The Art of Noise

If there was one thing that I have to say about India, it is that is a purely visceral, non-stop, undefatigable assault upon the senses, all “six” of them. In addition to the five senses that are under constant siege, your sixth sense develops dramatically, for if not, you will never even be able to cross the street, but you will instead be left standing on the street corner, mouth agape, eyes cross-eyed, ears ringing, taste buds wondering, nostrils expectantly wrenched up, and in a sense, you will be paralyzed if you do not cultivate a sixth sense of diving into the melee and going forth uninhibited.

However, there is Time for all of that.

Today, I was focusing upon the sounds that are omnipresent and as varied as one can imagine. Currently, sitting up in my “quiet” room in Madurai, I will just jot down the next sounds that I hear in the following couple of minutes:

Crows cawing

Children calling out below in the street

A persistent jingling noise from a vendor’s cart

Simple, friendly beeps from motorists

The call to prayer at the local mosque, today is EID, a very important Muslim holiday

The ceiling fan

Loud, annoying scooter horns

Laughter

A bird whose song is the most unique I have ever heard, but have not spotted it yet. It sings every morning at dawn as well, but proves to be elusive.

Fireworks (for EID I am assuming)

Long, frustrated-laden blast of a horn

Large truck horn that is more like a mix between a cow and a foghorn

Dogs barking back and forth

Whistling

Vespa and Tak-Tak engines           

Two loud backfires from a truck

Sound of a mallet and chisel on stone

Funky Tamil music from someone’s loudspeaker. They are scattered around the streets.

This is on a quiet backstreet in Madurai.

On a busy street, however, at first, it is nearly impossible to penetrate the wall of noise that encapsulates you, but slowly, if you listen, you begin to discriminate the sounds, realizing that it is one, huge paradoxical cacophonic symphony of noise and, it is a symphony.

The first two days, I had quite a pounding headache by the end of the day. Probably enhanced by being still jet-lagged from making the jump from America to Antwerp, Belgium, to Mumbai within a few days time, but also from the unrelenting wave of noise that had engulfed me and inundated my aural capacity to being full and truly unable to listen to the din of the streets any longer.

Because of this noise, I found it beyond absurd that on any major, busy street in Madurai, you will find yellow public phones on a wooden stand, outside. Not that anyone seems to use them anymore, but it seemed like an exercise in futility. However, having been here for a bit now, I see that your hearing takes on a new level and you are able discern many sounds amongst the multitudes. I am now able to understand the vendors when they tell me how much something is, whereas the first couple of days, all that I could hear was the noise, noise, noise. The Grinch would have had a heart attack here.

I thought that all Indians were just deaf after a bit, but they are much more adept at filtering that I can ever imagine. No noise seems to phase them, which is what initially lead me to think it was endemic hearing loss, but then I see them having conversations with three of four people at once, and there appears to be no loss of communication as everyone leaves the situation more or less satisfied as far as I can tell. But, this is again, amongst the breakers of enormous sonic tsunamis all around. When I learn a bit more Tamil, I am hoping that I will be able to break yet another sound barrier and to actually be able to distinguish real words in the interminable flow of Tamil buzzing through my ears.

I remember having a conversation with one of my Indian students in Antwerp a couple of years ago and we were talking about living in Belgium. The topic of traffic had come up as Antwerp can become quite congested and Belgium has had up to 900km of traffic jams (file) on its roads. Considering the entire country is only about 300km across, that should give one pause. However, those traffic jams are one car behind each other, not seven or eight vehicles, cows, Tak-taks, bikes, buses, trucks, and scooters abreast in a two-lane road as you will see here. I remember Harsh just shaking his head and laughing at me when I mentioned how much Belgians use their horns. Now, I fully know why he was laughing politely at my ignorance about the usage of horns.

I imagine that to pass a driver’s test in India, there is an entire section on the proper application of your horn, though I have no idea what that might be. And, yet, it still seems like an art that everyone understands. There are various levels of honking, and what I call the Flemish Blast that I had complained to Harsh about is actually the least used. The Flemish Blast is perfected with a scowl on the face and a blue streak of curse words that makes the vitriolic father from A Christmas Story look benign. Moreover, to properly apply the Flemish Blast, you must put your entire body weight into pressing the horn, your blood pressure must shoot through the roof, you have to be more important than anyone else on the road, drive a bigger car with a fatter engine, believe in your own supremacy over all other people, and the person in front of you must have done something really, really, really awful, like perhaps having the light be green for more than a fraction of a second before taking off at warp speed for 50 meters to reach the next stop light, where everyone will fume, curse, and be poised for another application of the Flemish Blast, which is also usually followed by driving at warp speed x 2 around the person, yelling at them and telling them what idiots they are, then both stopping in 50 meters for the next red light, truly feeling absolutely no better and will need to talk about the event to everyone you meet for the next two hours. So much for the Flemish Blast.

I have maybe seen that three times here in India, that being in Mumbai. There is a “light” version of the Flemish Blast here that is rather common, however, and that is used almost exclusively by very annoying (as far as their attitudes seem to be reflected in driving, that is) people who drive large SUV-type vehicles (usually “auspiciously” white) with various official-looking (“looking” is the operative word, they are not) flags and large variations of a silver or golden danda, or rod mounted phallically on the front grille. They would do well on Flemish roads.

For the most part, however, honking the horn here is nearly a reflex, and is actually usually a friendly “beep” to let the person know you are there. Usually it means, "Don't move! I see you, you don't see me and I will go around you." In fact, all trucks and various other transports have a sign painted on them on the back saying, “(please) sound horn” or some variation thereof. The action itself is nearly pointless at some point because the result is everyone is beeping and in truth, no one really pays attention to it. Or, at least it doesn’t seem like it. What is truly remarkable is that with all of this congestion, weaving in and out, massive violations of any perceivable traffic rules (I don’t think they really exist here), I have not seen one collision, or even a scratch. Near misses every second, but, as I say above, the sixth sense has kicked in and is phenomenal to watch. Tak-Taks careening wildly around with up to 12 school kids with their backpacks on top, or six or seven full-grown women in flowing saris is not uncommon to see dodging in and out of motorcycles with entire families of five (that is not an exaggeration), white Brahma bulls with painted horns and bells on the tips pulling carts, wandering cows, buses, and foot merchants pulling oxcarts of bananas, coconuts or large silver canteens, with everyone beeping their horn continuously, while no one bats an eye. (Unless I walk down the street, that is.)

Then, add to that the interesting jingle-jangle horns that the vendors' bicycles have, which is a curious device in which a clarion bell with lots of quoits on it is suspended underneath the main lateral cross bar of the bikes frame and activated by a rope strung taught under the handle bars, making for a very curious sound. In addition, carts pulled by humans and/or animals will be strung with jingle bells that jangle in rhythm to the plodding along of the cart. Tak-Taks, motorcycles and scooters have a range of beeps, going from the tradition metallic “meep-meep” of normal scooters reminiscent of the Road Runner cartoon to fancy tunes more like the Dukes of Hazard’s “Dixie” horn to old-fashioned ooga-ooga horns that they perilously squeeze constantly with one hand while careening through traffic with the other. The bus horns are the most curious of all because they really sound like a cow that has swallowed a foghorn, and is coughing up a giant fur ball.

I don’t want to say that I no longer notice the noise, because I do, but now, picking apart the individual sounds is really like going to a symphony and watching the musicians during a frantic finale of Mozart and seeing that little, mousy woman in the very back of the orchestra, with every so much care and enthusiasm, ting the Triangle spot on with pure eclat, for without it, the symphony would be incomplete and no longer a work of art. It would just be noise.