Sounds

Sounds.

So was speaking with The Short One (notice how I said talking with instead of me talking you listening…I listen!!!!)

So yeah okay fine for a minute got lost because I had an overwhelming rememberance of London and its own sounds. The laptop was right next to me as it was every night I slept there, playing Virgin Radio, street sounds outside, I remember the candles on the sill flickering (it was just after Divali), the window frame shifting in the light.

I heard cars on the street, water from potholes going splish-splash and I remembered the house I lived in when I was twelve or thirteen. I remember the room so clearly, the bed which had a thin mattress and wooden planks, a throw-away from my dad’s ancestral home. I remember the rough feel of the bed side table made using scrap wood by carpenters who had finished work on my parents bedroom, painted a white by me under the watchful eye of my grandfather. I remember the ‘stick’em stones’ which had just come out, blurry colors seen through ‘weak’ eyes, trying to sleep.

I’m thirteen and I hear cars splashing through the water in October in Delhi, watching the headlights streak across the wall, never stopping until that one car when my parents got home. Watching it grow bigger, displacing shadows, the clanking of the gate as my mother opened it for my father to park the car, the dogs whining and barking impatiently, waiting for my Mother to come up stairs.

I hear the rather loud air conditioned in my parents room from when I was much younger and used to sleep in their room since we had a small house, the pug coming nonchalantly, heaving up on his back pawn to turn the vents down and plonking himself next to me, his wheezing. I heard my dad scrabbling for the stick, reaching out to turn the vents back up.

I go farther back. I’m in Jaipur, in cream colored shorts, waiting inside the gate at my grandparents home where I lived for two years, I hear the auto that used to take me to school, kids piled in the drivers voice bellowing ‘bhaiiya!’.

I hear the songs I heard when I was madly in love, when I was heartbroken and when I grit my teeth deciding that enough is enough. I hear songs that I listen to on rainy days, Miles Davis, Nerina Pallot, BJ Thomas, Bob Seger.

Live, A3, Fall Out Boy, Nickleback screaming in my ears and the only other sound I can hear in me catching my breath at the gym

I listen to the children in the playground later in the evening than warrants them being out there, smiling and remembering Saudi Arabia and growing up there.

I hear the TV in my room, some random person, another random opinion which dissolves into nothingness and silence as I fall back into my own head.

I turn out the lights and hear myself breathing, sometimes louder than it should be.

I hear the phone rind and an involuntary smile at the slightly grumpy, just-woken-up voice at the other end:
“Hi…”

And I forgot all the other sounds in my memory and slip into something else altogether, something new and something yet unheard and unremembered.