While certain sounds classify as music, comfort and therapy, others fall apart as noise. And it is sad that my day begins with one. Are you thinking alarm clock? Wrong. I have carefully selected a soft tone, which works contrary to what it is supposed to do. I sleep deeper. Then comes the noise. In a routine series.
Dear god, the noise! Initially it would be the irrationally harsh knocks, sufficient to give a feeble heart like mine an attack. Then when I survived it, and muffled the slangs into my pillow to try and get back to the exact point of the dream, started the clamour of the mother with her "programs" for the day and other blahs that went on irrespective of whether I would listen or not. The stupid good person that I am, I would of course. Plans drafted when she finally left, declaring tea is on the dining table, I turn my side and try harder to sleep a ten minutes duration. Hell, just when the slumber would be on its way, slowly, came the woman's pressure cooker whistles. How I detest that one noise. My mom has said when she dies I should make sure that we give a pressure cooker along, so that she can go up (up?) and cook and feed her father and uncles. I don't know how much I would be able to do that, but I will surely not miss that horrifying hiss. Or, will I?
You thought twas over? Oh no-no, no-no. Then I wake up completely to the sound of my car being taken out for a wash. The only point when I detest it, and its squeaking sounds. While father listens to the TV in which a lady would melodramatically sing lullabyish and pessimistic Rabindra Sangeets, mother's choice of songs on the radio, from Rowdy Rathore to Dil to Pagal Hai creates an absolute commotion. I escape to the loo. I return to father's TV playing headlines, which sound the same every morning -- a telling remark on the state of our state. And finally, on days that I stay home, if you had thought the day would melt away here, stop.
My parents are, in their own way, unlike me, unexpectedly loved and well, unexpectedly loved. Which brings in, what? The door bell. G-o-o-d g-o-d o-f m-i-n-e, even when we pretend to say that we aren't home by hanging the lock from outside, the bell keeps ringing. People have gotten used to it. Mama and Mami are available. The daughter is a door-keeper. Sad life? Yeah? Wait.
My mother is a social well, if not butterfly, certainly firefly. Her mobile phone rings ALL the time. Yes, I deliberately wrote that in caps. Thank goodness she is not patient enough to learn of the smartphone, else the notifications wouldn't cease. And when by chance her mobile phone does not, gosh, the landline. It rings out a hostility in me, which I subdue by not taking the call, which further irritates me, because then it would not stop.
And then, the plans. I cannot even. The "to-do's, what-if's and the after-that's". The fish brawls. The sundry brawls. Of course, the silent afternoons followed by the over-bearing music instilling disgust in my system from the other room with father watching one bong soap after the other. To be taken over by mom's one hindi extravaganza after the other. Finally the house goes to sleep.
But you guessed it right. By this time I am so used to the noise that the new menace called Bigg Boss has entered my room, by my choice. I am sober that way, ignoring WhatsApps and continuing with the same tring-tring for a ringtone, since I got a phone, about more than a decade ago. All of these dissolve. Till I can hear the leaves swirling outside my window. Till I can hear the hourly bangs and the night guard's whistles. Till the insects and air come alive. I am sleepy by then.
Only to be awakened by the voice in my head. It is a sound, a disturbing sound, a noise. And it refuses to leave. That sound noise.
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