“Our knowledge of the world consists of systems of ideas that we construct in our imagination without being conscious of doing so. Some…”
The sentence blurred as my eyelids grew heavy. Penn Handwerker’s The Origin of Cultures slid off my chest, its thesis about individual choices shaping society dissolving into the static of sleep.
My phone screamed at midnight.
I rarely answer calls past 12. Friends know this. But It was her. Dhara. The friend who only called when the world felt too heavy to carry alone.
“Why,” she began, no greeting, “do we punish theft but not heartbreak ?”
Me (rubbing sleep from my eyes): “Emotions aren’t property. You can’t legislate love. And for theft and assaults we’ve criminal courts, and civil courts for breaches of contract. If you have any problem related to these, go there, but let me sleep.
Her (voice frayed): “If I steal your phone, I go to jail. If I steal your peace, I get to say ‘Get over it’?”
Me (slightly annoyed) “It’s not the same thing. You can’t compare a stolen phone to… to hurt feelings. It’s just not the same.”
She laughed—a sound like dry leaves crushed underfoot. “Hurt feelings ? Is that all it is? I haven’t slept properly in months. Every notification makes me jump. I find myself crying in the bathroom at work. Is that just a ‘feeling’? Or is it a slow, agonising erosion of my sanity?”
I defaulted to society’s script: “You can’t measure emotional harm. No bruises. No evidence.”
“What’s that if not evidence? you want more ?” She said, “Let me show you.”
“Two years,” she began. “Two years of his Urdu poetry, his promises scribbled on chai-stained napkins, his sajdas at dawn. Then I found the photo. A girl in a school uniform, her hand on his shoulder. ‘Childhood friend,’ he said. But childhood friends don’t send ‘I miss you’ texts at midnight.”
She’d discovered he’d been engaged to her since Class 9. “Every ‘I love you’ he whispered to me was a lie. Every prayer he offered was a performance. Tell me—what do you call a man who prays five times a day but cheats six?”
When she confronted him, he spun the blade:
“You’re overreacting.”
“You imagined it.”
“Why can’t you trust me?”
“He made me doubt my own pulse,” she said. “I started screenshotting his texts, recording his voice—proof I wasn’t insane. But the more evidence I gathered, the smaller I felt. Like a detective building a case against her own heart.”
Then came the ghosting.
“Where are you?”
“Did I do something?”
“At least tell me why.”
Messages left on “seen.” Calls ignored. A mutual friend finally told her: “He’s marrying her next month. It was arranged years ago.”
She wrote a letter: “I deserve the truth.” It returned unopened.
“Silence isn’t passive,” she said. “It’s a scalpel. It carves you out of existence. You become a rumor of yourself.”
Me (playing society’s chorus): “But Dhara—shouldn’t you have protected yourself? You knew the risks. Why get attached? Why trust so easily?”
She inhaled sharply, like I’d slapped her. “Ah, there it is. The oldest script : ‘You let him in. You’re the fool.’ Tell me—do we ask rape victims why they wore the wrong dress? Do we ask fraud victims why they trusted the wrong man?”
Me (defensive): “That’s different. This is… emotions. You can’t compare—”
“Why not?” she snapped. “You lock your doors at night to stop thieves. But how do you lock your heart? Chain it? Bury it? That’s the paradox—you shame us for feeling, then shame us for being broken by it.”
Her voice frayed. “And for your information—how could I think a man who prays five times a day, who quotes the Quran, who says ‘Kayamat ke din Allah will judge me,’_ would lie to my face for two years? How could I know his faith was just… costume jewelry?”_
Me (gently): “Maybe he wasn’t worth it.”
“Then why wasn’t I worth it?” The words tore out of her. “Why did I get neither love nor respect? If he wanted to leave, why not say so? Why didn’t he give me my due respect ? At least this ‘why’ wouldn’t haunt me!”
I hesitated. “maybe he did love you. But his cowardice was louder.”
She laughed, hollow. “You know his name? Arsalan. ‘Lion.’ But he was a mouse in a sherwani. And me? Dhara—the river that ‘flows on.’ But rivers drown too, Ashish. They choke on plastic, stagnate in sewage.
Me (softly): “You’re a senior editor now. You’ve rebuilt—”
“Rebuilt?” Her voice cracked. “I cried every night for two years. I mapped my worthlessness on Google Earth—his flat in Jamia, his fiancée’s Kerala village, the mosque where he prayed. You think thriving erases that? I still taste bile when I pass his mosque. I still see his wedding photos when I close my eyes.”
“Look, everyone goes through breakups. It’s part of life.” I told her. “You need to move on.”
“Move on ? She told, “Like a game of hopscotch? Just hop over the shattered pieces of my self-worth and pretend everything’s fine?”
Me: (softening slightly) “I know it’s hard, Dhara. But you’re strong. You’ll get through this.”
Dhara: “Strong? I feel like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of driftwood in the middle of a storm. And you’re telling me to just swim?”
A pause. Then, – “You know, People think emotional harm is soft—no blood, no scars. But it’s the cruelest crime. It lives in your breath, your dreams, the way you flinch when your phone buzzes. You carry it like a corpse. It’s like a punishment, walking up every day knowing someone could discard me like a used train ticket ? They say, “Move on.” But how do you move on when the wound isn’t in your body—it’s in your soul’s memory? When the man who called you his “truth” treats you like a lie? And the law? The law doesn’t recognise ghosts. I’ve been thinking about this. There’s should be a word for the kind of wounds that don’t bleed. Wounds that fester beneath the surface, poisoning your soul.”
You: “What word?”
Dhara _”Crimes of consciousness. They’re invisible. You can’t see them on an X-ray. There’s no physical evidence, no witnesses to testify.
Me: “But maybe they didn’t realize what they were doing.”
Dhara: “okay but the violence of indifference, afterwards? That’s the worst. Leaving the wound to fester. No apology, no fight. Just silence. Like you’re a ghost they’ve decided not to see.”
You: “But you need to move on, Dhara. You can’t let this define you. You can’t do injustice to your life.”
Dhara: “Emotional harm is the only crime where the victim becomes their own prison. You obsess over the ‘why?’ You become the prosecutor, the judge, the jury. And the sentence? Life. You relive the trial in every quiet moment. We call this ‘closure’—but what if closure is just a fairy tale for the wounded?” You know what’s real ? Waking up at 3 AM, drafting texts you’ll never send. Bargaining with God to swap your memories for amnesia.”
Outside, a police siren wailed. Somewhere, a pickpocket was chased. Somewhere, a heartache was dismissed.
Me : “But how do you punish a feeling? Build a courtroom for ghosts?”
Her (quieter, colder): “As harm is measured by impact, not intent, why do you treat emotional wounds like papercuts ? A drunk driver didn’t mean to crash, but he pays. Why is emotional harm different? If impact matters, why do we say ‘They didn’t mean it’ and walk away?”
I stayed silent. She pressed: “Last week, my neighbor filed a FIR because a stranger spat paan on her gate. But when I told her my partner lied for years, she said ‘Boys will be boys.’ Since when are paan stains worse than soul stains? Paan stains wash away. Soul stains metastasize.”
The line hummed. I stared at Handwerker’s book, its spine cracked open to a line: “Cultures are systems we construct without being conscious of doing so.”
Me (softly): “Maybe… we dismiss emotional pain because we built a world that only values what it can see.”
Her (bitter): “Then tear it down. Build a new one.”
A pause. Then, softer: “Once, I stood on my terrace and thought… if I jump, will he cry? Or just pray for my soul? Or maybe he even will not be concerned about it”
Me (fumbling): “But… people change. Maybe he regrets it.”
“Regret?” A bitter laugh. “His friend told me he cried when he met him. But he still won’t cry to me. Guilt without accountability is like praying over a corpse instead of calling an ambulance.. We bath in holy rivers to wash sins, but what if the sin isn’t in our skin—it’s in someone else’s bones? What if repentance without accountability is just self-salvation for cowards?
Me (quietly): “But don’t you think the guilt—this ‘pain of consciousness’—is the worst punishment? It’s always there, a wound that never clots. You’re the judge, jury, and life sentence.”
Dhara’s breath hitched. “True. But what’s the point of regret if the victim still drowns? If he’d just faced me, given me the respect of a ‘why,’ maybe the nights wouldn’t taste like ash. Maybe the ‘whys’ would stop carving canyons in my sleep.”
Me (gently): “Indifference isn’t about your worth. It’s about their inability to face their own shadow. Maybe he prays for your peace now. Or maybe they’ll face it on the day of Kayamat.”
“Kayamat ke din?” Her voice cracked. “He’d rather face God than me. Because God won’t make ask him to look me in the eye and say, ‘I used you.’ God won’t make him count the nights I sobbed into my pillow. God won’t make him see the cracks.”
Me (pushing): “But what if he’s oblivious? What if his conscience is dead?”
“Then he’s not human,” she said flatly. “A dead conscience is a moral coma. And we let these people walk free, vote, marry, pray—while their victims choke on the ‘whys.’ Society romanticizes karma and kayamat, but these are just… lazy justice. A fairy tale for the wounded.”
A pause. Then, softer: “You know what’s worse? Realizing his faith was a lie. A five-time namazi who can’t answer a single ‘why?’”
Me (offering solace through redirecting her attention): “Rumi said, ‘You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.’”
She laughed, brittle. “Then why do I feel evaporated? Why do I wake up thirsty for answers that never come?”
The line hummed. I pictured her:
– Tracing Arsalan’s wedding photos on Instagram, his smile serene in a crisp sehra.
– Burning her unopened letter, ashes swirling like unanswered prayers.
– Staring at the ceiling fan, its blades slicing moonlight into fragments of what-ifs.
Me(whispering) : “What now ?”
“Now ? She paused. “Now I write. About the crimes society excuses. About men who hide behind prayer mats and women who drown in silence. And when people say ‘move on’, I’ll tell them: Rivers don’t move on. They carve canyons through the rock that tried to break them.”
The conversation with Dhara lingered long after the call ended. It forced me to confront the limitations of our current understanding of justice and the urgent need for a society that recognises and addresses the invisible wounds that scar our souls. It left me unsettled, a knot of unease twisting in my gut. I couldn’t simply let this conversation fade into the quiet hours of the night. I had to do something. I had to write about it. And so, I wrote this article, a testament to the weight of unseen wounds and the urgent need for a society that values empathy and accountability above all else. If you’ve ever felt the sting of indifference, if you’ve ever carried the burden of unspoken pain, I hope this resonates with you. Perhaps together, we can begin to build a world where justice is not blind to the invisible scars that shape our lives.
There is another version of this story ; a longer version ; I’ve written the full story on this based on this conversation ; let me know if anyone wants to read.
