Noise
I am writing this so that those days are never forgotten, erased, or silenced from public memory and the sun never sets on it lest it be lost in the darkness.
I.
I sat next to the east-facing window. The sky was slowly melting. The remaining orange summer sun, passed by; its light painted the walls with shadows on my side of the room. I love water coloring in the remaining light of the day. There was relief in watching freshly mixed watercolor bloom in different gradations on 300 GSM thick paper. Just before surrendering itself to the paper, the color gleamed for a short second. My state-of-the-art noise-cancellation earpod sealed me into the moment. They functioned like switches for the human body. When I put them on, I tuned out of my surroundings. Once removed, I am returned to the reality of my home: a newly reunited group of four brought together by COVID in late 2020. After eleven years of living independently away from my home, town, and parents, I was back.
In the interim period of these eleven years, my parents aged some more and rolled out their retirement plan. They moved to a smaller apartment four years ago. They rightly assumed that my younger brother and I would continue to visit occasionally for festivals and such and that was that. Only Bill Gates had the foresight to predict a global pandemic and for that, he must have been more prepared to accommodate his family. We, on the other hand, doubled not just in number but also in idiosyncrasies of adult life. My family was living together again, for the first time, as four adults.
Within a few days of moving back, I was unequivocally annoyed with one thing above all: the noise and sound in the house. The bell, the kitchen, the footsteps, the phone calls, the conversations. It was like living inside a moving organism. Homes have people and people have their rituals- patterns of everyday practices. Ultimately, it is these rituals that make a house our home. It sets the people in the house in motion every morning, every day. Every home is a set of unquestioned and unfailing practices of habits and rituals. These are usually noisy in my home. At 6 AM, my mother tiptoed around the house cracking open all the windows and sliding open the balcony doors for fresh air. Soon, a polite request for tea is accompanied by a sharp clink-clang of metal saucepans and Borosil cups. The newspaper pages flipped with sighs, remarks, and commentaries. The Aquaguard water filter was turned on and bottles were refilled. Around 8 AM, after his bath, my father walked the length of the house with incense sticks chanting. This sound worked like an alarm for my younger brother to start his day unless he wanted an earful. Meanwhile, the streetscape came alive with distinct calls from street vendors and hawkers selling and mending things circling the streets on foot. There was always an active construction site with drilling, hammering, and loud instructions. There was a lull in the evening often interrupted by the house bells with doodhwala (milkman, it is always a wala, a man). Dinner started not with food on the table but with inquiries and bargains. After some back and forth with ‘What’s for dinner?’, ‘Can we have this instead of that?’, ‘Make it yourself!’, we settle down. Quietness silently crept out of those windows and doors of the house every morning at 6 AM and returned only around 10 PM.
II.
I had recently moved, uprooting eleven years of practicing my own rituals in the many houses I made into my home. There was an unease in returning to my family because it had not been my home for a long time. I had to find a way to softly weave my rituals into their tapestry. To focus on my work and not be distracted by conversation that seemed like inconsequential deliberations to me, I clicked ‘Buy Now’ on the best available earpod at the time.
Two days later, they arrived. I downloaded the Bose application and configured my earpod. I could control the level of volume and the background noise. The midnight black earpod communicated its need in three different blinking lights- charged, charging, and needs charging respectively. Fairly simple. Did you know these tiny earpod are fitted with speakers inside that drown the ambient noise with soundwaves? The sorcery of it all! I got used to them quickly; everyone around watched me walking or working with them on, unaware of them and the affairs of the home- enacting a form of outsider’s aloofness.
I quickly learned that my earpod was effective in keeping sounds out but not people. My mother wandered into my room and stood next to my desk, catching me by surprise. When I gasped, she’d say, ‘I called out, but you couldn’t hear me because of these dabbas in your ears’. She pointed at and mocked my world-class earpod, as dabbas (i.e. boxes in which I am held captive). ‘Suvira aunty from 3A is cooking some kebabs tonight. Do you want some? Order closes in a few hours, so tell me now, I will message her.’ Our neighbours ran a homegrown version of a cloud kitchen within the apartment complex. With the pandemic looming, online ordering was slashed. One day after I finished a zoom call, my father walked in to congratulate me on my ability to speak English so well. I chuckled and cheekily asked him, ‘How do you know?’. He humored me and guffawed. It echoed in the house and my mother left whatever she was doing to join in. They both speak Hindi and Maithili. On the weekends, my brother sneaked up, disguising his appreciation for my watercoloring to borrow art supplies that I would never see again.
III.
Without much warning, we were together on the devastating path of Covid’s delta variant and the Indian state’s inaction in mid-2021. Locked in, we were all tense. There was some consolation in knowing the rest of us were a door away. Our home, like the rest of our country, was enveloped in pain and terror of an insurmountable order. The creaking, the clink-clanging, the flipping of paper, the quiet whispering were all stymied. The days lost their flow and ebb. A deep, fearful silence took over, not just in our home but all around us. Silence was a manifestation of fear and kept the unthinkable at bay. The phones rang persistently and that only made the air heavier. A collective guilt was born out of news of sick and dying friends and family across the country and our inability to make any real difference, for the living and the dead alike. With every sound of an ambulance, we all said a silent prayer. At that point in 2021, we knew pessimism was fatal and optimism was cruel. I want to remind myself and everyone who reads this to remember it as a time in India when the country sunk into silence and grieved together: for all those who passed and those who survived it alone, for the pain of those known to us or not, for everyone who needed help and all of us who failed despite trying. I want to write this so that it is never forgotten, erased, or silenced from public memory and the sun never sets on it lest it be lost in the darkness.
I was compelled to think about noise and sound, of my home as well as the country. If my house, as the living organism it is, is made up of noisy rituals so must be the city and the country. During my stay at home, I could not ask for silence for the fear of evoking a silence I never wished for. The fear of rituals breaking and sounds disappearing was too real. I could not wear the noise cancellation for long stretches of time because it felt eerie. I wondered how we, as a country, failed to hear so many and so much? I wondered if my demand for silence was a burden, an imposition to change my family’s ways? I wondered what the street vendors, hawkers, and construction workers did to survive when their daily work ritual and income were upended? I wondered if my preference for silence and quiet veils what is missing, and if I have misinterpreted it as a preferred state of being? Two years later, my noise cancellation ear pod broke and I was left with the silence of living alone again.
Soon after the 2021 Covid wave subsided, I felt home again, after living with my family for eight months. The return to perceived ‘normal’ was quick. In 2022, I left India and moved to Bangkok. Here, in different conversations, India was referred to as, amongst other things, ‘noisy’ or a place with ‘a lot of commotion’. When I first got my earpod in 2020, noise was a nuisance that I contended with. I often wished for it to just stop. My family understood my frustration but found it difficult to empathize because that’s how life goes on every day. During the 2021 delta wave, I had to contend with the silence which was heart-wrenching. It was also a time that it dawned on me that silence and quiet was an entitlement in our country. I questioned if my disdain for noise and sound was mixed with disdain for people making it and the dangers of such arrogance. In a country’s economy that is made up of 93 percent informal sector workers, ‘the commotion’ was the only way of making a living. The presence of noise and sound signals continuity and survival and its absence, a tragedy.
On the cusp of 2021 and 2022, I lost my job because the Indian state preferred the silence of the organized civil society of which I was a part. Legal measures were used as instruments to remove critics and temper their evidence-backed opinions. This silencing was political, a preferred state of the Indian government that delegated questions of politicized civil society as a nuisance. They saw these as inconsequential deliberations.
After losing my job, I moved to another country in search of options. With my earpod broken, I was left to ruminate about sounds and silences on a much wider canvas than nuisance and quiet. I was left to think of the high cost of silence we demand and that is demanded of us. I was left to think if the return to ‘normal’ was a way of forgetting, a way of surrendering the memories and experiences of the past to the revival of the present, a way of silencing the shattering sound of broken rituals. I was left to wonder how I could resist the fast-paced loss of rituals of my home, its members, and the pain and memory of silence and celebrate noise as a way of feeling alive in India.
Hmm. Could relate to so much. Noise and silence.
This was a rather thought-provoking read Srishty. It is tough for us all to face these noises that also forms part of the tapestry of the Indian experience and I’ve missed it in fact. Living where I do, I hear the train rattling gently somewhere in the distance and birdsongs, but that’s about it. I don’t miss the noise of the traffic for sure, but I do miss the sound of the human voice. Beautifully and sensitively-written. Keep writing!