At first I thought I was going deaf. I was having trouble registering everything from car horns to human speech. Then there was the news of the old going deaf all over the world. Soon, it came to the point where all of us were deaf. We had to rely on lip movements and gestures; people took to drawing symbols in air, tapping one on the shoulder for a ‘yes’ and two for a ‘no’…. we were adapting. Initially, we had withdrawn ourselves into self-denial, but now we had come out of it. Intriguing display of clever and roguish ways of adapting lit up our hopes of survival. Then came the days of introspection; some theorised that this was just the beginning of what they called an ‘apocalypse’.
Scientists had at last, after repeated failures, come up with an explanation. Sound, a mechanical wave, was no longer transmitted through the medium of its source. They explained that the pressure oscillations were being absorbed by an alien medium. Research was in progress to find out more about the alien medium; a theoretical physicist wondered if the alien medium was nothing but the infamous dark matter. The mention of dark matter in the media sparked an interest in the common folk as they participated in tirades of an imminent apocalypse.
Humans were the lucky ones; we at least comprehended the gravity of the situation. Science came to our rescue, and although terrified to the bone, we were not hopeless. We were not lost; we knew what happened or at least we knew what we did not happen. Animals on the other hand, suffered a lot. How could I, for instance, explain to my dog? He was a notorious fellow, rapping at my bedroom window every night; digging his nails into the main door and dragging along like a rake on earth; and tearing apart any object he fixed his cross-wires on. His antics peaked if I did not acknowledge his wanderings; I had to constantly pay attention to his theatrics. There were times when, for the sheer pleasure of it, he would bark at nothing in particular. Back in the normal days, he sniffed about impatiently; meddling with every little ant, lone lizard, and innocent trespasser.
What a pity? He now slept on his back with paws extended skywards. Baring his genitalia, and indifferent to the world, he spent his time staring into a self-imposed abyss.
My husband, a guitarist, was so dispirited with the situation that last night he gulped down twenty sleeping pills. Doctors drilled a canal down his throat (apparently, he drank a bottle of gum too), and he slovenly regurgitated for the rest of the night. I wished to leave him in the care of a psychiatrist. But nervous depression had claimed so many minds in the city that the psychiatrist himself was diagnosed with it. A lady in the neighbourhood tragically tossed her husband out of the nearest window. As with many such cases, the fall from seventh floor was not heard by any one. As the body hit the ground, windowpanes of the people in the ground floor were pattered by brain and guts; alas! No one heard a thing.
Rain beat down on the roofs; wind pelted about household objects lying in the porticos and balconies – time passed and people adapted. On road, a muted van would issue a series of complex patterned on-off signal of the headlights to indicate a horn; all the vehicles were now fitted with a light induced dashboard. At offices, desk phones were replaced with mobiles or pagers; men carried papers in their trouser pockets, to roll them into balls and throw at people; women wore plastic pendants on their ears to peel one off in a jiffy and throw at people.
“Ah! Playing again,” Janaki cleared the table off newspapers. She turned around to stack them away in the cupboard. Someone was at the calling bell; it was the maid. After instructing the maid to mop the hallway and bedrooms, she returned to her son who was glued to his computer. “Have you nothing to do. All day long before the pixelated screen! Your existence will slip down the memory lanes of our relatives,” running her fingers lengthwise in her son’s hair, she asked him “when was the last time you attended a marriage reception or a…” Her voice petered away as she noticed the pale brown ring splotches on the table and called for the maid, who leisurely walked in with a mugful of soap water and a wet piece of cloth.
The maid retreated into the hallway after cleaning the coffee marks and Janaki closed the door behind her. She turned to her son, pinched her brow as if to recollect the last thread of conversation. Before she could begin, her son rather cheerfully pointed to the screen and added “Mother, look there, behind the woman on the sidewalk.”
Janaki grabbed her rimless spectacles and squinted through them. “Yes. Those two girls in short skirts?” She accentuated ‘skirts’ and Kranthi let out a sigh, a smile, and tapped on the screen with his index finger “look. You are not looking”.
Janaki replied “well, those girls, ones that are carrying green arrows overhead. Why are they wearing those cartoonish caps with torches belted on them?” Adjusting the spectacles on the bridge of her nose, digging more furrows on her brow, Janaki leaned into the monitor and inquired “why are they pointing the torch beams into each other’s’ faces?” Here she stepped back and raised her tone “That is rude. This is what your video games teach you.” As if vindicated, she turned around to leave. “Oh! And did you see that,” janaki exploded “why are the people throwing paper balls and ear pendants at each other. Whatever happened to the good old civilised ‘excuse me’.”
Kranthi, issuing a wide smile form his parted lips, grabbed his mother’s hand and explained. His pale irises drew back and the dark pupils flattened out as he said “That woman in the street corner, near the bend of the road. See that?” he pointed to the point on the screen where teenagers promenading together, waved their hands in air. “That’s me.” Kranthi crooned as he settled back to let his mother comprehend the scene. Cars skidded around the bend bearing headlights of yellow, red, green, and blue that flashed heavily in mid-day.
It made no sense to Janaki that the cars should chose to issue a complex pattern of headlight beams. She patted her son on the shoulder and said “that woman wearing a pink arrow overhead?” she paused and eyed her son to see if she had got it right. Her son nodded and she added “the woman with the uninterested weepy dog that is sleeping with its back on the sidewalk, like it cared death over life. That is you?” Her son was emptying the contents of a coke bottle into his mouth; he nodded to indicate that she got it right. A bemused Janaki had only one thing to ask of her son “and the man with dishevelled hair with a bottle of pills in his hand?”
“That’s my husband” Kranthi replied. Janaki unhurriedly rolled her right hand fingers around her son’s left ear. On the computer screen before him, the bar on the top right corner was blinking in red. It had been dragged to its extreme right. As Kranthi rolled his mouse over the bar, it read 'sound in dominion = 0'
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