Silence… thought Amba was amazing and versatile, like the wonderful silence just before dawn, or the quiet and calm just as the storm ends. There was the silence when we haven’t the answer to a question we have been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or most beautiful of all the moments after the door closes and we’re alone in the whole house…each one different, and all very beautiful if one took the trouble of listening to them.
She was all of 13yrs, when Transcendental meditation had become famous, and she was initiated into it. It began with closing her eyes for a minute and experiencing the sound around her, there were so many of them the hush tones of the gossiping hospital nurses, phone ringing of course it was as rampant as it was now.
Later when resumed practising TM, she realized that the voices in head were louder and more deafening than the sounds on the road, or pounding keyboard. She had felt the need to be alone, a need to ponder her shame and her despair in seclusion, she needed the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversations, face to face with herself, with only the music of her heart for company, and she thought she was most powerful then.
Silence was never expected from her, they expect words, motions, defence, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words handing leaping from the mouths but silence…No!
Words could be twisted into any shape, promises could be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul, in the final analysis worlds mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures when ninety nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast.
But was the silent man really the wisest man? He could just passive aggressive.
In that state that she was now Amba knew she was going to die, sooner or later, whether she had spoken or not. She realized her silences had not always protected her, actually no one’s silence had protected them…what are the words we do not have yet? What are the tyrannies we swallow day by day and attempt to make our own until we sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.
Amba began to ask each time that:” what’s the worst could happen to me if I tell this truth?” it could get her called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner party…fine, but it would also permit others to speak things may change.
Each time she asked herself, what the worse that will happen is and pushed her herself a little further than she dared. Once she start to speak, people did yell at her, they interrupted her, put her down and suggested that it was personal but the world did not come to an end.
Speaking she realized not talking or conversing mundanely mind you, she found got easier and easier, somewhere she had fallen in love with her own vision, and conviction and she had not even realized it, she did lose some friends, a husband and she realized she did not miss them. there were new people in space who cherished her. With all certainty she knew the only thing that was more frightening than speaking her truth, was not speaking it. Staying silent is like a slow growing cancer to the soul and the trait of a true coward. There is nothing intelligent about not standing for you. You may or may not win every battle. However everyone at least know what you stood for, YOU… when the truth is replaced by silence then silence is a lie.
This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.
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