A Silent Life (2005), the first novel by Guyanese writer Ryhaan Shah, spans several generations of East-Indians, from the descendents of the first indentured labourers on the plantations of post-emancipation British Guiana to the Indo-Guyanese, discriminated against in the 1960s and 70s. The novel essentially foregrounds the ways historical legacy has an impact on our contemporary lives, all the more so when the traumas of the past have been bottled up and all that is left is either silence or screams. The bond between the narrator and her quasi-aphasic grandmother is at the heart of the complexities of filiation and affiliation, of trauma and the memorialisation of trauma. When the grandmother’s silence is visited upon the granddaughter, it is the signal that the knots of this ‘blanket of silence’ have to be undone. How Aleya is going to mediate a trauma she has inherited and that is not directly hers, forms the crux of the novel, the rhetorics of voice and silence allowing the trauma to be eventually worked through.