About I Was There But I Was Never Home by MD Aslam
I Was There, But I Was Never Home is the book that will make you feel seen in ways you didn’t know you needed — because it tells the truth that most love stories are too afraid to tell. That sometimes, the person you love with every cell of your body is also the person quietly dismantling everything you are.
It begins the way all great destructions begin — beautifully. A boy. A girl across a hallway. Golden afternoon light in a small-town school in Durgapur, West Bengal. Two months so perfect he builds his entire identity around them. Then she disappears. No goodbye. No reason. Just silence.
What follows is five years of waiting, three years of manipulation so precise he stops trusting his own memory, a COVID-19 lockdown that turns into the darkest season of his life, and a suicide attempt that almost ended the story before it could be written.
But it wasn’t ended. And this book is why.
Read this if:
You’ve ever loved someone who made you feel crazy for loving them
You’ve stayed loyal to someone who only stayed convenient
You’ve smiled in public and fallen apart at 2 AM
You’ve ever needed someone to say “You are not too much. You were just with the wrong person.”
Written in the spirit of Kshama — forgiveness that doesn’t erase the wound, but finally cuts the chain. This book will break your heart. And then, quietly, it will hand it back to you — a little more whole than before.
Some books you read. This one reads you.
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Learn More About the Author
Aslam is a twenty-one-year-old writer from Kolkata, a city whose complexity and emotional depth often echo through his work. A Computer Science undergraduate by education and a writer by instinct, he lives at the intersection of logic and emotion — where code meets poetry.
His writing explores love, vulnerability, and the quiet emotional landscapes people rarely speak about openly. With a voice that is both raw and reflective, Aslam captures moments of heartbreak, longing, and self-realization in a way that resonates deeply with readers.