The dawn broke shattering the sky into a million bits of blue, red and gold, weaving a tapestry of magic while the tall trees with their green scraped the skies. It was a moment of wonder. Silence enveloped the world, a silence pregnant with sound waiting for a trigger. Below, the flowers filigreed with silver dew and beyond, the massive gulmohur in unabashed glory in little tongues of fire. Birds nesting in its branches were cooing to their little ones and warbling to the world. A reassuring sense that whatever may happen, the bird song is eternal. My humble balcony became an enclave of peace.
There were miles of empty street as far as the eye could see waiting for the familiar tread of humanity yet to stir from the morning slumber. A stray cow was ambling along in search of its cowherd and a dog barked, perhaps at an errant ‘spirit’ in the light of dawn. It was the stillness of a cathedral without a congregation, a silence that was almost celestial, not enslaved by sounds, not besieged by words.
As Samuel Beckett once said, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” It is in such silences that we find ourselves. We reminisce about people and events that have long gone, we realise the little guilts we carry and the conscience we have stilled. And the transcendental questions that worry us: Have we loved enough? Have we forgiven enough? Have we turned our faces away when things were not quite right?
A profound silence is also the time when “the absent are present in our lives in difficult and powerful ways”, as the poet K Srilata says. Sad we ignore or take for granted presences till they become absences! In the solitude of the mind, writers write, dreamers dream and all creative activity takes place unhampered by the demands of the mundane. It is also in the eternity of this moment we realise an Unseen Presence because the Lord is heard only in immaculate silences.
A few hours hence the place will come alive, breaking the silence and people will dip into their careworn lives. All self-introspection we are capable of is swallowed up in the bustle of life and we become ordinary folk lost in our daily pursuits, unconcerned with the finer questions of life. Already I can hear the cacophony of children’s voices, motorbikes revving up with a vengeance for the onslaught of the day and cars hooting for their right of passage. Silence dissolves in sound.