Word Of The Sound

By Sudipta Das

At times, you fall in love with the sound of a word as soon as you hear it for the first time. When it comes to a word, the sound always gets an unfair head start. Then you get to know the meaning of the word you fell in love with and almost immediately, your vehement mind wages a war. It might mean something harsh or pedantic or ecstatic or anything else that your mind refuses to accept and also, you are painfully aware of the fact that you lose in this game in all possible scenarios and here, conformity should be your only sanctuary, yet your rebellious, uncompromising mind doesn’t like to give in, so now, you’re torn apart between your unreasonable conflict and surrendering in your own battlefield. But to your surprise, you discover that your mind does neither, rather in pursuit of reconciliation, it thinks about the very concept of it, the ‘sound of the word’.

That’s a bit odd, you think to yourself. Does the sound alone mean anything? You can only come up with some interjections and visibly dubious about them for reasons still unknown to you, but out of the blue, you’re reminded of cavemen and their sounds. They used to map their sound to the situation at hand and you want to wonder, “At the very beginning of existence, did they all make the same sound to make someone aware of a deadly animal around them! Or did they reach to the conclusion by trial and error?”. We try to achieve the same effect but to an unfathomably greater extent. With sounds, we get to practice the illusion of time, the allusion of concepts and numerous indispensible cries and whispers; even silence could be used as a word in so many ways your mind can’t possibly keep track.

Meanwhile your mind is still stuck on the idea of ‘sound of the word’. So for a while, you think of the same thing to yourself and even start to repeat it in a murmur sort of a way- ‘sound of the word’, ‘sound of the word’. And a certain kind of release you can now experience from within, wanting to grab this chance with both hands, you start to repeat it out loud, ‘sound of the word’, ‘sound of the word’. Then a bit louder, ‘sound of the word’, ‘sound of the word’, in a way that can be heard from the other room even though your door is shut and locked from inside. Your mother is in the other room, can hear and understands you perfectly for she’s literate enough; she was married just after she had started to study Bachelor of Arts in the early eighties, although now, comprehension of your rant is the least of her worries and that’s mostly clouded by apprehension over your father waking up from a lukewarm nap in a cosy afternoon. By the time, her fearful irritation turns into fury which turns into the physical action of her thumping knock on your door as hard as she possibly can as if a desperate, wounded stranger at your door seeking refuge, you have started to scream at your loudest, in the horrid sounding voice that you have, ‘sound of the word’, ‘sound of the word’. The pounding on your door is as loud as your gut-wrenching scream, but you still can’t hear anything other than yourself as you have lost control over almost all of your senses, forgotten about your surroundings, your family, about your unemployment at the age of thirty three after getting sacked for the crime of stealing you didn’t commit, the shame it brought to a lower middle class family and you also have forgotten that you don’t have any pants on right now. Eventually, you come to your senses; your mother’s incessant, dreadful pounding of the door helps you calm down, even lets you remember everything that you forgot for a short-lived moment and you again go back to your shell like a cynical tortoise.

Now, you sit there with the demeanour of a lone tree survived in a deadly cyclone, calm, composed and collected yet shocked and scarred, trying to think but can’t come up with anything for a long period of time. Then suddenly, your eyes begin to sparkle as you have a notion hovering on your head, even though it’s not by any means ground-breaking or even ingenious for that matter. You think, “what if I reverse it, as in ‘word of the sound’? Does it mean anything? It must mean something, everything means something”. You discover yourself into a light trance yet ill at ease as you start to repeat it out loud but cautiously this time, ‘word of the sound’, ‘word of the sound’, keeping your eyes closed, sitting on the floor head rested against the wall, your tiresome, intoxicated mind would like to give up, yet you still go on muttering. You hear your mother’s constant yelling as your father may have woken up but can’t understand a word she’s saying. You can only hear your murmur now, ‘word of the sound’, ‘word of the sound’ and faintly try to remember the word that has gotten you here in the first place, though it seems like a farfetched idea. A little bit of doubt sets in at this moment as the quotient of light around you is now being compromised in a slow, steady manner. The last whereabouts you could remember of yourself is a tiny shack by the ocean, a place you have frequently been before, where your mumbles - ‘word of the sound’, ‘word of the sound’ - turned into whispers before it could fade away into thin air.

By Sudipta Das