All photographs copyright Maya Wallach, AliaTerra
In America I was an incredibly light sleeper. My dog's tail wagging in his sleep in the other room with a closed door between us would wake me up. I put my refridgerator on a timer so I could fall asleep without hearing it hum. I ran out in the rain to pile leaves at the bottom of the downspouts so I wouldn't hear the Chinese Water Torture of drips magically echoing inside my house. My doctor told me I should try to sleep more soundly -- the way a child does who you can carry in from the car without waking -- but how does one TRY to sleep more soundly?
Answer: move to India. My first trip to India I usually woke near dawn, often to the cries of the muzzin, which was appropriately exotic, and above all temporary. I was not staying in India.
Then I met Sher and the real test came. Could I sleep through his snoring, which rivalled great earth-moving machinery and jet airplanes? Astonishingly, the answer was yes. Happily, the snoring turned out to be short-lived, just the result of a cold. But there were other noises waiting to take its place, especially after dawn, which wouldn't be a problem, except that Sher & I tend to go to bed around 2 in the morning.
The first challenge is the birds. They start while it is still dark, uttering wonderful tropical calls. A loud but pleasant lullaby. Then there are the dogs, strays everywhere, who sound incredibly fierce when one pack is picking a fight with another, but when you peek out the window you see are just a bunch of skinny scrawny dogs. Because no one owns them, no one yells at them to shut up when they bark (not that owners always do that anyway), let alone howl and whine. A loud cow moo shuts them up wonderfully though.
In our hotel when we first arrived in Bangalore we had a well right outside our window. Every morning men would come and wash. The sound of the water splashing was lovely. The sound of them coughing and clearing their nose and throat was decidedly less so. When we first moved into our house we had to spend a few days in the small apartment above the garage, where again, I awoke to the sound of pouring water. But this was our servants -- women -- and they didn't hack or cough.
India has something like one third the land mass of the United States and four times the people, and this is patently evident by the street traffic even in our quiet elite neighborhood. As soon as it is light, I hear people on the streets, walking, talking, calling out, laughing, going about their day with no thought for late sleepers. Well, how many people here sleep late? Not the servants: they are up at dawn, sweeping the pavement with handleless grass brooms, cleaning pots and pans, pounding laundry. Not the laborers: they sleep in the unfinished basements of the buildings they are building, and begin work in the cool of the morning. Pregnant women dump bowls of dirt on a large screen, sifting out pebbles, making mortar. Ten year old boys toss bricks to each other up five flights of twine-tied rigging. Two year olds toddle around open wells and cry incessantly.
And then there are the street vendors, peddling up and down each street calling out their entirely indecipherable wares. I figured it was normal that I didn't understand what they were saying: my Hindi learning has been rather slow and most people's default language here is Kannard or Kannada or somesuch. So imagine my surprise when I discovered they were calling out in English. Kindof. "Popard!" turns out to be "Paper!" for the man collecting newspapers. "Apayai!" turned out to be "Papaya!" I haven't figured out what "Meat Pie!" is, but certainly not meat pies. The ice cream man just jingles a tinny tuneless bell. One day a rickshaw with a megaphone system came by, exhorting something in some language. Then it stopped and switched to English. It was going on about some hunger strike, please come and support, 8am, please come, 8am, please come, 8am. It was not a recording, but the poor man was clearly stuck: he repeated the same few phrases over and over, and entirely forgot to tell us WHERE to come. The men and women who set up their carts on the roadside and iron everyone's clothing with a big iron iron with a fire glowing inside have set corners where they show up for scheduled hours and so do not need to yell. The men driving ox carts yell "Gah! Gah!" every few seconds, but they're only talking to their patient animal. Of all these noises, the hardest one to sleep through is the wailing child.
But then there are the non-creature noises. Motor scooters beep and rush by. Motorcyles rev their mufflerless engines, and roar into the distance. You know how most commercial trucks in America have been for some years now outfitted with an annoying beep-beep-beep whenever they are in reverse? Well a great number of private cars in India have a version of this, but instead of a beep-beep-beep, it plays some mechanized version of a classical music piece, at volumes loud enough to be heard blocks away. They do this in reverse AND in neutral. Trucks full of bags of cement with cement-colored workers sitting atop vroom by in first gear, blocking out all other noise.
Cement trucks, morter making, brick-tossing, Bangalore is worse than Seattle for building on every street corner. We have a five story apartment going in across the street in our quiet residential neighborhood, and another has begun kitty corner. Mostly the building noises aren't so bad: they only rarely use machines. Instead you get intermittent hammering and banging and the yells of the workers. But once in a while they need heavy equipment, and it must cost so much to rent that they try to run it around the clock. For almost 18 excruciating hours a big well-boring truck across the street thrummed the air so loudly I thought I was inside the engines of a 747. I was just about to lose it when it suddenly shut down and drove away.
Somehow, Sher and I sleep through this cacophony. What is impossible to sleep through, despite our best efforts, is our doorbell. While not quite as loud as the air blasts of the truck horns, it is specifically calling us, and won't stop until one of us teeters to the door. You'd think, being new in town, we wouldn't have many visitors. Wrong! The doorbell at 6:30am for several days was the milkman wanting to give our landlords milk and forgetting that they had moved downstairs. The next one is the cook, needing to fill water jugs from the filter the landlords left upstairs. Then various members of the landlords' family come for various projects: fixing the plumbing, gathering more things to move downstairs. The painters come to finish the painting, or just look at it again. Another doorbell pusher gives up before we make it to the door. Our cleaning servant rings, wanting to come and clean. And our lunch cook comes an hour earlier than scheduled. I tell her to come back in an hour, but we never see her again.
Eventually it is 10:30 or 11 or 11:30 and I decide to try to see if anyone is still awake and online in the States or Sher gets his cup of chai and our sound albeit interrupted night of sleep is over.
We had a very interesting sound one afternoon. It sounded like elephants. In the middle of residential Bangalore? We couldn't believe it. But there it was again. We went to the balcony and looked. Nothing. Finally I figured it out. It was the Jungle screensaver on Sher's new computer. I'll bet the programmers never expected to fake anyone out with their sound track!
Nights here are as quiet as the days are loud. Except now the monsoon is about to come, so the frogs fill the air in the evening. Twice, we've had rain at night -- it usually prefers to fall in the late afternoon -- and the thunder of what sounds like an inch of rain falling in a few minutes is exhilerating. And then there is the wind. The most luscious sussurus through the trees, like fields of wheat billowing, an ocean breathing, a mother's hush. Lovely beyond words. Maya&Sher