About ‘Dear Sh’

A contemporary literary novel about silence, memory, girlhood, and the stories we learn to tell ourselves.

Thirteen-year-old Ranmi Marella stopped talking years ago. Or almost stopped. Words come when she feels safe; other times, she writes them down.

She has always believed her silence is a choice.

The problem is that she cannot remember choosing it.

When her father's promotion moves the family from Kagupadu, a small town in Andhra Pradesh, to Hyderabad, Ranmi leaves behind the people she knows and the routines she understands for a louder city, a class of 63 students, and people who rarely behave as logically as science says they should.

So Ranmi takes her questions to Sh—the notebook she names after a secret, and the one reader who never asks her to explain herself.

Through books, science, questions and patterns, she tries to make sense of the rules people seem to live by: about friendship, love, family, girlhood, and what it means to be normal.

Slowly, she finds a library, makes a few friends, and meets people who begin to notice her. She starts to imagine there is more waiting for her than the life she already understands.

Then an ordinary moment makes her freeze. She doesn't know why. Only that something about it feels familiar.

As fragments of memory return, the questions Ranmi has always asked about the world turn inward—toward the story she has told herself for years about why she stopped speaking.

And whether her silence was ever hers to choose.