Between Talking & Silence — Why I Wrote a Love Story
6 min read
A software founder writing a bilingual Hindi-English novel sounds like an unlikely project. Here is why it was the most necessary thing I have built.
People who know me primarily as a builder — websites, apps, SaaS platforms — are sometimes surprised to learn I wrote a novel. A love story, specifically. In Hindi and English. This is the honest account of why.
The Idea
Between Talking & Silence began as a question I couldn't stop thinking about: what happens in the space between what two people say to each other, and what they actually mean? That gap — full of unspoken things, misread silences, and carefully chosen words — felt like the most honest place to write about love.
Why Bilingual
I think in Hindi. I write professionally in English. The characters in this book live between both languages, the way most urban Indians do — switching mid-sentence, expressing tenderness in one tongue and arguments in another. That code-switching is not a literary device. It is the texture of real life in contemporary India.
"Some things can only be said in Hindi. Some silences only make sense in English."
What Fiction Does That Non-Fiction Cannot
I have written a non-fiction book about money and clarity. Fiction does something different — it lets you say true things without having to prove them. The emotional truths in Between Talking & Silence are things I could not have put in an essay. They needed to breathe inside characters, inside scenes, inside the pauses of a story.
The Writing Process
I wrote this book in the margins of building a company. Early mornings, late nights, train journeys. It was the slowest project I have ever worked on, and the most personal. Every chapter that landed felt like finishing a product feature that had been stuck for months — that specific satisfaction of a thing becoming what you intended.
Who It Is For
Between Talking & Silence is for anyone who has loved someone and found language both enough and not enough. It is for readers who want a story that takes them seriously — that does not simplify love into a formula. It is, I hope, the kind of book that feels true.