Silence kept me safe. Until it didn’t.
How art became my voice...and why I’m learning to speak anyway.
📍 Rome, January 2026 (Shraddha)
I am finally choosing to speak, even when it’s scary.
This might sound simple, but it isn’t. Because for most of my life, silence felt safer than words.
I grew up in Kamathipura, India’s oldest and most infamous red-light areas. My childhood was loud because the brothels and the streets were always filled with chaos, music, fighting, bargaining, or police sirens. But I was a quiet child. I learned early when not to speak. Silence kept things from getting worse. Silence meant being invisible and being invisible meant surviving.
I didn’t have language for fear or confusion. I didn’t know how to explain what I was seeing or feeling. But I had art.
Art became my first voice. When my mouth stayed closed, my hands moved. I drew in my school notebooks, on walls, on anything I could find. I drew because the paper listened. It didn’t question me. It didn’t ask me to explain myself. Through color and shape, I could say things I didn’t know how to say out loud. Art was not a hobby for me. It was how I breathed.
When I moved to Kranti as a teenager, this art, and my voice, finally had space to grow. I took formal art classes for the first time such as painting, sculpture, mosaics, and pottery. Slowly, I understood something important: art wasn’t only helping me survive. It could help other people survive too.
As part of Kranti’s volunteering requirements, I ran art workshops in cancer hospitals, sitting with children waiting for life-saving surgeries. I trained former sex workers, mostly transgenders, to paint murals across Mumbai, protesting violence and inequality. Many of my “students” spent their nights begging, drinking, or doing sex work. During the day, they painted. For those few hours, art gave them exactly what it had given me: escape, dignity, and a voice.
For a long time, this was enough. Art spoke for me. People listened to my work long before they listened to me.
Then I went to Europe.
I received full scholarships to an art residency in Ireland and a semester long university-prep program in Denmark. Then my portfolio earned me a huge scholarship to pursue a BA in Fine Arts…in Rome! I walked through museums I had only seen in books. I studied Western art history, architecture, technique. I painted landscapes from hilltops. I stood inside churches and galleries and felt, for the first time, like I belonged in spaces that once felt impossible.
From the outside, it looked like a dream. But inside, I was struggling.
University is not easy for me. I am not a “natural” student. I am slower than most of my classmates. English academic writing exhausts me. Presentations terrify me. I have tried to drop out more times than I can count.
Sometimes, sitting in an Italian classroom, the voices of my childhood teachers would return to me. “You’re going to grow up to be a whore just like your mother, why do you bother coming to school?”
I am 26 now. I will be 28 by the time I graduate, six years later than most students. For a long time, I was embarassed about being “behind.” About all the things I should have done earlier. But the truth is, it took me this long to believe my voice deserved space.
One day in class, a professor asked me a question. I knew the answer. I really did. But when she looked at me and waited, something happened in my body. I froze.
She didn’t move on. The room went quiet. The entire class stared at me. Minutes passed. My heart was pounding. My throat tightened. I couldn’t speak. Even though I knew what to say, the words were trapped inside me.
After five minutes of strained silence, the professor moved on. I sat there shaking, humiliated, confused, and exhausted. Not because I didn’t know the answer, but because I couldn’t give it.
That moment sent me back into therapy. My therapist asked me just one question that clarified everything:
“When was the first time you knew you should speak, but you remained silent?”
I knew instantly what moment she meant. I was twelve. I knew I needed to scream, to run, to protect myself. But my body didn’t let me. The scream stayed stuck in my throat. Silence took over. And silence kept me alive.
That was when I understood something important: this wasn’t about confidence. It wasn’t about public speaking. It wasn’t about English or academics. It was about survival. My body learned, very young, that speaking could be dangerous.
And now, years later, sitting in a university classroom in Rome, my body was still protecting me the only way it knew how. University has forced me to confront this over and over again. Sometimes through class discussions. Sometimes through writing. Sometimes through wanting to disappear entirely.
There are days I feel deeply grateful for this opportunity, and there are days I feel crushed by it. Days I think, “So many people are invested in me. I can’t fail.” And days when the past rises up so loudly that simply showing up feels impossible.
But there is one thing that keeps me going. I think about that twelve-year-old girl. The one who knew she should speak, but couldn’t. And I know, deep in my bones, that I owe her something.
I owe her a life where silence is no longer the only option. I owe her the effort of finding as many ways to speak in this world as possible, through art, through words, through presence, through staying when I want to leave.
Recently, I returned to Kamathipura to the classrooms of my childhood school. I didn’t give speeches. I didn’t explain my journey. I let the colors speak first, the way I always had.
The classrooms were loud, crowded, and starved of color. I painted them anyway. Bright walls, open skies, animals and worlds far larger than the small lanes outside. I wanted the children there to know that this place was not the end of their story.
It also felt like bringing my voice back to the place where it first learned how to hide.
Art will always be my first language, the place where my voice feels strongest. But now, I am learning a second language too.
Speaking.
Sometimes that means raising my hand and saying one sentence, even when my voice shakes. Sometimes it means asking for help. Sometimes it means staying in a program that scares me. Sometimes it still means letting my art speak first and trusting that my voice will follow.
Next week, I’ll tell another part of this story — about the woman who raised me with extraordinary love, and the forgiveness I wasn’t ready to give.
So beautiful