The Quiet Of The First Days

Home, at first, was a hotel room. Two suitcases in the corner, a kettle that wasn't ours, and that strange in-between feeling of having arrived but not yet landed. We lived out of those bags longer than we planned, our mornings blurring into afternoons as we searched.
Then came the hunt. Apartment listings, tours, applications, the math of deposits and leases in a currency our brains still converted back to rupees. Every viewing was a small audition for a life we were trying to picture ourselves living.
Our bodies took their own time to arrive. For weeks, our sleep belonged to another time zone — wide awake at 3 a.m., heavy-eyed by afternoon, our inner clocks still ticking on Indian time. Jet lag slowly loosened its grip, but teaching ourselves that night was night again took longer than we expected.
And then there was the silence. After Hyderabad's constant hum — horns, voices, life spilling into the streets — America felt almost startlingly still. Evenings were hushed. Streets emptied early. We'd stand by the window and hear nothing, and we learned that the quiet wasn't loneliness. It was just a different kind of full.