Word: Echo

Word courtesy: Aras’s recent note on Substack around the word echo. It made me wonder whether people, too, can sometimes become echoes.

The story I have with it:

The moment I hear the word echo, I think of a woman I never met.

My great-grandmother.

Or perhaps, if you ask my grandfather, I did.

She passed away about a year before I was born.

I was conceived in the room she had lived in.

And when I arrived, with my unusually round face and certain familiar expressions, my grandfather became convinced that his mother had somehow found her way back.

He stopped calling me by my name.

To him, I was always Ranu.

His mother.

As a child, I didn’t think much of it.

I just knew my grandfather loved me differently.

Only much later did I realise that his affection also came with consequences.

My aunts and cousins often saw it as partiality. I could never quite understand why I seemed to receive a little more patience, a little more forgiveness, a little more love.

Years later, when I became curious, I started asking questions.

“What made Dadu so sure?”

Everyone had a different answer.

“You smile exactly like her.”

“You’re just as stubborn.”

“You refuse to bend when you think you’re right.”

“She was calm in a crisis too.”

Every story sounded less like evidence and more like remembrance.

And I kept wondering...

Was I really echoing a woman I had never known?

Or had I simply spent my childhood growing into a story everyone around me already believed?

I still don’t know.

Maybe my grandfather saw his mother because grief wanted another chance.

Maybe families sometimes inherit stories so deeply that they begin shaping the next generation.

Or maybe some people really do leave behind echoes.

I have no way of proving any of it.

But every time someone tells me I stay unusually calm in the middle of chaos, I quietly think of a woman whose voice I never heard...

...yet somehow spent my entire life being compared to.

And I find that thought strangely comforting.

Maybe not every echo needs proof.

Sometimes it is enough that someone, somewhere, still hears it.