Sound-seva II

it is not a sound

I thought about the largeness of silence yesterday, its capacity ot absorb everything. Reduce the world to banal irrelevance. Rilke has a poem on it that I can’t remember but reading Mani Rao’s recent poem Love Poem at 3.33am reminded me of the voices one hears when the actual sounds fade out. Sometimes in the dead of the night. Sometimes at daybreak. The world is keeping those voices at bay by not letting the sounds of the world fade out. I prefer to go in a taxi or in the metro with my earphones in place.

The earphone is a constant piece of defence against the inner voice. We refuse silence. To listen inwardly in a world that relentlessly forcing one to face it, is daunting. Dangerous even. It’s what weird loners do. I think of snow mornings in Canada when all you can hear at 5am is the soft landing of snowflakes on the pavement. It is not a sound. Maybe a proto-sound. The sound of rivers and rivulets in the mountains of Bhutan and Himachal (I had the chance to visit both this year) come back to me now. Non-sound, that you can hear only if everything else fades away. The beating of someone else’s heart. Apparently horses can hear these things. I can only imagine that exquisiteness. For I am surrounded by talking mouths of all sorts. The sound of arteries - rivers of the body - can possibly be heard by blood cells. Perhaps, the world will be utterly silent one day, and you and I will face each other without the need of language. Perhaps, that too is a sort of love poem. You were racing through my veins. I could hear it.

[Image by the author. Taken at the NLS Library Courtyard.]

Love poem at 3.33 am by Mani Rao

(first published in Almost Island, December 2024)

I see her eyes in water
Suddenly the water is full of eyes
Splashing my face
I’m shy

I tore out the wind-chimes
to listen
You were racing through my veins
The curtains did a two-step
and swirled

I’m leaving you
Even in my dreams I’m leaving you
You don’t believe me
Even in my dreams you don’t believe me