Oases of silence
By Adil Jussawalla

"IT’s raining oases in Mumbai."

"Raining oases? How can it rain oases ?"

"It isn’t unusual. Oases rain in other cities too."

"What do yo mean — oases rain? What are talking about?" "I’m talking about oases. Everyone’s talking about oases. That’s what I mean when I say it’s raining oases."

"Why didn’t you say so in the first place?"

"This is the first place."

Everyone’s talking about oases of silence in Mumbai. Now that nine days of publicly broadcast pujas have stopped, depriving our neighbourhood of soul, now that ten heads have popped with the sound of a thousand Bofors and Durga has been dunked with more noise than the liftman makes when he slurps his tea (that’s saying a lot), we talk of oases of silence. How desperately we need them!

We do, but frankly much of this talk goes in one of my ears and out the other. (You read right, I have two ears. Though I may have ten heads, ten swollen heads as someone cruelly pointed out the other day. I have two ears.) For a privileged person in Mumbai — by privileged I mean someone who is never likely to interest P. Sainath — there are any number of oases of silence. They are generally entered by pushing a door.

There’s the library at Max Muller Bhavan, for example, where even the mild thump of sole on tile will attract attention. Readers in the library invariably look in the direction of your feet not your face, even if you have ten of them.

There’s the round belly of the National Gallery of Modern Art where you can move as noiselessly as gas moves in your own belly, though the gallery will tend to amplify any unfortunate lapse on your part.

There’s the Crossword Bookstore which is beginning to resemble a library, since more and more people I know go to read there rather than buy books, so much so that salespersons get dirty looks when they talk and boisterous children are found mysteriously bouncing down the stairs leading to the street while their parents are looking the other way.

And there are oases of silence you can enter without pushing a door. Like the Sanjay Gandhi National Park where what you took to be the soothing drone of slokas turns out to be a swarm of bees heading your way, and where errant encroachers are occasionally eaten by leopards without being allowed to scream.

We need these oases of silence as much as we don’t need Divali. The united colours of Divali have long been disunited into a million Pokhrans of sound. Each test in the neighbourhood tests our nerves and those of our animals. All creatures quake in the united terror of Divali.

Except those without ears. I have two. I said it before. I insist. How nice to have heard with those two ears two salespersons, a man and a woman, at Crossword the other day:

"I’m getting late, no?"

"What no? Say I’m getting late."

"Yes."

"What yes? Say I’m getting late."

"No."

"What no? Say I’m getting late."

"It’s getting late, no?"

There are creatures who thrive on words but who can’t hear them. Not for them the terrors of Divali. They can’t hear it. They can’t hear my words but they’re eating them away, silently, without pause. They are bookworms oblivious of noise, eating my books to oblivion. Eating away till the year turns on its side...

It’s getting late, no? — ANF