The Chatter Amidst Silence
Anybody who visits our house will find it similar to a Vipassana meditation retreat. As one site cited, “Vipassana or ‘Insight’ meditation is an oldest Buddhist meditation practice which centres around observing the ‘noble silence’ — the silence of body, speech and mind.” It is about being aware of your breathing and the sensations in your body and one of the steps that a practitioner has to follow while taking up the course in the meditation retreat is to maintain absolute silence throughout the course. You can only communicate with the teachers but not with your co-meditators.
So, when somebody visits our house, they might get to experience a certain degree of this silence because our house is filled with laconic characters — me and my parents. We are a family of four but my sister is based in another city due to work. My parents open their mouths only when the dissemination of news to each one of us is extremely important such as a relative’s arrival in a few minutes or other family-related matters. Even then also, they don’t partake in mindless ramblings. On any other day, they limit their words to enquiring about the food menu and calling one another when the lunch or dinner is ready. There is no showering of love or explicit showing of affection in our house. Because there was hardly any exchange of personal information among us, I barely knew my parents. Even if I ask them, they will mostly nod or reply in monosyllables. It feels like silence supplanted voices and made its way into our lives. We seem like strangers sharing a common house occasionally meeting at the dinner table.
But when the pandemic-induced lockdown began and quietness transcended the whole neighbourhood, our mouths began to spill words more than usual and I got a peek into my parents’ stronghold of emotions.
We live on the outskirts of the countryside. When the complete lockdown was declared last year and humans limited their interactions with one another, Nature became visible. The colours of flora captured our eyes and the sounds of fauna filled our ears. The stillness of night transcended beyond the darkness and stepped into daylight — only the sound of the crickets got replaced by the sound of the cicadas and birds.
Being an introvert, it hardly made any difference to me when the quarantine was declared initially. I could go on for days without communicating with anyone. But not forever. Having worked in jobs that needed frequent client interactions, I learnt to shed some degree of my introverted-ness and welcome company into my otherwise wide “private space”. Thus, when I took a break from jobs and shifted home and the indefinite lockdown was declared, it brought out the bookworm inside me and I remained confined in my room binge-reading. But after a few weeks, I grew exhausted and craved company.
The four walls of my room seemed to grow narrower day by day like a Venus flytrap trying to squeeze the juices out from its victims. I feared that my prolonged stay inside the room will diminish my excitement level of reading books to zero and I will fall out of love for books and that nothing will interest me anymore. The negative emotions started to flicker my optimism with its relentless echoes and the pervasive silence amplified it to the loudest decibel. And that time I knew I needed out.
With no tooting of horns of vehicles and almost no conversations in our house, my ears picked up the other cacophonies around me — birds chirping and cicadas singing with the occasional sneezing or talking of our neighbours nearby.
After my breakfast, I started to take a tour of our garden and explore it in detail. In that small patch of land, the magnificence of Nature unfolded before my eyes and populated my brain with important tidbits and philosophy which later on got compounded by the information shared by my father. I noticed the ants continuing work even after the trail gets broken due to unforeseen circumstances. When there is a bonanza from the skies e.g bread crumbs falling from our mouths, they lift it with their tiny bodies and move in tandem to their colonies. And if a bird snatches it, they run hither and thither and gets disoriented for a split second only to resume work again as if they were never an inch closer to death a moment ago. “Worry” doesn’t seem to be in their life’s dictionary. It seems “Life goes on” fits them not us.
Our garden is also frequented by the white-breasted waterhen. It doesn’t know that it is registered as a “least concern” species of Nature in human books. Had it known, it would have lived its life without fear from humans. The slightest sound makes it run to the nooks or fly away at a lightning speed. The babies are even more fearful of humans. When any human comes near, they play “dead” and when somebody picks them up and then puts them down thinking them to be dead, they run away at a lightning speed.
Sonder dawned on me as I strolled the garden. The colour-changing chameleon running hither and thither stealthily across the garden, the doves foraging for food by walking from one end of the garden to the other, the butterflies flitting from one branch to another and the Mynah birds’ incessant bickering with one another spoke of a story of their own. Their liveliness rejuvenated me and a calmness descended upon my soul. Their taking up of residence in our small garden rent-free made me think of a world with no borders and where every species live in harmony with one another. It feels strange that there are worlds of other species continuing parallelly just at arm’s length around us that we hardly notice, their noises dimmed by the cacophonies of our life.
This harmony breaks though, sometimes, with the visit of the monkeys. It unfolds like the scene from the yesteryear movies where the robbers visit in large numbers to unleash havoc in a village and rob the villagers of their belongings. The monkeys that visit us are no less than those savages. They come in groups of ten, sometimes up to thirty or fifty, with small babies clinging tightly to their mother’s chests to plunder just because they want to. They uproot newly planted saplings, tear down the fruits or vegetables, half-eat them and scatter the rest around. Their visit becomes a sight to see. The birds especially the crows get alarmed by their visit. They peck the monkeys’ bodies and the monkeys try to swat them in return. Thankfully, the crows know how to keep a safe distance from them. After they leave, it seems like the entire garden is swept by a storm.
Evenings made me encroach the private space of my parents who sit on the patio every day for a few hours from evening till dusk staring long hours at the gate. They hardly talked and the silence was so deafening that I started to punctuate it little by little with my random questions when I joined them.
My mother doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. Reticent of the highest order, any attempts to know her history through talks will be greeted by silence or monosyllables. She is the least talkative among us. She prefers silence to melodrama. I barely know what’s going on in her mind even after all these years. We had so little woman-woman talk that I only know her by her actions. My phone conversations with her during my college days used to end after answering her same four queries which get repeated in every single phone call — What are you doing? Have you eaten? What did you eat? Is it raining? I think she gets a gist of how I am doing by the tone of my speaking. On good days, I speak enthusiastically and on bad days, I reply with an irritated tone.
Over the years I have learnt to read her also and give her a wide berth in case she is petulant. Sometimes, to make light of the situation, I occasionally slip a joke addressing my father — “I think we are not getting lunch today.” Hearing this, she doesn’t yell or stir but turns her head to the other side to show her displeasure. I quietly slip away. My father too. We know it will be deadly to kick the hornet’s nest anymore.
When she is bored of our conversations, she intentionally yawns.
My mother never starts a conversation unless something piques her interest. Like during the lockdown, when I started trying my hand in culinary skills and random chefs on YouTube became my guide, she began to poke her head too in my affairs, asking for a particular recipe and occasionally replicating it later on in the kitchen.
She would ask, “Does your YouTube contain my favourite peda recipe?
“Yes, it contains everything.” I would reply.
“And what about gulab jamun?”
Replying no further, I would proceed to show her the myriad of recipes on YouTube. Seeing the plethora of recipes, her face beams like a child taking her first steps into the Disney world. In the following days, she tries to bring changes in her cooking.
My mother doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. Reticent of the highest order, any attempts to know her history through talks will be greeted by silence or monosyllables.
Sometimes, I also show her funny videos of cats and dogs. Their imitation of human behaviour amuses her and she couldn’t help but praise them for their fast-learning abilities. Being a pet owner herself during her childhood, she is moved by the compassionate nature of animals and shares a story or two of her earlier pets. She speaks fondly of them and I learn more new chapters of her life.
I also helped her shed some of her regressive beliefs by educating her of them. She has been socially conditioned to think of menstrual bleeding as impure and a hush-hush affair. She used to bar me from touching any food for three days in the kitchen when I underwent periods during my teen years. I used to rebel and never followed it. I faced her scorn and being young and naive at that time, I was not able to counteract it. Fast forward to now, the internet came to my aid and I showed her cases where harbouring such beliefs has only led to more oppressive measures for women in many areas and that it hinders the upliftment of women in every sense. Since then, the firmness in her beliefs has softened and we now talk more openly about periods.
Another instance was related to burnt rice. I love burnt rice but my mother never lets me eat it. One day, I pressed her to reveal the reason. It was a superstitious belief that eating burnt rice would bring rain on one’s wedding day. I showed her how burnt rice is a delicacy in South East Asian countries and every kid relishes it. I also told her that burnt rice costs higher than plain rice in many restaurants serving South-East Asian cuisine. A peek into other cultures and traditions helped her forego many of her superstitious beliefs.
Sometimes her imagination fills me with wonder.
One day we saw a baby goat on the street having a face half-black and half-white.
My mother said, “What if humans were born like that!”
Then colour-based racism wouldn’t be there. The thought flashed my mind.
My father has a strict demeanour which made me cower in fear when I was little and his tough stance on emotional matters alienated me from him. I never shared my feelings with him nor did he with me. Our phone conversations were meagre too when I was staying away from home. It’s limited to me asking for money during college days or relaying a piece of important information during my workdays with no exchange of pleasantries and no emotions attached. But he gave me the freedom to pursue my field of interest and plan my future however I want. I was so caught up with the demands of life that I hardly got to know him. But the chance came during the lockdown. I learnt about his interests and my interest in his interests evoked a response from him.
My father is an avid gardener and when I brought up the idea of learning gardening in front of him, he scoffed at first but later became excited to find an apprentice in me. He answers enthusiastically to my queries regarding plants and that’s how I learnt how much he loves them. He cleans the garden all by himself, removing the weeds, pruning the plants, sowing the seasonal flowers and vegetables and making natural arbours by entangling the chopped down branches left during pruning with each other for the creepers.
Under his tutelage, some of the wild herbs in our garden got their status elevated to “medicinal” in my brain and the edible fiddlehead ferns got singled from the non-edible ones. He also educated me about a type of invasive species — a parasitic plant that was growing in a pomegranate tree insidiously, its revival brought forth by the tiny birds eating the parasitic plant’s seeds and excreting it on the pomegranate tree. Ever a noob I was, I ask my father, “How did you know the tree was taken over by a parasitic plant?”
He said, “Check the leaves.”
To my horror and amazement, I found the pomegranate tree was laden with two different types of leaves. The leaves look almost similar in size and structure, only the veins were different. It would miss any unkeen eyes. My father chopped down the branch where the parasitic plant was starting to make itself home. The thought of having a lookalike replacing you without anyone’s knowledge gave me the chills.
I took advice on pruning and also how to uproot baby marigold plants and plant them in rows without damaging them. He shared the tips by planting one himself instead of relaying the instructions word for word — an effective way of using fewer words and getting work done quickly.
Ever a dedicated gardener, my father often reads the skies in case rains affect the newly emerged seedlings.
The next day, my father examining the crust told me it is soft and water is laden in the porous pores. So, it will be a perfect time to plant the saplings. I thought the saplings would die of excess water. Still being a docile student, I uprooted a few gently and planted around 20 flower saplings in two rows that day. Tiny leaves emerged from them in a few days signifying that they revived. I asked again, “How did you know?”
“Years of experience,” he replied again.
My father is an avid gardener and when I brought up the idea of learning gardening in front of him, he scoffed at first but later became excited to find an apprentice in me.
He made me water the whole garden for a few days and being someone who detests physical labour and shies away from it, I ended up having severe backache. It awakened the truant in me after some days.
In the next few months, we also spotted bird’s nests in the garden. One deserted nest was woven with twigs and colourful threads. Another made by a white-breasted hen resembled a hammock made with dried leaves. A few months later, my father spotted another nest which had eggs but no mother bird. Maybe she was away in search of food. The height was inaccessible to me so I asked my father to take pictures for me. I taught him how to click pictures with my smartphone for the first time. After a few trials and errors and dodging numerous mosquito bites(owing to rainy weather), we finally managed to get one decent video clicked by my father.
I also had a run-in with crickets who steal the newly-planted chilli plants at night by snipping them at the base and carrying it to their holes. I declared a war on them. I put a stone on the entrance of their homes. My father laughed at the sight.
“You can’t defeat them in their area.” He told.
And sure enough, they just dug holes on the other side. How stupid of me!
Politics is the other arena where we frequently started to cross hairs with each other. My father follows politics quite closely. Our differences in assessing the tactics of the political parties lead to debate and discussion for a few weeks. Even my reticent mother chimes in and shares a sentence or two regarding party politics in the heat of any arguments. The political season saw a salvo of words wafting in our house. The TV barely got a rest and exclamatory sounds resonated in our house for days.
The relaxation of the restrictions brought some liveliness in our patio. Our neighbourhood is filled with houses which have a big iron gate in the front. Ours was no exception. The double gate has gaps in the geometrical designs which let us see the people commuting through the street in front of our home. Watching them from the patio became our distraction from the pandemic-related news. There were some regular commuters and a handful of them were quite interesting ones. Their idiosyncrasies and oddities grabbed our attention and elicited a response among us.
Some woodcutters cover long distances on foot delivering woods mounted in a cycle to an unknown destination. They couldn’t ride that cycle because the woods were lodged and tied below the crossbar giving no room for pedalling. We see them in the morning and returning home late in the evening. Seeing them, my mother walks down memory lane and shares a sentence or two about them when woods were widely used during her childhood days for cooking or other purposes and woodcutters were a common sight in her area.
There was also an old man with a hunchback hand-pulling a cart carrying random things. My father told me that it was due to occupational hazard and that years of hand-pulling the cart have rendered his back a curved posture.
With the government ordering the closure of weekly markets to prevent crowding in such areas, the fish and vegetable vendors started frequenting our area either on a bicycle or a motorcycle. They provided door-to-door services but the prices of their goods skyrocketed. With time they came to know the financial capacity of many of their customers and they made sure to amplify their voices in front of the rich customers’ houses. The customer’s haggling, their light banters with the vendor, the frustration of the vendors after a no-sale with the current customer and sharing the frustation with the next-door customer kept the neighbourhood abuzz.
All these sights and sounds of the street unravelled before us like a movie playing in a loop every day. If one follows the scenes closely, one will notice the economic disparity among the vendors. The poor sell on foot/bicycles but the ones who earn just a few hundred rupees above them sell on vehicles with engines.
Watching them from the patio became our distraction from the pandemic-related news. There were some regular commuters and a handful of them were quite interesting ones.
When work-from-home jobs and online classes became a requirement around the world and the use of mobiles increased exponentially, my father also showed interest in becoming a smartphone-user. He asked me to demystify it. He was using a keypad version before. I showed him the basic techniques such as messaging, calling and deleting numbers on the phone and he was quick to follow. I was happy to help. It drew the interest of my mother too and she coaxed me to teach her. But her fragile touch owing to her belief that my smartphone will curve inwards under the pressure of her pudgy fingers made it difficult to make her learn. Her learning is still an ongoing process though.
And just like that slowly and implicitly, the stillness helped to bring out some extroverted-ness of our introverted nature.
Mindless chattering drains me so I tend to talk less and I want a copious amount of self-space to rejuvenate myself. About my parents, I have no idea why they love to keep mum and not share their feelings. But I can say we have exchanged many more feelings during lockdown than we have in years. We had made incursions into one another’s private space and we are not minding it at all. I got to know about some of my parents’ interests and disinterests and it’s a work in progress.
Credits: Rumi Sonowal
