The railway line does not quite touch Bangalore’s Indiranagar area, missing it by a kilometre or so. But if you are up at daybreak when the world is still asleep, you can hear the whistle blow as the odd train goes by. In the slight mist that the habitually rain-drenched city often wakes up to, the sound is muffled and seems to beckon you to come for a journey of discovery to distant lands.
As I grow older, I keep getting up earlier and have come to like this hour as among the best. It reminds me of childhood early winter mornings in Kolkata. Mist would muffle and romanticise the call of the foghorns of ships on the river, which would invariably make my mother say how she missed the steamer journeys in what was then East Bengal, where at times the confluence of rivers would get so wide that you could not see the other bank and felt you were out at sea.
The only other sounds at that hour are, of course, the wake-up call from the koel, which says all good people must be up and about, and the gentle putter of the booster pump that is always put on by the old couple next door before they sit down to watch the prayer service on TV.
As the day gets going two other early birds, school buses for two neighbours’ children, never fail to arrive at the appointed hour. They create a cheerful racket with their diesel engines running as half sleepy children are rushed out by their mothers who must make sure they don’t miss the bus. Silence returns after the banging of bus doors signals the departure of sound and mechanical rattle.
One of the pleasantest sounds early in the morning is that of the street cries of the day’s first hawker — a little girl who intones in an undulating half tuneful voice: rangoolee. Her ware is the white chalk powder that household women use every morning to draw an auspicious design on the paved walkway to the main gate, washed clean. It is a ritual – a fresh design drawn every day and a more colourful and elaborate one on special religious days – that signifies the optimistic beginning of another day.
About the same time also come the flower women who leave dangling from every front gate latch or knob a little garland or two for household women to put in their freshly bathed hair before they get on with the day’s chores. That is also a ritual in which the freshly plucked and strung flowers (the hawker women must be getting up while it is still dark to do the job) reassert that life goes on.
When the sun is fully up and sundry noises of life and living have populated the air, there comes a succession of hawkers with their pushcarts laden with fruits or vegetables (some specialise only in leafy vegetables) making calls in a language I do not know but over time have been able to make do by tagging a specific call to specific ware.
Come early office hour, there is a silent string of young girls, mostly from the north-east and Nepal, freshly made up and briskly walking to the bus stand nearby to get to work. I realise they are a relatively new feature of daily life brought on by the retail revolution and the sales jobs that it has spawned, but they fit in so nicely that it seems they have always walked that way in the morning.
The good thing about the neighbourhood is that it is never noisy beyond a point. The sound of the traffic from the main road is no more than a muffled roar, like the sound of the breakers and the sea when you are a couple of streets away from the sea front. The one constant through the day is the sound of pigeons as they gossip, dance in elaborate courtship and mate in routine.
The late afternoon brings back the school buses, which return the children home. They get off the buses in tired slow motion, the hurry of the morning gone, exchanging “byes” with the other children in the bus. The homecoming is invariably followed by the signature peal of the ice cream vendor’s bell, which acts like the call of a Pied Piper who causes the children to come out in ones and twos.
Then as the sun goes down, the koel signals the end of the day like a town crier calling the hour or broadcasting a message. The sun never fails to set and the koel never fails to say goodbye to it.
It gets very quiet as evening descends and the only major sound I can occasionally hear is of crackers going off somewhere at a distance to mark one of three happenings. It is the night of some festival, or some wedding procession is on the way, or India or the local boys, Royal Challengers, are on their way to winning a one-day international or a T20 fixture.
My part of street and neighbourhood goes to bed rather early, so as to have slept enough by the time the koel is there early next morning insisting that you do not linger in bed for too long.
