Sound of Silence

Now that my newbie phase has waned away, I often recollect all the aspects that demanded getting used to over the past few months. The very first thing that bothered me was the absolute silence around. Having grown up in a house overlooking the local railway station, constant noise has been an integral and inseparable part of my life. Somehow over the years I started associating the lack of sound with discomfort. And suddenly I was in a place where I could hear the whoosh of the Volkswagens with my windows shut!

In the first week post arrival, since my body was getting adapted to the coldest weather it has ever witnessed (combined with a different microbial environment), I was down with a sore throat and bad cough. So whenever I had to cough it felt like a percussion act gone awry and worse still when those coughs wanted to exit in the middle of the night, it  felt like I was waking up the entire apartment! Hunger pangs felt like audible conversations with my stomach. Not only that, once when I turned my head sideways on the pillow I was sure I heard the gushing of blood into my head!

And then there were times I could hear my neighbor's booming voice yelling at his kids, or the kids making a racket. An occasional bark of a dog, the refrigerator reminding me of its existence with a jolt-like sound, my mattress rustling; it seemed as if every faint noise was amplified beyond it's capacity; this wasn’t what I was accustomed to! It felt like permanently wearing noise cancelling headphones sans the music! The chimes of the clock tower was the only comforting sound for a long while. Then I began streaming songs on YouTube to keep me company, started switching on the kitchen exhaust even if I was only making tea so that its loud grumble would eliminate the quietness around.

But on an idle Saturday morning, when I was having breakfast I could hear some music. The walls did not assure clarity but I could still hear most of the notes from a piano being played beyond my kitchen walls. I started looking forward to the soothing sound of the keys every Saturday morning; sometimes it was Sundays. For a change I was thankful for the silence.

Soon with winter gone I was woken up almost every morning to the incessant chirping of sparrows from the trees across the street. Occasionally I would hear the disgruntled caw from a crow. Wasps and flies would buzz past; sometimes becoming uninvited guests, making me devise ingenious methods to drive them away. With the windows open I could even hear the distant sound of the trains as they whizzed past the underground tracks much further away from my apartment. I was ecstatic upon hearing this, it felt like a familiar melody following me beyond continents. So that’s how I began to slowly get used to and enjoy the silence.

As I write now, I can hear the keys rattling away on my laptop, the tick tock of my new wall clock, the exhaust still working in the bathroom, my neighbour yanking his door open and the kids excitedly chattering; announcing their arrival after their summer vacation. Well, I wonder if they hear my YouTube sing-along sessions or conversations over Skype and are complaining about their 'noisy' neighbour over blog posts!