Sounds Of My Childhood
Today, I am thinking of the power of sounds and the significance they hold for us, especially in memories.
The buzzing sound of lost signal on the TV was a constant one in my childhood. Growing up in the early 90s in small town India, televisions were just becoming common across homes. There was just one channel — Doordarshan, a Government owned channel. Slowly, another channel came in and then Star TV, Zee TV and then the entire cable. But in the early years, there was only Doordarshan and the entire nation would watch the same shows. Entire neighbourhoods would gather sometimes in one person’s home(whoever had a TV or whoever had power backup when electricity was lost) to watch some beloved Sunday morning shows — some of them were mythological shows and some were musical. Then there were the cricket matches that everyone was crazy about for as long as I can remember. My father bought a battery for the TV so we could watch the cricket world cup even if we lost electricity. Then our home became the gathering place for all the neighbours. The sounds of laughter, of people speaking loudly over each other are all familiar sounds of my childhood. And of course, the sound of the pressure cooker, which I have carried into my own household now.
The sound of the azaan in the evenings and early mornings has been another constant in my life in India. The haunting voice of the mullah invoking allah always transported me to a quiet, deep place of longing for something unknown, even as a little girl. This sound was the most prominent in the evenings at my paternal grandparents’ house. Whenever I hear this sound, I remember being on my grandparents’ roof, coconut trees and trying to look through them and all the similar sized houses to find the mosque where the sound was coming from. I never found it, and so I would just focus on listening and let myself soak in the voice. When I would come down from the roof, I would find my grandmother lighting the evening diya(lamp) and singing a folk song about Yashoda anxiously awaiting Krishna’s return from his wanderings through the day(Sakhi he, saanjh bhayee nahin aaye murari), then lighting kerosene lamp(because we would often not have electricity at this time). I often think about these simple rituals of welcoming transitions- from night to day, day to night, summer to monsoon to winter to spring, and find so much wisdom in them. Whenever I can, I try to do that too, even though my ideas of God and religion are much more amorphous.
