It's 4.15am in Toronto now, on January 16, 2019. I have woken early as my sleep pattern seems to have changed ...falling asleep by 8.30pm and early awakening...3am.
Surrounded by almost complete silence as I am sitting in bed and studying, I am reminded of the sounds which woke me in India at the same time as now...early morning.
When visiting India, I either couldn't sleep due to jet lag or I had disturbed sleep and woke early. The sounds from outside my house which woke me were in this order. First it was the incessant song of the koel. Next was the absolutely horrible sounds of autorickshaw. It's the worst vehicle sound to hear in the lovely early morning silence when all are asleep! As the noise of the autorickshaw faded into the distance, there would be a brief lull and then noise from another auto or another vehicle would disturb the silence. As the clock hands moved towards, 5.30, a variety of noises demolished the early morning silence... honking drivers, dog-walkers, neighbours cleaning their front yards and my mother's TV blaring out religious hymns i.e. Suprabathas. Within my house, the sound of people waking and going about their daily routine...the toilets flushing, sister making coffee, the TV news competing with the Suprabatha from the music-player, my now-deaf dad calling his tenant in the village to give/'yell' needless instructions about his farm... By 7am the koel's song is either completely drowned out by these noises or it's done singing for the day. There's also the sound of dogs barking, people from the neighbouring businesses talking, opening garage doors, incessant parking and driving away of vehicles.
By contrast,in Toronto, it's almost complete silence! The only sounds seem to be from vehicles driving by and this sound increases as peak hour approaches and fade away as the peak hour ends. Now at 7am on a January Sunday morning, the only sounds are that of cars driving sporadically (about three or four a minute or less) in front of my home. If I sit, in another room, it would be complete silence the entire day! The sounds of the vehicles vary with the season...wheels on dry roads make a different noise than wheels on wet roads and on snow. Drivers, thankfully don't honk here.
No bird songs for nearly 3 months of winter. Thanks to either the sound-proof windows or fewer people chatting with neighbours, there are no people sounds either. Dogs are in the neighbourhood but don't seem to bark much. Here, unlike India, we don't hear our neighbours TV in our home.
There's virtually a cocoon of silence in my Toronto home. And a literal cacophony of noises in my India home. Sometimes, I fantasize, recording the sounds of India, and listening to them here...
Surrounded by almost complete silence as I am sitting in bed and studying, I am reminded of the sounds which woke me in India at the same time as now...early morning.
When visiting India, I either couldn't sleep due to jet lag or I had disturbed sleep and woke early. The sounds from outside my house which woke me were in this order. First it was the incessant song of the koel. Next was the absolutely horrible sounds of autorickshaw. It's the worst vehicle sound to hear in the lovely early morning silence when all are asleep! As the noise of the autorickshaw faded into the distance, there would be a brief lull and then noise from another auto or another vehicle would disturb the silence. As the clock hands moved towards, 5.30, a variety of noises demolished the early morning silence... honking drivers, dog-walkers, neighbours cleaning their front yards and my mother's TV blaring out religious hymns i.e. Suprabathas. Within my house, the sound of people waking and going about their daily routine...the toilets flushing, sister making coffee, the TV news competing with the Suprabatha from the music-player, my now-deaf dad calling his tenant in the village to give/'yell' needless instructions about his farm... By 7am the koel's song is either completely drowned out by these noises or it's done singing for the day. There's also the sound of dogs barking, people from the neighbouring businesses talking, opening garage doors, incessant parking and driving away of vehicles.
By contrast,in Toronto, it's almost complete silence! The only sounds seem to be from vehicles driving by and this sound increases as peak hour approaches and fade away as the peak hour ends. Now at 7am on a January Sunday morning, the only sounds are that of cars driving sporadically (about three or four a minute or less) in front of my home. If I sit, in another room, it would be complete silence the entire day! The sounds of the vehicles vary with the season...wheels on dry roads make a different noise than wheels on wet roads and on snow. Drivers, thankfully don't honk here.
No bird songs for nearly 3 months of winter. Thanks to either the sound-proof windows or fewer people chatting with neighbours, there are no people sounds either. Dogs are in the neighbourhood but don't seem to bark much. Here, unlike India, we don't hear our neighbours TV in our home.
There's virtually a cocoon of silence in my Toronto home. And a literal cacophony of noises in my India home. Sometimes, I fantasize, recording the sounds of India, and listening to them here...
- the koel in the tree outside my home in the morning
- the coppersmith singing in the peepul tree and the sounds of the peepul leaves rustling in the wind( outside Kadumalleshwara temple in Malleshwaram)
- the sound of water running in paths from the well to the fields
- and so on.
I love the silence of Toronto and have gotten used to it. But I do miss some of the noises of India...like the koel, the coppersmith and the doves, the wind in the trees.
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The early morning sounds in my village are, as might have guessed, quite different. What I am writing now is something I saw 25 years ago. Things might have changed now. I hear there is more mechanization in farming and less labour, people have started sending their kids to school and kids don't help out much in farming, new roads have come and the entire geography itself has changed! So, what I have written below is a description of 'sounds in my village, 25-30 years ago.
If I slept in the 'current room' in the fields, the morning started off with a cacophony of birds chirping as they woke and left their nests, the early morning farmers switching on their motor pumps to water the fields. The sound of the motor running and water gushing up from the well into the trough is..I don't know how to describe this sound. There is also the voices of muy village folks calling out loudly to each other. The dull rumble of buses in the distance with the occasional honking. As the day gets hotter, the birds fall silent. In the afternoon, or mid-morning, one can hear the women-folk in the fields, chatting and gossiping. They come after they finish the housework and join the men in the fields, doing the 'lighter work' such as pulling out weeds. They come with food in baskets, which they eat with their men-folk at noon.
One lovely sound is that of bells round the neck of cows, as they wander around the fields, grazing, Occasionally an irate farmer yells at the child/person in charge of the cows, if he suspects the cow is eating the rice plants instead of grazing the grass, on the edges of the field.
One can hear a lot of people a few days at different times of the year. At time of planting when rows of saplings are planted by many women at a time in rows. At harvest time, when many labourers are hired to cut the rice plants, gather it on their heads, walk to a spot, where the rice plants are beaten on the ground to make the paddy fall out.
In movies, they show, rapid photos...I forget the word for it, where they show the ebb and flow of lights in a single place...like darkness, sun-rise, bright sun, sun-set, darkness, stars and street-lights, fading darkness, sun-rise, etc. I wish they also accompanied this visual with the ebb and flow of the sounds. That would be so nice and give a complete picture.
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