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Shashi Warrier

Have a nice, quiet day!

Indians are a noisy people.

When, in 1995, I returned to the village where I was born, I came looking for peace and quiet. After Bangalore, I thought this would be a nice, quiet place to live in. I was tired of the city and, having decided to try my hand at writing, needed to get away from things. The move worked, in the sense that, in 27 months, I wrote three books totalling 375,000 words and over 100,000 words by way of short stories, columns, book reviews, articles on language and so on. Half a million words in two years and a quarter is good going, even if half of that is yet to be published.

All the same, the reality of living here has turned out to be very different from the slow-paced, silent existence I had in mind when I shifted. The last time I spent more than a few days here before shifting was in 1992. My memories were of a relaxed pace of life, of dreamy afternoons on the porch with the hum of bumblebees in the background. The loudest sound, perhaps, was the thud of a falling coconut.

There were memories of rains that didn't let up for days and weeks, of spreading banyan trees and a green hill across the street. There were memories of bullock carts creaking past the gates on a summer's night, a lantern glowing underneath like a feeble glowworm, with the occasional tinkle of a bell tied to the bullocks' necks or a curse from the driver or the hiss of brakes as the animals, going downhill, struggled to keep the cart from running away from them.

But most important of all was the sound, or the lack of it.

By day there was a little traffic on the road, may be three or four buses every hour, an occasional car and, once in a long while, a motorcycle. Fifteen minutes before classes started in the nearby school, there'd be the chatter of children running to make it to their classes in time: after that, silence until classes finished at four in the afternoon.

By night, there was almost no traffic at all: perhaps a lorry or two grinding its way up the slope in front of the house, nothing more. The loudest noises at night were the crickets in the trees behind the house. On Wednesday nights -- Thursday is market day in a nearby village -- there were the noises of livestock, ranging from skittish goat kids to large, well-fed buffaloes, being driven to the small ground where cattle are sold every week. By nine at night, you could hear the jackals howling in the woods on the hill across the street.

Now, five years after that quiet summer of '92 and nearly three after I started writing full-time, the noise level is comparable with that in any reasonably busy part of a city. The morning sun is welcomed by the muezzin's call from the nearby mosque, pouring out of high-powered loudspeakers atop one of its minarets. This, by itself, is nothing to write about but, then, there are three mosques within a two kilometre of my house, all of which follow slightly different clocks. Sitting in my verandah, you get to hear three prayers one after another. The very fact that the call can be heard well over a kilometre away should be some indication of the noise level generated by these speakers.

Traffic begins early, well before daylight. The first of the autorickshaws and jeeps that ply these roads start at half past five. Where you once heard, if you were awake, the sounds of cattle being milked, you hear the noise of reviving diesels. Where once you woke to the crowing of roosters, you wake to the cacophony of badly-tuned engines.

Traffic noises by themselves are acceptable as an inevitable part of development, but it doesn't stop there. Drivers of autorickshaws and jeeps like to play with their horns and the serenade of multi-tone horns begins about the time you reach blearily for the toothbrush as the dark begins to lift.

Now for the bad news for those wishing for a quiet life: the quieter part of the day is over.

Six decades ago, when the Soviet government under Stalin wanted to 'resettle' a village -- as they did to most of Chechnya -- they'd send the Red Army in to force people out. The Army would be preceded by a truck with a powerful loudspeaker, through which warnings would be shouted out to everyone in the village, to the effect that they had one hour in which to pack their bags and get ready to move the freezing, inhospitable wastes out of which they were supposed to scratch a living.

While the resettlements are history, the idea of vehicle-borne loudspeakers has been reborn in rural India. Commercial breaks start at seven in the morning, with your first cup of tea, when a jeep with eight speakers rushes by, announcing very loudly but not intelligibly the virtues of the ice-cream shop at the corner or the saree shop in the neighbouring village. On six days out of 10, there's a political rally within 10 kilometres of here: after the commercial break, another bunch of jeeps go by with a political message.

This continues through the day. It's impossible to have a siesta because the jeeps rush up and down all day. And it's not just the noise: though the commercial messages are loud, they are not particularly disturbing. But the political ones are full of naked aggression. Listen to them from a distance and you get the aggression without any idea of what the details of the message are. This is politicking at its very worst.

The day passes and, at dusk, things quieten down. Ah, you tell yourself, at last.

You're mistaken. At nine in the evening, you hear loud film music from powerful speakers at the junction a hundred metres away. The occasion? It's a ritualised story-telling session, performed outside the nearby mosque, which begins at 10 at night and continues until three in the morning. For the next five or six hours you shut your windows and cringe under the assault on your eardrums and your sensibilities.

When, at last, in the wee hours the racket is over and the audience have scattered, you heave a sigh of relief and get to bed. You take a deep break and settle down in your favourite position on your bed. Just as you're about to drop off to sleep, a medley of horns outside on the road jerks you awake.

Have a nice quiet day!

Illustration: Dominic Xavier