DING DONG BELL

The other day I underwent  an MRI for a suspected  meniscus tear. During  the fifty, interminably long minutes when I was rendered hors de combat, I had my loneliness, pain and an assortment of different types of sound for company. The machine made weird sounds of different types in a random disorder- a robot in gastric distress, a washing machine settling to a stop, the squelch and crackle of wireless sets, the rat a tat tat  of a Made in China toy woodpecker, Bhooter Naacch or the Ghost Dance of Satyajit Ray's Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne, the rattle of a chain saw and many others. Sometimes complete silence, not even the hum or a growl,  would cut short the cacophony like a knife. Interspersed with these two were  bouquets of ad jingles, the RJ's chatter and songs on Radio Mirchi tumbling out in a competing tangle. For a person who is a social network addict , this complete break from the world set me reflecting on  sound,  and even  sent me down to the deepest  recess of memory to recollect the sounds of  my childhood. 

A mother's heartbeat in the womb, as everybody knows, is the first connect with life. Our initial encounters with Nature have been by way of the sounds of rustling of leaves, blowing of winds, the pitter- patter of raindrops and claps of thunder. Sound has a therapeutic value- that is why they played the Radio Mirchi during my MRI! It nurtures and nourishes. At a ceremony held to plant a sapling, also called brikharopan,  at Santiniketan - that best thing to happen to Indian higher studies after Nalanda and Vikramshila-  I was amazed to see something quite interesting. After the then Governor Sri Satyanarain Reddy had covered the sapling with loose soil  and sprinkled water , the organisers requested him to wave a palm leaf fan over it and blow a conch . Vayu and dhvani are as central to a plant's nourishment as soil or  mitti and jal, they said. 

Dhvani or sound has been celebrated by poets.  "Man communicates by articulation of Sounds, and paramountly by the memory in the Ear", said Coleridge,  half punning, and developed a theory of poetry. According to him,  poetry  was  "an imagination of words as a path of sound through the air". Even silence is a kind of sound. It is merely suspended, ready to burst forth as in" The mute still air/Is music slumbering on her instrument". Silence can even depict a visual imagery - as in " moonlight steeped in silentness" ( The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere).

It is to embellish this "path of sound in air" that  English poetry employs the rhyme, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia to enhance its beauty. Similarly , in addition to rhyming or tukant, Hindi poetry also employs such techniques which  are appropriately called alankar or adornments - anupras, yamak, shlesh ( of course they are  adorned with arth alankar also). A very large number of Hindi poets  have used these techniques to telling effect, and I am sure my Bengali friends will be able to improve upon this,  citing examples from that greatest of the Indian literary figures, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

More than museums or art galleries, it is to  musical concerts that people go to. The sound of music is all pervading in the world of arts and has no frontiers of language. I have seen at at a concert " Sufi Sutra" artists from different countries go backstage for less than  ten minutes and  come out to jam for over an hour in a delightful symphony. Our body also understands the importance of sound. That is why perhaps the hearing organ  breaks  down slower than the optic and reproductive. Actually, the ear is the only orifice of the body which does not make a sound and just concentrates to do what it is meant for - save for the occasional dance it does in the 'hands' of some artists. 

Even though sound is not as evocative a mechanism to trigger memory as much as smell or touch or vision, nevertheless, it does perform that function to a large extent. As Wordsworth wrote:

My eyes are dim with childish tears,

My heart is idly stirred,

For the same sound is in my ears,

Which in those I heard. ( The Fountain 29-32).

There are so many memories of childhood which are more auditory  than visual in nature. You would not see them on a particular day but you knew that they had passed through your mohalla  just  by their signature sounds and tunes which could be  adenoidal, high-pitched, guttural, orotund, shrill, boomy or singsong - the ice cream vendor, the locksmith, the raddi wala, the carpet seller, the dosa wala, the mochi or cobbler, the sil lodha repair man,  the bartanwali, the scissor-knife sharpening man, and even the different beggars.  

In Kadamkuan, Patna where I stayed for my Intermediate,  there was this tall chap with a twirled moustache and dhoti kurta who would shout in a nasal voice, much above the traffic din " Taja Makhan" - he sold sweets laced with bhaang. The sugarcane juice wala did not even give a shout- just the jingle of the bells attached to the rotatory would give away his presence.Whenever  and wherever I hear Kundanlal Saigal, the first thing that flashes in my mind is the sight of we three brothers scurrying out of our houses at 5 to 8 in the morning to catch the school bus.

One did not get  up with the sun in the eyes, it was the job of the goraiyyas or sparrows to wake us up with their incessant chirping.  A sound which for a long time had terrorised me after I moved in from Patna to a predominantly Bengali Dhanbad was that of evening ululation from the Bengali households after the evening diya was lit - it sounded  like the hukka hua of  hungry jackals. Much later, at a wedding, I heard this that I  could put the howl and ululation together. The crackle, snap, roar and whistle of an assortment of wood stacked in a heap  are as evocative of the Holika Dahan as swishing fangs of the flames. 

The breaking of bangles is associated with widowhood, but for me the sound of breaking bangles as they flew here and there , softly clanging on the floor, reminds me of the beatings we used to get from our mother. Her multi-coloured glass bangles would break on our backs and shoulders and we three would dutifully collect the broken pieces and hand over to her, sometimes smiling, sometimes sullen.

Food is primarily a teaser for the taste buds.  It is also feast for the eyes  that has led to very snazzy table settings ,  eye-catching garnishing and artistic carving. However, there is a huge scope for ramping up the eating experience by infusion of sound as well. The first thing that attracts you to a sizzler is the sound of sizzle itself. In much younger days, ghee was never served as it is done today- finely sliced onions were  deep  fried in a the bowl of ghee and served hot so as to make a hissing sound when poured over daal- chaaval or khhiccdi.  Of  the kitchen memories one remembers most are the whistle of the pressure cooker and the hiss of chhonk or tempering  when added to the dal . Amongst the many candies of childhood, the whistle- candy stands out as delightfully unique and maddeningly disturbing for the older folks, surpassed only by the pop of the bubble of the gum.

A person's voice is also a unique identity card. The laughter of my late friend Ravi Kant could light up my college hostel, that of my wife assures my children that all is well in the world. No one calls me Vivek anymore like my late father did. I remember his 'Kaun hai" call after lunch on Sundays that would trigger a  tip toe exit by us  three to avoid being caught to massage his feet. More than facial expressions or body language, it is the tone of the voice of a person that conveys his state of mind and mood most eloquently. This has an important implication.

As we move to an era of being heard more than read through our SMSs,  emails and social networking posts,  the range of punctuation marks meant to convey modulation of voice- comma, full stop, interrogation mark and exclamation mark- appears to be inadequately narrow. That is why frequent elisions, triple exclamation marks, double question marks and sundry other emoticons  are being used. One may well see new punctuation signs come up in the near future.

The hissing sound caused by the seam of the cricket ball as it skidded past you was rivalled only by the sound of crashing of stumps. The soft sound when the pin of the friend's latoo  when it landed on yours and spliced it during the game of bella phhad was so  heart rending. Children's elation at Bho katta or severing a rival's kite would rent the air of the colony during the kite flying season. Even today, I don't require to watch an old movie to remind me the sounds of the steam engine. 

Despite such a vast array of sounds, one did not feel overwhelmed and boxed up as today when the continuous honking  and other emission noises of vehicles, clanks and clunks of construction equipment and blaring of microphones compel us to close our ears every now and then.  In our days, if there was a load shedding, you did not put on the generator and disturb the entire neighbourhood - you either endured it, or lit up candles or  lanterns after cleaning the soot from the previous evening- and watched the fireflies and heard the buzz of the mosquitos. The traffic on roads was much less, there was so much of silence around that you had the facility to savour each of these sounds severally- like a good dish whose every single spice or  herb could be dissected and enjoyed. 

However,  one sound has withstood the ravages of  time-  the sound of the  gong of the school. The gong is such a wonderful harbinger of good things. Except when it is sounded five minutes before the conclusion of an examination paper to accelerate a  flurry of helpless  activities and the final "Stop Writing"  one when it comes  crashing on our hopes, it usually  such a happy sounding sound. There is a  hierarchy of gong sounds -  at the lowest lies  the Assembly bell which wrenches  you away from your pre - classes pursuits  of marbles or swings. A notch above this morbidity is  the gong that signals the end of lunch hour which is  also received with much sadness by the eagles circling, crying and swooping up above in the sky. Each gong which would signal the end of a period would be progressively sweeter, the one signalling the Maths more. 

But the gong that is  more awaited than even the Games period bell is the  one to signal the Dismissal.  Then there is a flurry of activity, hoorays, a few wolf whistles, much jostling and everyone is happy. It is the sound which unites the naughtiest of the students and the most unfriendly of the teachers in a baby- like, gurgling bliss. Who doesn't want to go home?

Even as I my fingers move over the keypad, I remember Salim, the darbaan of my junior school whose job it was to sound  the gong - a yellow, metallic disc suspended on a small iron hook. Such unalloyed pleasure he gave, especially during the Dismissal  when he  would purse his lips, beat the gong harder, longer and finish with a flourish  of the gavel  like an orchestra conductor- waiting  for the approving and excited roar of the children.