The cries that echo beyond walls

In the heart of the rehabilitation centre, every day begins with a fragile hope; the hope that broken people can piece together their stories again.Yet, there are days when that hope trembles.Today was one of them.

On my duty at one of the valley’s prominent Drug De-addiction and Rehabilitation Centres in Srinagar, a lady came in with tears glistening in her eyes, her arms holding an infant close to her chest. As the woman spoke, her voice quivered under the weight of pain long held in silence. Her husband stood besides her, hollow-eyed, his presence more shadow than substance. Another life fractured by the grip of addiction, a man consumed by dependence, his face bearing the exhaustion of battles long fought and often lost. The paperwork began; the questions that feel mechanical but are necessary: history, dependence, duration, relapse. He stood quietly, hunched and withdrawn, his silence heavy with shame. But what pierced through the sterile rhythm of paperwork and clinical assessment was not his silence; it was the cry of the infant in her mother’s lap. A faint, trembling cry.

A sound too soft to command the world, yet powerful enough to still it. I wrote as required, but my ears could not unhear her. In those moments, her cries became louder than the father’s muttered justifications, louder than the ticking clock, louder than the life stories that fill our files daily. My attention faltered as the infant’s cry filled the room; a small, piercing sound that cut through the institutional stillness. The child lay in her mother’s lap, wrapped in thin, worn cloth that could barely fend off the biting Srinagar cold. Her tiny feet were bare, her skin pale against the chill as her mother tried to cover her with the edge of her shawl. Her small chest rose and fell unevenly. Her chest convulsed with small, labored breaths, each one interrupted by a faint cough. She cried as the mother rocked her gently, trying to hush her into calmness, whispering comfort that dissolved into the cold air. I tried to continue writing, recording the clinical details on paper, but each cry struck deeper than any word could describe.

They weren’t only cries of discomfort or cold; they were the sound of life echoing through hardship, sorrow made audible. Eventually, her cries faded into short gasps. Her little limbs sagged as she drifted into a tired sleep, her face streaked with tears. She slept in her mother’s lap, one hand clutching the edge of her shawl, her breathing fragile and uneven. Even in slumber, she seemed to bear a weight too heavy for her tiny shoulders; the silent inheritance of pain. Addiction is never a solitary affliction; it consumes entire circles of love and belonging. While the person with substance use disorder suffers visibly, others suffer in silence ; children, spouses, parents carry invisible bruises that never find words. That infant’s suffering, though wordless spoke of absence, longing, and love’s helpless endurance. I paused for a long moment, setting down my pen. There, between that child’s quiet sleep and the father’s trembling hands, lay the truth of what we face every day in the fight against addiction; the desperate hope of healing one life while witnessing how deeply others bleed beside it.

As evening descended, the sound of her cries lingered in the corridors, soft yet unyielding. It fused with the murmur of patients, the clinking of cups, and the dull hum of heaters warming a cold valley evening. Those echoes were not just from one child; they were the echoes of countless untold stories addiction leaves behind. She will never remember this day; the cold, the tears, the helplessness. But for me, who witnessed it, the memory will remain carved deep. In those frail sobs now hushed in uneasy sleep lies the profound tragedy of addiction; the generations it stains, the innocence it bruises, and the quiet, enduring humanity that those of us in this work must carry forward.

The father sought recovery. The mother sought hope. But the child, too young to seek anything, only curled into uneasy sleep, her tiny frame trembling with the lingering chill that still lives in my memory.

Ishfaq Nabi Qureshi,

Counseling Psychologist.