27 Sounds and Silence
Sat on my verandah in the morning: the sun is just coming up over the trees, the butterflies are up and about, the birds are singing... and there is musical chaos in the air. We’re mid-way through a nine-day festival in honour of Durga, most feared goddess, and day by day loudspeakers blast out music from the temporary pavilions erected in the villages. Last month we had the same thing for Ganesh, and although the songs change, the quality of reproduction does not. In India a hit song will often be recorded end to end onto a 30-minute cassette and just left to play on a loop. The loudspeaker is one of the curses of the modern world, but especially in India – through it politicians persuade the gullible, lottery sellers promise a better future, and the poor are entertained, as though the greater the volume the less the poverty.
Currently we have two villages, which must be about 5km apart, competing for airspace, and my left ear is filled with the music from our village, and the right with the music being played from another. The pollution of peoples’ silence with ever repeated banality shows a complete disregard for a person’s need for space and quiet. In India nowadays you can’t walk through a town without being assaulted by amplified mayhem, which forces its way into consciousness with the subtlety of a sledge-hammer.
When the music stops, as it has now, the silence is filled with the fear of expectation, as one’s ears prepare for the restart, which usually happens, not at the beginning of the tune, but right in the middle. The peasants go out to their fields about 10.00 am and then there will be some quiet, until they return and the noise will start again just before evening prayer, continuing until late, long after I’ve fallen asleep at night. We still have about five days to go, and I have fantasies about disrupting the power supply, but I guess I will forbear. I don’t know if Durga is pleased with all the noise, but if I was a murti, I would be Dakshinamurti who was pleased to give and to receive only one thing – silence, the silence that is revelation and joy in a way that noise never can be.
one evening
sitting in prayer
a deafening stillness
filled the air
birds in morn
going their way
didn’t return
at end of day
an empty tree
an empty mind
when birds have flown
great peace you find