As I landed (from what turned out to be a surprisingly relaxing journey halfway across the globe) and found myself sitting shotgun in a minivan, I grew acutely cognizant of the silence surrounding me. Aside from my nephews displaying their vocal capacities only to have their parents compete with them in anger, and our various reluctant attempts at conversation, there was nothing. No sound whatsoever.
My agitation only increased as the day came to a close and I found myself lying in bed, the first in many months, to absolute deafening silence. With the kids asleep, and the conversations muted, there really remained no sound. And while this might not seem strange to those accustomed with the norms of western life, it's definitely the most immediately noticeable divergence for someone who has just flown half away across the world, having spent the better part of the previous year immersed in Indian culture.
I remember as a child watching an episode from a popular TV show where one of the main characters, a young surgeon with a wedding around the corner, is confronted by his soon to be wife about a mole on his face she wants surgically removed. He is reluctant, who wouldn't be - when confronted about altering a portion of your identity - but he submits to the demand out of his commitment to her happiness. Eventually, as the wife also navigates the compromises she's been asked to make for the marriage, she seeks counsel from an advisor who promptly replies, "that thing you hate so much may be the very same thing you miss when it's gone."
When you first step foot in the subcontinent, the first thing that hits you is the pungent smell. The scent of aromatic rice cooked over burning rubber. The next thing to hit you is the unrelenting sound. Sound, much like air itself, is everywhere, and almost completely unavoidable. It rings with the breeze, and burns with the scorch. It's in the veins of people, in their pores. You find it in the screams of young men as they beckon you towards their taxi, and you find it in the persistent blaring of their horns afterwards, an almost proud traffic.
And when you find yourself in such an environment, an unaccustomed foreigner having lived life in blissfully ignorant silence, it can grow quite bothersome. As you lay in your room puking from the food that won't settle and sweating from the heat that won't surrender, the last thing you want is to hear the ringing of bells blasting from loudspeakers at the local mandir followed by hours of relentless repetitious songs. And if you happen to live in a Muslim neighborhood, you witness firsthand how many similarities are shared between religions. In this case, you find the same speakers, just different hymns.
But after the initial shock and frustration finally subside and you find yourself more accommodated to the culture, you start noticing something you hadn't before. A quaint beauty emanating from the relentless chaos. What you once saw as an unbearable nuisance in those street bands hired for weddings, you now see a manifestation of love and family, carried on the sleeves of society. And the hymns blasting from those places of worship during their sporadic festivals not as just headaches, but also a celebration of faith. You start to see that same oppressively incessant blasting of taxi horns (among those of other cars and bikes) not as the unforgiving traffic you once surmised, but of the struggle of living and sweating through this rough, rich corner of the globe. All in the same shared pursuit of happiness, that which drives men across every part of the globe to wake from their idyllic slumber at dawn and toil until dusk in need of rest for the next day of labor.
As I woke up the following dawn, back aching from the velvet tempurpedic mattress (a reflective reminder of the proverb of the bird which, when caged long enough, sees flying as a crime) I felt a sudden pang of loneliness. Not waking up to the melodious tune of the adhan (alongside the four less melodious uncles earning their Lord's favor in the other mosques nearby), nor the tune of the milkman making his early run, or of the aunties starting their dhikresque gossiping on the roof a few feet away, made way for a painful emptiness as I dragged myself towards the kitchen to prepare the pizza left over from the night prior.
As I sat alone on the kitchen table eating those two slices, in complete silence as everyone else enjoyed the final hour of their sleep, I begged to try and understand this silence. As the noise of the subcontinent initially frustrated me, so too did this silence now. But it wasn't long that I was led to resolve, much as I had grown to understand of the sound, that this silence itself must be a blessing too. A symbol of peace and tranquility. A moment to connect with the Creator without the barriers of daily struggle bearing down on one's chest. Just as the hymns and adhans were a reflection of holding faith on one's sleeve, maybe this silence served as an internal guage of that faith. An opportunity to reflect on how deep that vocal testament really lay.
My father was the first to wake, and I suspect that has always been the case. A life of shunning sleep so that his children may wake every day without facing the pains he endured in his pursuit of prosperity. Then, the children. They no longer cry, but the house still grows bright with their waking presence. And as the remainder of the household wakes, the day starts once again. A life full of blessings. Yearning to be recognized, striving to be attained.
-Muzammil Ahmad
