Kashmir's Softest Voice Cuts The Deepest

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
Ode to Silence by Dr. Aaliya Mushtaq Baba

By Fatima Khan

There is a stillness that comes after snowfall. The kind that quiets the world without warning. Dr. Aaliya Mushtaq Baba's An Ode to Silence carries that same hush. Her words do not arrive to impress. They arrive to stay.

This is not a loud book. It does not chase the reader. It waits. With 80 pages of delicate, thoughtful verse, Baba offers something rare: poems that do not demand to be heard, yet echo long after they're read. The silence in her poetry is not empty. It is alive.

Each poem feels like a private note left in a drawer. You open one and find a memory, folded into itself. A woman making tea in a dim kitchen. A child remembering a garden that no longer grows. A mind returning to words that were never said out loud.

Baba writes with an unshaken calm. She doesn't decorate her language. She doesn't need to. Her choice of words is plain, but never dull. They feel honest, unfiltered, as if she trusts her reader the way one might trust a confidante. This trust shapes the rhythm of the book. It's what makes the poems feel like they belong not just to the poet, but to anyone who has ever endured quietly.

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There is deep knowledge here. The kind that does not announce itself with fireworks. Baba, an academic from Srinagar, has long studied the intersections of identity, memory, and voice. That wisdom moves like an undercurrent through her poetry. But it never overpowers the emotional clarity of her work. Her poems breathe. They hold pause. They give space.

Much of her verse is grounded in womanhood: its ache, its beauty, its complexity. Yet she avoids the trap of making her speakers martyrs. They are not asking for pity. They are asking to be seen.

In one poem, the weight of silence becomes a necklace of invisible graves. In another, love lingers like breath on glass. These are not metaphors meant to astonish. They are truths, quietly laid bare.

The book's design is clean, its size intimate. It feels like something you could carry in a coat pocket, to pull out on a bus ride or a sleepless night. At ₹295, it may seem a little steep for its length. But poetry is not sold by the page. It is measured by the silence it breaks, and the ones it honors.

An Ode to Silence does not tell you how to feel. It simply walks beside you, holding your sorrow without question. It listens, without judgment. And in doing so, it becomes more than poetry. It becomes a kind of shelter.

For those who have lived through quiet storms, for those who have built whole worlds inside their heads, this book will feel like recognition. A mirror with soft edges. A whisper that understands.

Fatima Khan is a Civil Engineering graduate from NIT Srinagar and currently works at ZS, a global consulting firm.

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