The Silence of Music

The best thing about a busy day at college is that I get to bike my way around Mulund in the dead of the night. Today, I was cycling from about 12:20am to 1:10am and it's been the most fun  have had so far cycling in Mulund for several reasons.

For one, I did not stop my pedalling even once for any reason. I think I managed to spot just 4 cars in total for that 50 minute period. That in the city of Mumbai is priceless road time I'll tell you. But something even more priceless is the Sound of Silence, no I am not referring to the Simon and Garfunkel number but to the very real silence that was on the streets. I have this habit of plugging earphones into my ear holes to plug out the maddening sounds of the city and replace them with music from my iPod. Although I am not for causing voluntary deafness, I would rather do that than walk through sounds that occupy the city. But tonight was different, I had the music on a comfortable volume level and the best Love Ballad Rock band to walk on this earth playing: Michael Learns To Rock (MLTR).

Music has this intoxicating and mesmerising effect on many people. Personally, it transports me back to my school days when I actually heard them and those were some really good times!  Not a care in the world, lost in our own world, whose periphery barely made it beyond Mulund! Schooling on weekdays and Sunday Schooling on Sundays. Thursday Holidays and playing Cricket on the Football grounds. Fighting with the girls at St Mary's but secretly liking them. That was the life we all had that we all left behind.

And left it behind because an oyster needs to jump out of its shell to be in the Queen's necklace. 12 years later some have outshone themselves while some of us are still trying to make it there. But I guess all of us will remember that time of our lives when we could be ourselves and 'growing up' meant new clothes every 6 months 'cause the old ones wouldn't fit anymore!

Bark! Bark! Bark! I am broken out of my thought cycle by a bunch of dogs barking at the 4th vehicle I saw on the road tonight. And I realised how easy it is to be lost in silence. Through all that music I remembered the songs we sang, the steps we danced, the mischief we committed, the fun we had, the teasing with girls' names, the crushes on girls, the letters we wrote, the carvings on desks, the Pepsi-Cola stick and the Vada-Pav in the school canteen, the Annual days and the Zero Period practice, the Sports days and the March Past rehearsals, the Parent Teacher Meets and the Art & Craft Exhibitions, the hush-hush talks and the sex education, the debates and the elocution, the school hours and the after-school tuition, walking through shortcuts to reach home and the cycling through these very lanes. These lanes they have time stamps of my childhood all over them just as they do for so many of you from Mulund and elsewhere.

It is an intoxicating and mesmerising feeling to go down memory lane. But I guess once in a while it would do us good to revisit those roads in the silence of the day and realise in the silence of our hearts the place where we came from and where we were formed into the people we are today. And if you need a bike to do that, mine is always available for you!