The Quiet Curriculum of Compassion

For the past week, I have been working on the repatriation of a few women, trying, step by step, to help them find their way back to their families. As I sit with files, phone calls, fragments of memory, and maps, some of the women sit with me.

They watch the process. I let them. And slowly, they start learning what questions to ask. They become curious about how we trace a place, a person, a possibility. We open tools like Google Earth to trace roads and villages that exist somewhere between memory and reality.

We are also learning about the complexity of relationships, life circumstances, the weight of poverty, abuse, and mental health—of how life unfolds in ways that are rarely linear or predictable.

Today, as two life stories were unfolding, I couldn’t ignore the background score taking shape. A few women sat quietly, watching, absorbing, understanding the layers of what it takes for someone to return “home.” There were faint smiles on their faces. Tears rested gently in their eyes. And with folded hands, prayers began to form.

One of them said softly,
“Hum dua karenge ki yeh ghar pohoch jaye.”
(We will pray that she reaches home.)

And I paused.
Because the woman who said this is far away from her own home. 
From her family.
From her country.

And yet, in that moment, she chose not to sit inside her own longing, her own absence. Instead, she stepped outside it—just enough—to hold someone else in compassion.

Who taught her that? Where does that come from? How does someone, in the midst of their own suffering, still find the space to wish well for another?

This is the question I am sitting with. Because perhaps, this is the real curriculum unfolding in that room.

Not the paperwork.
Not the tracing.
Not even the reunions.
But this quiet, almost invisible act—of choosing compassion over contraction.

Of allowing the heart to remain open,
even when it has every reason to close.

And maybe the question is not whether suffering exists—it clearly does. But whether, within that suffering, we can still access something untouched.

Something that knows how to give,
even when we feel we have nothing.

Something that remembers connection,
even in separation.

Something that, despite everything,
still whispers a prayer for another.
Even within four walls, there can be expansion.