Euphonious

Tonight was the last night of Diwali – the festival of lights and the celebration of Krishna vanquishing the rakshasi from the earth. For one or two days, families string their homes in light and places oil lamps around the periphery to make the god feel welcome, like he can come home any time. And, most importantly, in celebration and maybe to scare off any lingering evil spirits the streets or land-mind with fireworks. And these are not Fourth of July government regulated or lakeside fireworks that pop and whiz but can be slept through, these are the sounds of war, explosions that hammer the stucco walls and blasts that go off inches from passerbies and flowing sarees. As can be imagined, all the noise is not tolerated too well by the non-Hindus and the foreigners. Lack of sleep and the fear of flying sparklers and bottle rockets turns nerves a little raw. But it all made me think of India in terms of sound; I mean a country of 1.6 billion people makes a lot of noise.

So, in my observation, sound can be classified into a few categories:

1. Sound that exists alone, personal sounds, mainly morning noises. I live in a Muslim neighborhood, so the call to prayer to all believers, if one is awake to hear it, is a pretty powerful sound, a kind of rich baritone hum that sits like a cloud over my apartment building for the first few minutes of every morning. Then there are the chants, the groups of men and women on rooftops and in gardens doing their morning sun salutations, recitating of mantras. This comes right after the call to prayer around 5 or so, as if Muslims and Hindus broke the times of day up evenly so as not to overlap. And then there is my favorite sound: the sound of a whole apartment building or even just one man on the balcony below, doing a early morning cleansing of the system. I won’t describe too much, but let your mind wander to all the sounds and throat and nose can make after 8 hours of sleep. This took a long time to get used to.

2. Then there are the street sounds, the communal sounds. The locomotive-chugging of generators when the power goes out. The sounds of samosa sellers who talk and hawk so quickly that their sentences attack each other like puppies rough housing in an indecipherable ball. And there are the horns. In India, and especially in Hyderabad, honking is not a rude brush-off or reprimand, but better translated as “Hi, hello… hello, hi” like a nervous interviewer trying to get his subjects attention. Blinkers are completely out of fashion and the white lines divided lanes have no sovereignty, so when veering from left to right, trucks and rickshaws chirp out a long-winded trail of sound, more like the beginning of a song. In addition, there is the sound cars make in reverse. My friends small hatchback blurts out a medley of Christmas carols, and then there is a man who leaves my apartment building everyday at 7 am who is followed in reverse by ‘You are my sunshine’.

3. And then there are the international sounds, the sounds that make me feel like I am at home, back in Birmingham on a Sunday morning. There are the children playing hide-n-seek and ring-n-run, games of which I and my Iranian roommate as foreigners are the main target. And on the trains there is the soft-whisper of friends, of husband to wife, figuring out which bunk is whose, whether to order tea or coffee… And there is music. Everywhere. Western music, Hindi music, Telugu music. There is the vina and violin and drums. There is always drumming. Sometimes it is used politically for the campaign of a local BJP candidate and sometimes, like in a New Orleans Second-Line, when someone dies the drumming and singing of their friends and loved ones follows them to the grave.