The road is crowded - 19-Sept-2012

The road is crowded and the air is littered with the insistent shrillness of a horn being leaned on for far longer than is acceptable. Whistles shriek as traffic controllers are desperate to let cars pass without causing a traffic jam, and without letting themselves become part of the pavement. Sweat drips off their tired brows as they pointlessly gesticulate at the crowding busses and unyielding anxious drivers, racing to get their kids, to the destination  to whatever the next stop of their day is.

On the sidewalk, panhandlers crowd around in ephemeral shapeless forms that seem to hover on the outskirts of personal space. Panhandlers desperate to get rid of their ill gotten goods fill my retinas with stolen bags, fake watches, and cheap cheap t-shirts that declare how much I love Noida.

Impatient music blares in my ears from the tiny white buds that somehow, by connecting to the slim black contraption in my pocket, smoothly absorb music like a perfectly blended milkshake through a bendy straw. But this milkshake is full of air pockets, as with each gulp, I’m skipping to the beginning of the next song. Michael Jackson competes with The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Subliminal to have their full works listened to by my anxious ears.

My visual field is a wall of tightly clutched purses and back pockets, suit jackets and store uniforms, a sea of Blackberries and touch phones undulates in front of me as I try to zig zag through to wherever my next destination is. DMRC space is limited, buses run early and I run earlier, trains rattle and roll and my brain swims back and forth in its pool of cerebrospinal fluid, swaying dangerously close to the cranial walls. The glare of the sun and the sting of raindrops filters through my cracking eyes, and the unified buzzing, ringing of the street follows through. The noise in the street is mimicked in my mind, and I could not even find a moment of silence to honor the spirits as I pass through the graveyards.

My brain is splitting, I am living the exaggerated lightning strikes shown in advertisements for Migraine medicine, I am out of balance, and my field of vision comes in and out of focus. Glasses on, glasses off. Nothing helps, I am dizzy and tired, and NCR races indifferently around me. I want to sit on the sidewalk and cradle my ears in my tired hands, but they are way too dirty. I want to lay my legs on the ground and give them a moment of stillness. I long for the tree pose, the lotus, I lust after stillness, silence, and space.

I’m starving for silence, I crave minutes of frozen time and deaf ears. I beg for indifference and for one second of breathing space. I want to read, and so sue me, I want to have a good night’s sleep. The deceiving couch cushions eat away at my back, and my swollen joints take shots. I feel perpetually hung over, even though I don’t drink. Enjoyable outings, conversations, phone vibrations are a hammer hitting the nail that has gone crookedly into the wood.

The city is overwhelmingly exciting, and overwhelmingly tiring. Stray items fall into my possession without intention, without compensation. I’m a chrono-kleptomaniac, I’m steal seconds instead of silverware. In breaks form work I find the dimly lit sitting areas of delis, I hide in my book and dive into someone else’s world for a few minutes of the day. I’m gone for an hour but only 10 minutes have faltered through the noise.

I’m imagining a shaved head, a Buddhist monastery where I am the solitary Monk. I’m jittery from coffee that I haven’t even yet consumed. I greet MOD cashiers like they’re my family. My life is disoriented. I imagine myself in a bubble of smoke, or plastic, or plexiglass. I imagine a great big black hole consuming me, just me into a dimension of syrupy blackness that snakes into my eyes, and throat, silently deadly.

I reach out from the quicksand, but the quicksand is painfully slow; enveloping me up to the knee on one side and dissolving my arm on the other. Sway. Slip. Stuck. Crawling painfully, slowly, determinately are tiny red fire ants, forming in a necklace of toxicity. They feed on my tears and build their nests in my bloodstream. I wake up from sleep more tired than when I went to bed. My eyes are no longer blue, they are nauseatingly purple, they are maroon with determine niceness and conviviality, they are ice cold grey from exhaustion. They are rimmed with unrested capillaries, and surrounded by an army of speckled dust.

I’m facing a situation that my entire life has been the most successful at making me completely and totally uncomfortable, the only one that truly exhausts me: I have no place of silence. Not even a corner, a closet, a bathroom where I can sit and think. Where I can write. I am rushing these words out at the end of the workday, I can no longer think straight. I go from morning to office to outings to nighttime. And again the next day. I don’t know what it is to unwind. Someone is perpetually pulling the string in my back that makes me spit out preprogrammed phrases. Transaction. Evaluation. Good morning. Good night. How are you? How was your day.

Please, sometimes, I don’t care. My phone rings and I answer, and I wish it could teleport me to where the dialer’s fingers are CP, GK, Nehru Place, Rohini,  Somewhere, Anywhere. I just want some silence.

If I pour out my coins, can I buy some space? Can I eviscerate myself for some silence? I’ll trade a kidney for a chance to write my stories. A lung, perhaps, for a good night’s sleep.

Time is money, but Silence is priceless.

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“Do not speak unless you can improve the Silence”