To,
the Interpreter of Silences
Why does a person go silent?
Is it his sheer unwillingness to speak or is he sad deep inside?
Has he always been like this or is it a recent phenomenon that occurred to him?
Is he in deep thoughts or is it a limbo that has taken over him for long and is showing no signs of relief for some time to come. Has he got a different take on how he has to spend the rest of his life? Mostly quiet with intermittent spans of talking and interacting. Talking precise, talking direct, talking for short spans only, and talking only when it is quite-essentially important and relevant. People around him say he is allergic to pseudo and crap.
Are we thinking too much? The above assumptions are hardly going to give us a lead whatsoever in deriving a reasonable psychological makeup that may exhaustively tells us that why he has gone quiet.
Are we neglecting the fact that he may simply be an introvert, who doesn’t really like intermingling with people, putting crazy pictures on the website just to prove that he is cool or put up fancy updates in a bid to grace his friends to his hidden and obscured intellectual self?
But then how can the seductive Punjabi beats escape the most introverts of all beings. How can an introvert not laugh or even smile to the raunchiest of the jokes that Kapil Sharma cracks on his show. How can the acid humor not affect him?
Who knows he might have been the just another normal being sometime back.
Dear interpreter, I had an interface with one such person not very long time back and I can tell you that nobody is born silent and everyone carries an ocean of thoughts with them. Some prefer to talk it out, some refrain from talking.
May be, that he has attended a lot many funerals for a person his age.
May be he never got a chance to say goodbye to some of his nearest childhood buddies which he was pretty sure, are not coming for some time to come.
May be, he never had a summer of 69.
May be, he matured way too quickly than most people do. May be a sting still bothers him and he doesn’t want to do away with it either for some time to come.
May be, he has fallen in love with the serenity of the very silence he once hated and has allowed it to take a safe haven inside him. He lives and breathes in the aura and allows it to take over every bit of his existence. Nobody knows for sure, but I believe that sometimes empires are carved in silence; territories get divided and distributed to their respective owners; regimes come and go; realms get established and sometimes fade away into oblivion; All in silence.
As one my favorite TV Shows Game of Thrones puts it- “Chaos is a ladder. Most of them, who dare to climb, fall and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. Some are given the chance, but they refuse to climb and cling to the realm of silence for they have either fallen with the nothingness of their thoughts or the excess of it, to love, gods or illusions. The chaos is not real, only the ladder is.”
I guess, the silent one, hasn’t seen the episodes. He believes that right before the dawn of chaos and long after its dusk from the very horizons of existence, silence is all there is. It follows you like shadows do and keeps by your side like a true companion. It’s (silence’s) territory is infinite. It was, it is and will always be.
As a child he was the jolliest of all, the absolute performer in the cricket team. He was bright till late teenage and that is when things started to take a turn. The city was abandoned by his favorite few. In school his language teachers were always impressed by him. He interpreted historic texts with great interest. They never knew, one day he would grow up to contributing his bit, in interpreting deep silences with finesse so perfect, which some would awe and some would snub as madness.
His history teacher knew, he was great with dates, war tactics, military formations, societies and civilizations, battles for land, glory, wealth, religion, succession and sometimes immortality. Religious symbology always tempted him. Dan Brown came much later and Amish Tripathi was a long way from personifying Shiva.
What made him go silent? Those close to him cannot recollect, since when he exactly went silent. Was it a single thing or was it a series of events, which if might not have happened in the exact same order, silence would have a different address. Nobody knows since when he started pushing his limits. Everybody knows he didn’t quiet succeed. The pretence of being tough for an unaccounted period of time, took its toll. May be he carries a lot of burden with himself. A luggage full of things that went wrong, dreams that could never find a way to possibility, frolic that was always mocked off, friendships that were in name only, relations that never showed up whenever he tried socializing and rumors that never spread for good. Or maybe, he never considered himself old enough to hurl abuses to people and to the universe.
May be, nobody ever read Tarun Tejpal to him where he wrote- “In a short period of time, I’ve understood that at every step of his life a man buries and leaves behind loss , sorrow, deprivation, failure and misery so deep that it can make a hole to the very centre of this earth and beyond . The man who does not master the routines of this burial becomes so weighted as to be incapable of moving a single step.
He perishes where he stands!! ”
May be a fatherly figure in his colony near his residence, checked out early at an age that Arundhati Roy best describes as being neither too young, nor too old but a viable, die-able age.
May be, he is quiet now, but is slowly training himself to go enormously strong from inside. May be, things are about to take a turn in a manner that he no longer is afraid of abusing anyone, anytime for any long, if provoked. He has tamed his hormones under control and isn’t embarrassed of handshakes. He will very soon feel no fear in letting a train pass from his front without even a blink.
He is determined and I am factually strong on that. Believe me dear interpreter as I’ve been one myself.
In silence, he finds his oxygen. In self talking, he finds the answers. In observations, he adds value to his wisdom. In slogans, he vents his anger. In his unconstructed, unorganized taps on the table and in the unwoven lyrics, he is trying to define his music for life; a rhythm that will keep him going for a long time to come. Believe me, he soon will speak.
Every expression sends a message.
This silence here would be a GOOD BYE!!
Yours faithfully,
A just another Silent
From the Country of Deep Silences.
Divyanshu Ojha
MBA-IT, IIIT Allahabad