The silence

Have you ever experienced the total lack of sound, not a hiss, nor a bang, neither a hum nor a distant clanking, nothing at all, complete and absolute silence? It happened to me one day, on a day that meant everything to me.

Later on, when I asked the doctor, he told me it must have been because I had been concentrating too hard. “Like Arjun and the fish,” he said, if you get my meaning. This was the first time anything like this had happened and he reassured me that I wasn’t developing any sort of malignancy in my ear.

My ears are quite large, at least one of them is, a deformity I had inherited from my father. He had gone deaf quite early, but everyone told me it was because an artillery shell fell near him in the 1965 war with Pakistan. Deafness was not an inheritable problem, they all said. So the last thing I had thought would happen to me was this complete soundlessness. It had left me nonplussed for about 10 seconds, the most crucial 10 seconds of my life, the do-or-die moment that defines your life.

I had been up in the air in open cockpits when I was learning to fly. Before we were allowed to go up in powered aircraft we had to learn on gliders, and that silence was sublime. Just the hiss of the air as you flew through it at 60 miles an hour, maybe the occasional sound of a horn from below, but that’s all.

But this was something else altogether. I could see everything around me. I could feel everything, too, the tension, the expectation, the fear, the latent energy all around me.

But the sounds, the persistent irritating noises, the maddeningly high decibels, the screams, all had vanished. One moment they were all there, and the next, gone. I may as well have been born without eardrums, I thought.

So there I was, rooted to the spot, taking everything in but unable to comprehend what was wrong with me. I saw the others waiting, looking at me with questioning looks on their faces.

By now it should have all been over. Instead, I was staring straight ahead, thinking through things, wondering how I was going to do it without any sounds to guide me. I wondered if I should go to left or right; a further out or closer; full-on or sideways. I just could not decide. Finally, when the moment could not be postponed any further I started down.

I missed the regular sounds of my feet on the turf. Usually it used to be thump-thump-thump-thum-thum-thum-th-th-th... But not today. In fact, I couldn’t even see very much, just a blob in front. I felt the hardness in my palm, and rolled it a bit till it was nestling firmly in my grip. My heart was pounding by now, mouth dry and eyes wide open with the dryness that comes from running into the wind. This was the first time I had done it in such total silence.

Four seconds later I had bowled the all-important ball, the last ball of the World Cup final match, the one on which the fate of the whole two years’ effort of my team and the hopes of a billion people depended. The moment it left my hand, I knew I had bowled a bummer, short, wide and too full. I just hadn’t been able to get my mind off the silence.

All that the batsman had to do was bang it and, a quarter of a second later, that is what he did. It was a wonderful shot, straight down the ground, coming at 90 miles per hour at me about three feet off the ground. I lunged at it, as if avoiding a bullet from the back, trying to stop it with my left hand, but it caught my wrist and flew off in a high loop to long off. I could see the fielder coming at it from the boundary, at a speed I didn’t know he had, panic on his face and hands outstretched as if in prayer.

Then, suddenly, my hearing came back. I have never heard any sound like it, the sound of a silence of a different kind, just the breathing of the silent 90,000-strong crowd, only the thudding feet of the two batsmen and the fielder in the distance, that’s all, nothing else. It was so quiet that I could even hear the umpire breathing hard as he waited to see what was going to happen.

I have relived that moment a million times in my head. But I have stopped watching the videos of those last 60 seconds after my three-year-old son one day asked me why I always cried when I played that video.

TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan’s debut novel, An Imperfect Calling, is forthcoming from Speaking Tiger mid-2018

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