And the Silence That Stayed
There’s a particular hour in the evening when a certain kind of house in Jammu gets very quiet. The television goes on because the sound of another voice in the room helps. The phone stays on the arm of the chair, not because anyone expects it to ring, but because putting it in another room feels like giving up on the chance that it might. Somewhere in that house there’s a shelf or a cupboard that still has the same steel plates and extra chairs kept ready for guests who used to come often and now come twice a year. Nobody says any of this out loud. It’s just how the house sits now.
There was a time when leaving Jammu felt like an event. A son got admission somewhere. A daughter found a job in Delhi. A relative received an opportunity abroad. The whole family knew about it well before it happened. There were discussions before the decision, packing before the journey, a phone call the moment the train pulled in. Someone always said it wouldn’t be for long, that the degree would finish and the job would end and the person would come back because that’s simply where life happened. For most families, that return never quite came. One year became three. Three became ten. A course became a career, a rented room became a home, a handful of college friends became a professional network that mattered more than the one left behind. Marriage happened somewhere else. Children were born somewhere else. And at some point, without anyone deciding it out loud, Jammu stopped being where life would be built and became the place people came back to visit.
You don’t need a government report to see this; you can see it in the houses. A mother in Gandhi Nagar keeps her son’s old cricket bat leaning in the same corner of the balcony it’s leaned in for fifteen years, though he hasn’t played a match since he left for engineering college. A retired school teacher in Trikuta Nagar still buys two cups’ worth of tea leaves every morning out of habit, though there’s only ever been one cup to pour since his wife passed and his daughter settled in Pune. These aren’t unusual houses. Ask around and nearly every street in this city has two or three of them, homes clearly built for the sound of more people than currently live inside.
Nobody’s saying leaving is wrong, it isn’t. A student who leaves for a better education is not a tragedy. A young professional who takes a stronger job elsewhere is not a betrayal. Parents spend years pushing their children to go further than they themselves got to go, paying for the coaching, celebrating the admission letter, telling relatives proudly about the job offer from Bengaluru or the visa that finally came through. That pride is real and it’s earned, and it sits right alongside something harder to admit. A parent can tell a visitor, with genuine happiness, exactly which city or country a child has settled in. And still, later that same evening, quietly wish the distance were smaller. There’s no contradiction in that. Just a kind of double feeling this city hasn’t quite found the language for yet, proud of the very thing that leaves them alone.
The trouble starts when this stops being one family’s story and becomes the story of an entire generation, when a child growing up in Jammu today more or less assumes, without anyone ever saying so, that the real education happens somewhere else, the real career happens somewhere else, and the real life gets built somewhere else too. It rarely begins as a decision to leave for good. It begins with a train ticket at eighteen. Four years in a hostel room in another city. A friend circle that starts to matter more than the one back home. An internship, then an offer letter. By the time the degree is finished, Jammu is still home in every sense that counts emotionally. It just isn’t where the future seems to be waiting anymore. Nobody ever announces the moment a temporary move becomes a permanent one. It just quietly happens somewhere between the first job and the first EMI on a flat in another city.
It would be easy to blame this on jobs alone, and jobs are certainly part of it, but they’re not the whole story. People don’t only leave because they can’t find a first job here. They leave because they can’t see where that first job leads. A graduate takes a position in Jammu and still leaves two years later because there’s nowhere further to go from it. A doctor trains here and moves because the specialised institutions a real career needs sit somewhere else entirely. An entrepreneur has a genuine idea and has to go looking outside the city for the capital, and the market that idea actually needs to survive. None of these are stories about a lack of jobs. They’re stories about a lack of what comes after the job, and a city can offer someone a salary without ever managing to offer them a future.
And what gets talked about the least is what happens inside the houses left behind. Walk through some of Jammu’s older neighbourhoods, and the pattern isn’t subtle. Homes built for large families now hold one or two people. Dining tables that used to have children arguing over chairs are set for one or two at most. Bedrooms stay shut for months at a stretch, the door opened only to dust. Festivals bring a brief burst of noise back. The kitchen gets busy for a few days, the house feels young again. Then the suitcases reappear, someone leaves for the airport, and the silence returns, a little heavier than before. Most of these children haven’t abandoned anyone, they call, they send money, they worry, they come home whenever they genuinely can. But affection doesn’t cover distance. A fall in the bathroom doesn’t wait for the next flight. A medical emergency doesn’t check anyone’s travel calendar. There are parents in Jammu today who speak to their children every single day and still spend most evenings entirely alone, and that particular combination, constant contact and constant absence, is something this city hasn’t really learned how to sit with yet.
There’s a harder layer underneath this one, and it’s becoming more visible with every passing year. In a growing number of homes, it’s no longer two ageing parents waiting together. It’s one, a mother whose husband is gone, a father who lost his wife and now moves through rooms that once held three generations at different points across the decades. The children are settled elsewhere, they visit when they can, they arrange the medical appointments and the household help from a distance, but at night, when the door closes, there’s genuinely no one else in the house, no one across the table who remembers the same version of this family that used to fill it. A neighbour two doors down might not know for a day or two if something’s gone wrong, and that’s the part of this nobody in Jammu has quite figured out how to talk about.
It’s tempting to reach for a phrase like वृद्ध आश्रम बिना दीवारों के, an old-age home without walls, and there’s something true in it, enough elderly people living alone across enough homes in this city that it stops being a private matter and starts looking like something the whole city needs to reckon with. But the phrase can also flatten something more complicated than neglect. These aren’t parents who were abandoned. They’re parents whose children did exactly what they were raised to do, went further than the last generation could, and the quiet, unintended cost of that success is a house too big and too silent for the person still living in it.
There’s also a version of this story that doesn’t end in permanent loss, and it’s worth telling honestly rather than only mourning what’s left behind. A great many of the people who leave Jammu never actually let go of it. They come back for every wedding they can manage. They keep the family home rather than selling it. They send money not just for their parents’ needs but for a cousin’s business or a temple renovation or a school they once studied in. Somewhere in that ongoing attachment is a possibility this city hasn’t yet learned to use. A doctor who trained abroad might set up a specialised practice here, if the right hospital existed to support it. An entrepreneur who built a company in Bengaluru might open a second office in Jammu, if the ecosystem could actually hold it. A young professional might return in ten years with capital and experience, if there were something here worth returning to. Right now, most of that potential simply evaporates, because nobody in Jammu is asking these people what it would take to bring any of it back. The relationship between this city and everyone who left it doesn’t have to end at the airport. It only feels that way because nobody has built the bridge back.
And there’s a further cost that won’t be visible for another twenty years but is already being set in motion. The children being raised in Delhi or Toronto or Dubai by parents who grew up in Jammu will hear about this city mostly through stories, a grandmother’s cooking, a temple visited once during a childhood holiday, a language spoken at home but never quite outside it. They may love the idea of Jammu without ever having lived inside it the way their parents did. That’s how a place stops being someone’s city and starts being their parents’ city instead, quietly, across a single generation, without a single dramatic moment marking the change.
None of this means Jammu should try to talk its young people out of leaving. Migration is what ambition looks like in a connected country, and no city earns loyalty by making it harder to leave. The real question is smaller and harder than how to stop people leaving. It’s whether leaving still feels like a choice here, or whether it’s quietly become the only path anyone can picture. And sitting right alongside that question is another one this city has barely started asking out loud: what it owes the parents, and increasingly the one parent left, already living through the consequences of a choice their children made for entirely good reasons.
That second question doesn’t have an easy answer, but it has real, practical starting points. Whether a neighbourhood still knows who’s living alone on its street and who might need someone to check in during an emergency. Whether a housing society has any actual system for the elderly residents whose children are a flight away rather than a floor away. Whether there’s a place nearby where someone in their seventies can find real company on an ordinary Tuesday, not only during a festival. None of it replaces a child’s presence, nothing does, but it’s the difference between a city quietly aware of what’s happening behind its own doors and one that only finds out when something has already gone wrong.
Jammu will keep being known as the city of temples, and it should be. But it’s worth asking, honestly, what’s happening to the homes around those temples as they grow quieter, one family at a time. Because behind a lot of ordinary front doors in this city tonight, there’s a mother keeping the television on for the company of another voice, or a father who still buys enough tea for two out of a habit he hasn’t been able to let go of. They’re not waiting for sympathy. They’re waiting for the next phone call, the next visit, and some quiet sign that the city they spent their whole lives building for their children hasn’t, in turn, quietly forgotten them.
Dr. Gaurav Vaid
Writer & Analyst
Source: https://www.dailyexcelsior.com/when-the-children-left-and-the-silence-that-stayed/