A summer day, hot and humid as ever, found me clad as usual in my half-sleeve shirt, cotton trousers and sandals walking home from the market. I was carrying a bag of vegetables in one hand, my phone in the other, and was contemplating which pocket to put my phone in so I could pull out a kerchief and wipe some of the perspiration off my face and neck. Somewhere amid this meditation upon personal comfort, I heard a sob. It was a quiet, private sound that had absolutely no place in the public milieu of a noisy street, but despite the thousand other sounds, that one sob hit my eardrum with the same impact as crashing thunder. I looked around, my confusion startling others around me, half-wondering if I had imagined it, but no, I hadn't. It was the old woman whom I had seen a million times sitting on the stone slab that served as a doorstep and threshold. But usually, she was quiet, staring at the street as if it were empty, but being aware enough to shout a warning to an errant driver or pedestrian. I myself had been the recipient of her shout a couple of times. But today, what I got from her was a different sound.
I stood there, stiff as the lamp post I had just walked past a moment ago, and I hoped she wasn't aware of my standing there. Several thousand “me”s were holding a hurried conference inside my head. I had to stop and attend, I didn't know how to proceed. There was a proposal floated that I inquire about the woman's grief. This shocked many of the more insular “me”s, those parts that had, over the years, learned not to intrude on any unshared emotion, even among friends. This suppression of curiosity was in someways an alienation of my childhood, when I would ask a gazillion questions about the most trivial thing. But slugging through an adolescence into an adulthood characterized by having to “deal with it” - it being any emotional upheaval, any depression, any want for affection – by myself, without expectation of understanding or support, the questions changed direction and went inward. The well was drawing water into itself. It would no longer provide water to any, outside. And then, the teardrop behind the sob had sunk to the deepest levels of the well. So what would I do?
That day, and on many days afterward, I walked away. I isolated myself even further. I was an ostrich with its head in the sand, a bird of flight with its head in the clouds, whatever. Around me, it wasn't just one old woman washing the street with her anguish. A country-load of cries, wails and other pained expressions rent the air, and I heard them all, even while attending parliament inside my head. As it was inside, so it seemed to be outside. The real Parliament, the one with the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, was also turning cacophonous as more and more atrocities weaved their way into common speech. Even as the mass media equally railed and ridiculed, ranted and (wittily or not) remarked, the debates and the motions continued. The monsoon came, then the winter, then the summer, and so on. Nothing happened. The voices inside the head grew louder and louder in a bid to outcry every other sound. They became insidious, effete and eventually merely raucous.
The first emergence of the voices had struck me dumb, just as the first reports of the staggering levels of corruptions had rendered my fellow citizens mute with shock. But the incessant haggling over the particulars and relevant protocol wearied everyone. The number of pointed, pointy and pointing fingers annoyed endlessly. Now, with the voices outshrieking everyone, I wanted to be deaf as well. I had changed, become aware of a growing dumbness, just as the nation I lived in became cognizant of being a mute spectator to a masterly puppet show. Whoever is pulling the strings in India, knows we are losing our senses, one by one. We never ever saw who did what. Our sense of smell is redundant since ages. We are being rendered voiceless, by shock or by gag-on-mouth. We are tired of all the outrage being poured on our ears. Do we really feel the proverbial horror making our skin crawl? I doubt it. The end is nigh.
I stood there, stiff as the lamp post I had just walked past a moment ago, and I hoped she wasn't aware of my standing there. Several thousand “me”s were holding a hurried conference inside my head. I had to stop and attend, I didn't know how to proceed. There was a proposal floated that I inquire about the woman's grief. This shocked many of the more insular “me”s, those parts that had, over the years, learned not to intrude on any unshared emotion, even among friends. This suppression of curiosity was in someways an alienation of my childhood, when I would ask a gazillion questions about the most trivial thing. But slugging through an adolescence into an adulthood characterized by having to “deal with it” - it being any emotional upheaval, any depression, any want for affection – by myself, without expectation of understanding or support, the questions changed direction and went inward. The well was drawing water into itself. It would no longer provide water to any, outside. And then, the teardrop behind the sob had sunk to the deepest levels of the well. So what would I do?
That day, and on many days afterward, I walked away. I isolated myself even further. I was an ostrich with its head in the sand, a bird of flight with its head in the clouds, whatever. Around me, it wasn't just one old woman washing the street with her anguish. A country-load of cries, wails and other pained expressions rent the air, and I heard them all, even while attending parliament inside my head. As it was inside, so it seemed to be outside. The real Parliament, the one with the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, was also turning cacophonous as more and more atrocities weaved their way into common speech. Even as the mass media equally railed and ridiculed, ranted and (wittily or not) remarked, the debates and the motions continued. The monsoon came, then the winter, then the summer, and so on. Nothing happened. The voices inside the head grew louder and louder in a bid to outcry every other sound. They became insidious, effete and eventually merely raucous.
The first emergence of the voices had struck me dumb, just as the first reports of the staggering levels of corruptions had rendered my fellow citizens mute with shock. But the incessant haggling over the particulars and relevant protocol wearied everyone. The number of pointed, pointy and pointing fingers annoyed endlessly. Now, with the voices outshrieking everyone, I wanted to be deaf as well. I had changed, become aware of a growing dumbness, just as the nation I lived in became cognizant of being a mute spectator to a masterly puppet show. Whoever is pulling the strings in India, knows we are losing our senses, one by one. We never ever saw who did what. Our sense of smell is redundant since ages. We are being rendered voiceless, by shock or by gag-on-mouth. We are tired of all the outrage being poured on our ears. Do we really feel the proverbial horror making our skin crawl? I doubt it. The end is nigh.
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