‘Tune Neend Kharab Kar Di’ is an upcoming memoir by Sonia Gupta, tracing her years in a difficult marriage and her decision to leave and rebuild her life. It is a deeply personal account of her unseen emotional collapse, from nights of silent tears to a coma that forced her body to reveal what her voice could not. It is the story of how she reclaimed her voice and stopped apologising for taking up space.
Named after a phrase many South Asian daughters hear, “Tune neend kharab kar di” (you ruined my sleep), the book looks at how silence becomes a habit, guilt gets passed down, and endurance is often mistaken for strength. With this memoir, Sonia hopes to make more desi women feel seen and heard.
Here is an excerpt from the book ahead of its release.
Book Excerpt: Tune Neend Kharab Kar Di by Sonia Gupta
Don’t break the marriage.
Tune Neend Kharab Kar Di
So, I swallowed myself to protect everyone else.
Living together while emotionally broken is its own kind of hell. Sharing a kitchen but not a life. Sharing a table but not conversation. Sharing routines but not connection. We weren’t husband and wife. We were co-parents. Co-inhabitants. Co-survivors. Some days were explosive. Some days were silent. Most days were unpredictable. I lived in a constant state of bracing — never knowing which version of the day I’d wake up to.
Never knowing when the next argument would erupt. Never knowing how to protect the boys from the atmosphere. This wasn’t peace. This was emotional warfare done quietly.
This was the darkest truth of all. I didn’t stay because I loved the marriage. I stayed because I had nowhere to go. I fought with my parents every single day for seven years. Not because they didn’t love me, but because they were terrified of society, shame, gossip, judgment, reputation. Their words were a mix of fear, conditioning, and heartbreak:
“Adjust.”
“Work harder.”
“Think of your children.”
“We can’t take you back.”
“People will talk.”
“Stay for the children”
“How will you survive?”
“Tune Neend Kharab Kar Di”
I wasn’t just battling a marriage. I was battling a culture. A culture that teaches daughters to sacrifice themselves to protect everyone else’s peace. My suffering was invisible. Their fear was loud. And guilt — the heaviest, most corrosive kind — kept me trapped.
Guilt didn’t enter my life as a single moment.
It arrived slowly — folded into culture, reinforced by silence, inherited like a family heirloom no one admits owning. I learned it in the pauses between conversations. In sharp looks that lasted a second too long. In the way women apologised for existing before they ever asked for anything. Guilt taught me to measure my needs against everyone else’s comfort. To shrink so others could rest. To absorb tension so others could sleep peacefully. It whispered that if anyone was unsettled, the fault must have lived in me. And guilt is clever like that. It wraps itself around a woman’s ribs and convinces her she is responsible for the emotional weather of every room she enters. But guilt isn’t guidance. It is fear dressed up as duty.
So by the time I reached marriage, guilt was already living inside me louder than my own voice.
I felt responsible for everyone’s peace. Responsible for holding the house together even when I was falling apart. I felt guilty for ruining my children’s childhood. Guilty for disturbing my parents’ dreams. Guilty for creating tension in the extended family. Guilty for failing at a role I was never allowed to question. Guilty for even thinking of leaving.
I already lived with the quiet shame of feeling like I’d fallen short. I didn’t go to uni. I depended on my family more than I ever wanted to. So when the marriage began breaking, it felt like the one thing I couldn’t afford — the final blow — as if I had failed them in every direction at once.
And beneath all that guilt sat a truth I never said out loud:
I grew up feeling like I was falling short, so choosing divorce felt like committing the one mistake a daughter is never forgiven for.
This guilt wasn’t logical. It was cultural. Because daughters are raised to believe:
Your happiness is flexible.
Your silence is duty.
Your suffering is normal.
So, I stayed — long after my body stopped coping, long after my spirit dimmed, long after the version of me I recognised had disappeared. I stayed because the thought of causing them pain felt heavier than the pain I was carrying inside me. I lost years of sleep trying to protect a peace that never protected me.
The guilt tried its best to silence me.
And for years — it succeeded.
After that conversation, I walked through the house in a kind of emotional fog — a dizziness that had nothing to do with the room and everything to do with the truth settling into me:
I was truly on my own in this.
Not unloved.
Not abandoned.
Just unsupported in the way I needed most.
It is a quiet grief, the grief of realising your family loves you but cannot meet you in the version of pain you are living now. I wanted my family. Not the family shaped by expectation, reputation, and generational belief systems — I wanted the familiar comfort, the unconditional softness, the safety I had imagined would always be there. But when I reached for it this time, I collided with the traditions they were raised within.
Their love was real — steady, deep, genuine — but the boundaries around it were shaped by their world, not mine. And I don’t blame them for that. Truly, I don’t. But love offered through fear lands differently on a daughter’s skin.
My family wasn’t abandoning me.
They were following the script they were handed.
But that script was not written for the woman I was becoming.
And in that space between loyalty and love, I sometimes felt as though he belonged to them more than I did.
Understanding that didn’t soften the pain.
It sharpened it.
Because suddenly I was standing between two worlds: the daughter they raised, and the woman I was becoming. And the woman I was becoming could no longer survive inside the rules that shaped my girlhood.
And somewhere beneath the guilt, beneath the silence, beneath the years of lost sleep, one truth began to rise:
I didn’t disturb the peace.
I disturbed the silence that was killing me.
Excerpt from ‘Still Here: Tune Neend Kharab Kar Di’ by Sonia Gupta.
