In a family someone has done something that can’t be defended. A brother empties out a joint bank account the week the father is admitted. An aunt tells a fourteen-year-old girl that she is the reason her mother is unwell. The room holds its breath, and then someone at the table reaches for the sentence that fixes everything. He had a hard childhood. She lost her own mother at nine. Hurt people hurt people.
The conversation ends.
It sounds like compassion. It dismisses the case.
The Sentence That Ends The Conversation
Who is at the receiving end of such statements? No one walks up to the brother whose bank account is empty to explain his sibling’s tough childhood to his face. The sentence is for the affected person, still hurt and angry, carelessly made by a relative who wants the evening to proceed. It’s offered as understanding and it stands as an instruction: stop talking about this now.
Indian families are unusually good at this. We do not have a habit of open discussion, so we’ve built a vocabulary that ends arguments before they start. Adjust. Let it go. He’s like that. Every one of these is a door being politely closed, and this is the newest and most sophisticated of them, because it arrives disguised as reconciliation.
What A Wound Explains
When describing our society, hurt people hurt people is an accurate observation. Damage travels. A man who was beaten learns that a raised hand settles a room. A woman who was never chosen learns to make sure no one else is chosen either. None of this is a mystery and none of it is disputed.
The trouble starts when an excuse is promoted to an answer. Knowing the origin of a behavior tells you nothing about what the family should do with it. An origin is not a defense. We would never accept this reasoning anywhere else. We accept it at home because the alternative would be blaming an adult in the room.
A wound explains the weapon. It never hands over the license.
Who Is Asked To Suffer For It
The excuse runs downhill. It’s handed to the new daughter-in-law, to the youngest cousin, to whoever still needs something from the family and cannot afford an alternative. The people who actually require a change in behavior are never the ones asked to do anything.
So the system persists. One person’s excuse is their unstable past. Everyone beneath them is told to be patient, indefinitely, and is expected to keep being patient for the next thirty years.
The Ones Who Were Hurt And Did Not Pass It On
Here’s the part that goes against the entire argument, and it’s sitting in the same house.
The brother grew up in that home. So did his sister. She watched the same father, ate at the same table, lived the same evenings. She has never once taken it out on a child, another woman, or a bank account. If the wound produced cruelty, it should have produced it in both of them. It didn’t, which means something other than the wound was at work, and the family decided not to look at it.
This silence brands the sister as boring and unremarkable. Her restraint costs her visibility as she goes unnoticed, because restraint makes no noise. Cruelty gets a biography, endurance gets nothing.
Every family has someone who carried the same wound and put it down. No one has ever praised them.
Why I Write The People I Write
My novel Cobra Orchard is full of people who were damaged early in life and went on to damage others. I gave them their reasons. I did not pardon them. They live with what they did, because that’s the only version of them that is honest. Hurt people hurt people is where these characters begin. It’s not where the book lets them end.
Book reviewer Sukhpreet S. Giani puts across this argument in an honest and straightforward manner. Better than what I would have managed to do.
It doesn’t give you comfortable characters. It makes us understand that people by nature are complicated.
Sukhpreet S. Giani, Unfiltered Book Talk
If you have ever been handed this sentence across a dinner table, explore Cobra Orchard and meet the people it was invented to protect.
Once the excuse is accepted, the next thing the family wants is your forgiveness. Forced forgiveness is how they get it.
Who does this sentence protect in your family, and what has protecting them cost you?
Three women. Two timelines. One curse that refuses to die. Set in the shadow-drenched villages of Uttar Pradesh, India — across the 1970s and the early 2000s.
Cobra Orchard is a psychological thriller about secrets buried so deep, even the earth forgot them. Read Cobra Orchard on Amazon Kindle and Amazon Prime Paperback.
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Terveen Gill is a writer who has always been drawn to the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath ordinary lives. A Times of India and Chandigarh Literary Society award-winning short story writer, she is also a graphic novel script writer, indie filmmaker, and a former engineer.
Her debut psychological thriller Cobra Orchard is the culmination of that instinct: a dark, immersive novel about three women, a sinister guru, and secrets buried so deep they have begun to rot.
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