It’s a running joke among my friends and it’s difficult to stop them laughing mercilessly about it, especially when life loads the dice in their favour. The thing is, there is this idea — not at all outlandish — that a writer needs quiet in order to write. Wherefore, in the West, we have the image of retreats deep into countryside; the cottage on the remote coastal cliff; the dacha away from the main mansion where the landowner/scribe can forge his or her deathless prose to the rhythm of the soft fall of snow; the shed at the end of the garden, the garden itself being in some far rural place; the perch on top of a very high building somewhere, where the sound falls away, its fingernails ripping as it tries to climb up; or, closer to home, the houseboat on the silent river, or the hut in a village without electricity, where the hurricane lantern provides light and hiss to accompany the buzz of night insects and the scratch of the immortal kalam on rough paper, and so on.
All this is fine, a bit exaggerated perhaps, perhaps a cliché riding on a cliché, like those photos you see of dolphins of diminishing size piggybacking on each other. What I do know is that writer friends of mine somehow manage to do the necessary jugaad, somehow find the necessary bubble of reduced noise in which their own voices can speak or sing onto the page or screen without interference. This is true of my friends but, sadly, not of me.
The noise begins at home
In Calcutta, where I do most of my writing, I live surrounded by ugly cliffs and canyons of concrete. I have a nice chair and desk, my laptop, Anglepoise lamp, headphones and air conditioner. However, none of this really stops the noise. I live right by one of the city’s big road crossings, a nodal point where the loudest traffic in the world is amplified by the presence of a flyover that traps and then blasts the horn and engine noise. If that is not enough, I am surrounded by the aural reports of constant construction, or rather, constant redecoration. The far wealthier people who live around me like their marble; they don’t like the marble chosen by the wealthy people who previously owned the four-bedroom flat they’ve just bought. Therefore, first there is the sound of the old marble being ripped out, and the perfectly good Rajasthani slabs being carried away, before the new Italian marble arrives and needs to be installed and polished. In the meantime, someone in the next building is getting their bathroom redone — again leading to a fortnight-long argument between marble and polishing machine. When there is a hot weather hiatus in all this, and I start to feel the silent throb of hope in my battered being, the martinet secretary of the building next door obtains money at gun point from all the flat-owners and begins his grand project of creating a stone driveway with inlay work just below my window.
The joke really starts to spiral when I go to Delhi. I arrive, secretly fantasising about a quiet barsaati (a contradiction in terms, I know), and find that the neighbours are breaking down their house which is pasted to my friend’s house. Escaping to Berlin, there is loud sewer work in progress near my friend’s normally quiet apartment. Added to this are the sounds of the nursery across the road from where emerges, every morning, a wash of human sound as tiny Occidentals ritually gouge out each others’ eyes. By the time I totter into London, my friends are falling about laughing as they lay bets about the next sound ambush that will sidewind me.
Praying to the god of labour
Sure enough my friends are not wrong. There is my host friend’s lovely overgrown garden; there is birdsong; the constant stream of airliners that fly overhead have their engines muted by law. There is nothing not to love in all this and I set up my writer’s shop. And then it starts. The very polite, very majestic older English lady next door decides she needs to add a toilet to her downstairs arrangements. Across the summer, every morning at 8 a.m. sharp, these senior workers come in and start doing their meticulous labour. In stages: they drill down into the sewers and put in a camera; the pipes are 150 years old and will need to be replaced; then they start to build the loo extension, drilling and sawing, while humming tunes from the credit sequences of obscure British TV series from the ’60s and ’70s. Just as they reach peak construction, on the other side of my friend’s house, the builder brother of the old Kenyan Gujju Kaka finally sends in his Punjabi boys to do extensions on Kaka’s attic and kitchen. The crisp autumn mornings are now leavened by cockney and northern burrs on one side and Southall Punjabi on the other — ‘ Oye, Baljiit-uh! Ki kar rya tu? Phad ley oye !’
My worldwide friends keep hurting themselves while laughing. I admire the beautiful craftsmanship that the older builders are putting into making the toilet, the speed at which the Sardar workers take apart Kaka’s roof and put in a new floor. I keep at the computer, praying to Vishwakarma and telling myself that I’m lucky to be a working karigar constantly surrounded by other craftsmen.
