Chapter 2: The Silence at Home.
The house felt unusually quiet that evening.
Kishori sat at the dining table, her result sheet folded neatly beside her plate. No one was shouting. No one was angry.
And somehow, that made it worse.
Her father ate silently, scrolling through his phone.
Her mother forced a small smile and said, "It's okay. You tried."
Tried.
The word felt heavy.
After dinner, Kishori walked into her room and closed the door gently. She placed the result sheet on her desk and stared at the number again.
Average.
Not terrible.
Not impressive.
Just safe.
She lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling.
"Maybe this is all I can do," she whispered.
The thought scared her more than failure.
Because if this was her limit… then what was the point of trying harder?
Her phone buzzed.
A message from a classmate.
"Hey, what did you get?"
She didn't reply.
Instead, she opened her notebook.
For a few minutes, she just looked at the blank page.
Then slowly, she wrote:
What if I improve by just 1% every day?
It sounded silly.
Too simple.
But it was better than doing nothing.
The next morning, she woke up before her alarm rang.
The sky outside was still pale. The world was quiet.
She sat at her desk and opened her math book.
The same subject she struggled with the most.
The numbers blurred at first.
Her brain resisted.
Her mind kept saying, "Sleep more. You're not made for this."
But she stayed.
Thirty minutes.
Then forty-five.
Then one hour.
When she finally got one difficult question correct without looking at the solution, she paused.
It wasn't a big achievement.
No one clapped.
No one even knew.
But inside her chest, something warm spread.
A tiny spark.
That day at school, nothing extraordinary happened.
She was still the same girl sitting in the third row.
But when the teacher asked a question, she didn't immediately look down.
She listened carefully.
She tried.
And even though she didn't answer out loud, she knew the solution in her mind.
That evening, she studied again.
Not perfectly.
Not for five hours straight.
But consistently.
Days passed.
The change was invisible to others.
But visible to her.
She wasn't suddenly confident.
She still doubted herself.
But now, when the words "You can't do it" echoed in her head—
She had a new reply.
"Maybe not yet."
And sometimes, "not yet" is stronger than "never."
One relative sighed and said, "Her future doesn't look very brbrighKishori stood there, pretending not to cacare.