A Desi Girl in Videsh (Living in America) - III

Solitude! I come from India - a land which is home to 1.2 Billion people. I lived in a city - a place where roadside aesthetics are the families who live there with their swollen-belly children and bare-ribs dogs. I had a small home – an apartment where even the closed doors couldn’t block out the various types of sounds that rose from the passing traffic. Why, I even became uncommonly skilled to identify the vehicle just by listening to its honk. I lived by myself but was never alone for a single second. Now I have come to a country which is three times as large as India but has a population of only 300 million. Now I live in a city where red and white tulips adorn the sidewalk. The only sound that enters even through the open windows is quacking of ducks that live in the lake behind.
When I moved to the US, I brought my third world disposition along with me. The first world notion was very new and I was bombarded with one cultural shock after another. The most shocking part of it probably was the complete absence of noise. The chaotic cacophony of various sounds on which my daily survival dwelt on was now gone. Instead it was replaced by such an absolute silence that I had, quite a few times in the beginning, taken a sudden conscious look around me, just to ensure that everything was indeed fine and in place. In India I could not dream of getting a step in an escalator in a mall to myself entirely; here sometimes I am uncomfortably aware of standing alone on an entire escalator in the train station. Inside the train people speak but with a surprising ability to keep the silence untouched. On the streets of Chicago downtown cabs sometimes honk half-heartedly at a careless pedestrian but not with Indian drivers’ alarming urgency and respectfully stop and wait for him to clear the road.    It’s only now that I have slowly started being accustomed with the silence. Its only now that I have started appreciating the greenery of my neighbourhood, the meticulousness of the jogger’s park, the picturesque sidewalk by the clean green Chicago River in the Michigan Ave (Amazingly, I don’t see any maintenance crew ever, yet, everything continues to be immaculately kept).    I sometimes take a long solitary walk in the jogger’s park. Sometimes I just sit by the river watching the rowers rowing their narrow canoes. It seems perfectly ok to be sitting or walking alone without any company in total silence. It feels almost meditative. And I feel alone well. I feel luxuriously immersed in doings of my own choice. I feel aware so fully of my own presence rather than of the absence of others.    And thus after long last, the desi girl in me found the way to solitude! It’s through the silence of videsh.
Love,

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