Sound. I suddenly miss sound more than anything else. It’s early November, and I have just—the luggage tags are yet to come off the suitcases—returned from New Delhi to Ontario. Here, eleven thousand kilometres away from my mother’s house, fall has run its course, and as it steps forward, winter, true to its habit of stripping its surroundings, has taken away the auditory background track of the warmer months—children’s holler, music coming off backyard parties, the lawn mower’s monotonous drone. This is the first time in my seven years of living in Canada, though, that I am finding the early-winter quietude utterly disquieting, almost impossible to deal with. Sitting on my bed as I work on my laptop, my ears long to hear the blare of traffic running through the main road facing my Delhi home. It’s a weird wish, considering how grating that non-stop vehicular noise feels like when I am at my mother’s. Absurdity is a key ingredient of nostalgia, I infer. What else could explain this yearning for hearing Delhi’s hyper masculine traffic noise or the fact that I wear wrist watches still set to India time at work?
Homesickness is not an avalanche, it’s a slow cascade. It doesn’t come over you in an all-consuming sweep; it pulls from the circuit of your mental catalogue one thing at a time and spreads itself on your being like a fluffy mist blanketing a hill. For me, the first wisp of this mist had come with Durga Puja, arguably the most important annual event in a Bengali’s calendar. In North America, not only did the autumnal festival present itself as a pathetic fake of the original—the five days of Puja hurriedly condensed to a weekend—it came emptied of the most vital sensory marker I’d come to attach with the pujas: the dhaak, a drum that dhaakis, traditional drummers from Bengal, would beat into life using two slender sticks and years of homegrown skill. My dissatisfaction with the NRI version of puja, I realised, was less to do with its weekend avatar (this was convenient if nothing else), but the distinct absence of live dhaak, a sound I’d grown up seeing overtaking Durga Puja venues in Delhi. Four years after landing in Canada, I would write a poem with these opening lines—Every autumn, the / ghost of a drum-beating dhaaki / enters a tired CD player, / his rhythms muffled, / mismatched. Alongside the dhaak’s exultant beats, I also missed the mantras the Bengali priests chanted with clear-throated exuberance at Delhi’s Durga Puja pandals. Instead, I saw priests from north India, now earning pretty dollars by offering their services to North American temples singing Ram bhajans during Durga Puja.
Despite having the best acoustic settings, the confined space of the North American Hindu temple couldn’t replace the soundtrack of my Durga Puja ethos, bereft as it were of songs from the golden age of ‘modern’ songs rendered by the likes of Hemanta Mukherjee, Shyamal Mitra, Sandhya Mukherjee and Gita Dutt. Back in Delhi, their recorded voices boomed out of loudspeakers at a pandal right behind my mother’s house in Chittaranjan Park. In Canada, I missed Hemanta and Gita Dutt crooning Neer chhoto, khoti nei, akaash toh boro / Worry not if the nest is small, the sky is enough for all (my translation). Despite being unbound, the sky here looked and sounded terribly limited.
From a series titled We have no place for the belief in—The one Reality and the unreal appearances! by Samit Das
October 2018
I’m home for Durga Puja. It’s almost a decade since I’ve attended the festival in Delhi. I’ve planned my holidays in such a way that I’ll get to breathe in some of the pre-puja joys—my favourite part of the event. The digging of the puja grounds to lay down the bamboo scaffolding that will hold the pandal in place for five days, the sports competitions on Sunday mornings, featuring ‘three-legged’ and spoon-in-the-mouth kids and their cheering parents, the abritti (recitation) and singing competitions in the evenings. The build-up to the pujas is the alaap, the pleasing opening notes to a tantalising khayal, the versed song of the actual event.
Much has changed, though, I note. I feel noise of a different kind this time around. It’s brasher, more in-your-face. It doesn’t even speak and yet feels jarring. As we drive from the airport to Ma’s house, I see Hanuman stickers plastered on the backs of cars. As a child, I often went to the local temple in Kalkaji on Tuesdays with my mother or friends with a sawa-rupiya (1.25 rupees) sweet offering to Hanuman, the monkey god. Over the years, he had endeared himself to me, and I’d remember even invoke him during small and big crises. But this Hanuman I now see on the back of cars, so many of them, looks angry in his deep-orange, sharply-angular jaws. He seems to be emblematic of a new India, one I am fearful of coming to terms with. At a Durga Puja pandal, an oversized banner valorising the mettle of the Indian Army welcomes devotees at the entrance. I’m at home, yet I am missing home—the home of my childhood Durga Puja, when toy sellers with cardboard swords and toy pistols constituted the extent of heroism on display.
A few days after Durga Puja, as I’m on my way to meet some old friends in an autorickshaw, traffic comes to a standstill at rush hour. This isn’t another one of Delhi’s notorious traffic jams, though. This halt is to make way for a long line of Kānvarias, devotees of Shiva on an annual pilgrimage to fetch water from Ganga. Growing up in Delhi, I’ve seen Kānvarias many times before, but this is the first time I hear them—chanting loudly, blaring even louder songs off speakers they carry, and bringing traffic to its knees.
Back in the somnolent silence of Ontario, as I reflect on the sounds from back home I miss and the noises I don’t, I’m reminded of a novel I read a few years ago. In The Silence and the Roar, written by Nihad Sirees, an exiled Syrian writer, as he contemplates on the nature of quietude, the narrator says, “The most beautiful sound in the world is the voice of the muezzin making his call to prayer from the minaret two miles away from my building as the city slumbers in a deep sleep, as all modes of transportation stop moving, as the streets are emptied of people and cars....”
It is that kind of sound that I have truly missed, I realise.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Pause And Effect")
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Bhaswati Ghosh writes and translates fiction, non-fiction and poetry
