Surround sound

I’ve always had up-and-down relationships with the ten commandments Moses downloaded, but the one I’m currently finding most difficult to follow is ‘Love Thy Neighbour’. I live in a short apartment building that is dwarfed on all four sides by much taller ones. In the surrounding multi-storeys there are many neighbours, most of whom I can’t even see. But I can hear them and that kills the love. It starts daily at about 5.30 am, even in winter. People driving to their morning walk start their cars and start honking for their companions several floors above to hurry up; clearly groggy from not having woken up properly, they don’t give a d**n about other people’s morning peace. After a while, somebody or the other cleaning the cars in another adjoining building invariably sets off a car alarm or two. Then the darwans in the building to the west get into their daily shouting match. Around 7 am, just as all this starts to fade out, the main aural assault begins, shredding those last precious filaments of my waking sleep.

This culprit is either on the third or the fifth floor, not 20 feet to the east of my living room. This criminal has a loud sound system. This perpetrator thinks he’s a bhakta of Ma Amba. This sleep-murderer feels an overwhelming need to advertise his undying devotion to each and everyone living in the quadrant between Lee Road and Ballygunge Circular Road, and between Elgin Road and Lower Circular. This hooligan used to begin blasting the worst, plastic-disco Ma ke Bhajan around 6.50 am, the bass on full. Within 10 minutes his fervour (I’m pretty sure it’s a ‘he’) reached critical mass and he would begin full-throatedly to karaoke with the CD.

I countered this by leaning out of my window and calling out (to blankly open windows above and below the unoccupied fourth floor flat), quite politely, asking that he turn down the volume. There was no effect. After a few days, I leaned out and shouted. I’m not sure the bhakta heard but the neighbours from the second to the sixth floor certainly did. There was silence for a few days while the man probably consulted lawyers. After about a week, the disco-bhajans began at 8 am sharp and the sing-along at around ten past, 0800 perhaps being the threshold at which all devotional or marble-polishing mayhem can legally be let loose.

Call me both old and old-fashioned, but I remember my parents playing their morning radio at a carefully low volume, even when there was only an empty green patch next to our old flat in 1960s Lake Gardens. Call me decadent and selfish, but I like my mornings quiet till the Calcutta traffic noise overwhelms all sanity around 9 am. I leaned out of my window again and called. I leaned out again and shouted, this time at two sets of closed windows, through one of which the noise was pounding. There was no response. My blood was boiling, my day lay in shards, it was not even half-past eight in the morning.

**************

On the way to catch an early morning flight recently, I waited for the taxi driver to start his day’s work on the horn. Amazingly, he drove silently till we’d passed Sonardown Hotel and I was beginning to put together an sms text announcing a miracle: a taxi ride without a single blast of the horn. Foolish of me. At one of the pillars being constructed for the new flyover, the ones that look like modern Indian art that should sell for millions in a New York gallery, a large yellow earth-mover cut into our path. The four cars held up by this manoeuvre all began to hit their horns, including my driver.

“Bhai, why are you honking? He’s just doing what he has to do.”

“Nahi, horn bajaaney sey woh thoda side mey ho jaayga na…. Maybe he’ll move to one side because of the horns.”

I suggested that if the driver of the earth-mover acceded to every horn he’d never get any work done, that the earth-mover reacting to the horns was as likely as a sensible proposal making it through the Writers’ Buildings. The driver nodded in agreement, but the flood-gates had opened: all the way to the airport, the man honked at every dawn crow that flew across his windshield.

*************

For a town that doesn’t produce much we sure do make a h**l of a lot of noise. If blind aliens were circling around the earth trying to sense productive activity through microphones attached outside their spaceship, they would surely hover over Calcutta for a long time. Ultimately, they would get it — “Naah, the earthlings in this sector are just a frustrated bunch, scratching their biologically private sections through ancient mechanical means” — and move on.

Recently, a national newsmagazine conducted a Happiness Survey. As all such biopsies of mass psyche invariably are, this sampling, too, was deeply flawed, but it threw up some interesting conjectural exercises. What if we were to do a Sound Survey, specifically trying to connect levels of sound pollution to levels of happiness or rocking sex lives in various Indian cities? Statistics do exist, for instance, comparing the decibel levels of various Calcutta areas on a normal day against the spike on Kali Puja/Diwali (and yes, no surprises, my locality, Minto Park, is the epicentre of the loudness) but we haven’t, as far as I know, done a comparative study of noise in different cities and the harmful effects on the health of the respective citizenries. I’m willing to bet my keyboard that Calkota would win this Deafness Derby hands down.

Compared to the dangers of living in a ticking fire-trap, I suppose the oppressions and damage from relentless cacophony are minor, but we still need to think about this, just as a heart patient might also need to watch out for diabetes or cancer. Since fantasy plays such a major part in all our lives, perhaps we should give ourselves the Christmas present of imagining the joys of a sound-civilized Calcutta by this time next year. Having imagined it vividly, perhaps we can then begin to make the fantasy come true.

************

In the meantime, the bhakta continued to batter at my dreams and imagination. Every single morning until about two weeks ago.

“Maa!...Aaaja Maaa!” he wailed along with the dhak-dhak beat of the motherless bass, but clearly the Devi was having nothing to do with this racket and keeping far away from our whole cluster of buildings. However, one evening a spirit whispered to me, (it could have been Ma Amba herself, I don’t know), and I was reminded that I, too, possessed a set of small but quite powerful computer speakers. By 7.55 the next morning I was ready with the speakers pointed outwards from the windows facing the bhakta’s flat.

Not wanting to go nuclear at first, I kept the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton quite low on the playlist I’d quickly put together. In any dispute one wants to avoid hurting small innocent children and birds, so I also held back strictly as reinforcements the Jimi Hendrix solos and the Iggy Pop tracks from Raw Power. I did nothing as the disco-bhajan began. I waited till the man’s voice joined in and then pressed the play icon. Blue Camel by Rabih Abou-Khalil is a beautifully smooth track from the eponymous album but the horn of Kenny Wheeler and, especially, Charlie Mariano’s alto-sax solos can, literally, cut through glass, not to mention the stale grease of any ersatz-bass. The mix of brass, percussion and the oud brought some pause to the bhajans and then a lowering of the volume from the other side till all I could hear was the low thump of the bhakta’s woofer. However, I hardened my heart, stayed relentless, and escalated with my next track. Those readers who’ve had the pleasure of hearing the great dhrupad exponent, Pandit Vidur Mallick, will not need any description. Panditji’s recording of Bhairavi is a classic and it engulfs you from the first sandpaper-honey growl. “Dayani! Bhavaani! Mahishasur mara-da-ni….” In his listing of the mother goddess’s names, by the time Pandit Mallick arrives at “JWALAmukhi Chandi!” you are in the mouth of the volcano itself, basking (or, if this is not to your taste, roasting) in the searing heat of the sur. The alap track runs for a good 30 minutes and I let it play at full volume till the traffic outside became too loud. It was strong medicine for sure, but I haven’t heard a sound from the bhakta’s windows since then.