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. But not completely. She speaks when she has to, writes when she can, and has convinced herself that silence is a choice.

The problem is, she cannot remember choosing it.

When her father's promotion moves the family from a small town near the Andhra Pradesh–Odisha border to Hyderabad, Ranmi loses the people she knew and the routines she understands.

At school, teachers want to fix her. At home, she assumes every difficulty is further proof that something is wrong with her.

So Ranmi writes to Sh, the silent confidant inside her diary.

Through books, science, questions and patterns, she tries to understand a world in which people rarely behave as logically as chemicals do.

Slowly, she finds friendship, first love, and reasons to imagine a future.

Then a boy's kiss shatters her self and her logic. Fragments of memories about her silence begin returning.

To understand why her body remembers what her mind has forgotten, Ranmi must question the story she has told herself for years, including whether her silence was ever hers to choose.