The Sound of a Billion People

Starting with the rushing throngs of Mumbai and moving into the slightly less hectic but still as dense southern states of Goa and Kerala, there hasn’t been a moment of silence since I stepped off the airplane. Not even in the countryside of Munnar, a supposedly relaxed rural area of tea plantations and high mountains have I escaped the sometimes annoying, occasionally mystifying, often beautiful but always present sounds of the Indian civilization.

Just this morning I woke to the national morning sound of India: a billion people hacking up loogies. Seriously, I’ve been here for a month and I’ve traveled to several regions and it’s been the same everywhere. As soon as the cock crows, the loogie-hacking begins, no doubt a side-effect of the chuggy haze that hangs in the sky and collects in the lungs. The air pollution is staggering: in over thirty days I’ve seen a blue sky exactly twice. The local farmers are burning their fields and the smoke is joining the haze from the hundreds of coal-fired brick factories that line the highways. Add the eye-burning petrochemical smog from the big cities and the airborne dust from the Rajasthani deserts for a depressingly toxic atmospheric cocktail.

With the dense, lung-clogging air, it’s no wonder  everyone needs to clear their throats and lungs as soon as they wake. What makes it funny is the enthusiasm and vigor the neighboring villagers are putting into the effort. They do it loudly, with gusto, as if trying to outdo each other. Over and over again until their airways are clear and every ounce of lung-butter has been coughed up and spat (also loudly) onto the dirt. As far as I can tell, it’s a competition to see who can expectorate with the most grandiosity.

Joking aside, I knew before visiting that India would be a challenge to both my senses and my sensibilities. A friend described the shock she felt on her first-time visit:

In America we separate and isolate unlike things. The rich and the poor live in completely different areas of a city. Our shopping areas are separate from the places where the products are manufactured. Luxury car dealerships are never found next to trash dumps, churches are never in the same building with plastic surgeons. In India, though, no matter where you look, in every glance you see it all, at once, in a riot and jumble of everything on top of everything else. There are no rules. Unimaginable wealth and the cruelest poverty side-by-side. And the noise, well, you can’t even begin to imagine the sound of a billion people.

It’s true, and it’s overwhelming. My brain can’t really understand what I’m seeing and hearing. The sing-song call-to-prayer from a mosque’s loudspeakers compete with the bells of the Catholic church which are being over-dubbed by the drums of a Hindu temple, all of which are barely audible because there’s a guy in a truck driving up and down the street with giant loudspeakers strapped to the back, blaring a political diatribe against the ruling BJP party.

My homestay host tells me, “We Indians cannot stand silence. If it is too quiet, we will find a way to make noise.” My experience supports his statement. At 4AM, just as soon as the guy in the next house turns off his stereo which has been humming a mix of Justin Bieber and Indian pop all night, the loudspeakers at the local mosque blast out the morning call-to-prayer, which wakes up all the dogs who howl for the next half an hour, by which time the first light of dawn is visible in the sky which arouses the roosters who begin to crow, followed soon by the swishing of the women street sweepers and the cranking of thousands of motor-scooters as the early-risers head off to work. Now add the aforementioned loogie-hacking and you’ll have the sonic landscape of an Indian sunrise.

Then, the real show begins. Far and away the greatest national noisemaker is the automobile horn. If you’ve never been here to experience the automotive cacophony that is an Indian street you cannot even begin to understand the sheer mass of sound it generates. If somebody could find a way to harness the sound energy coming from India’s vehicle horns, the world energy crisis would surely be solved.

Indians honk at everything. Honking is not only expected, but encouraged. On the rear of every lorry, truck and tuktuk is a colorful, hand-painted sign that says HONK PLEASE THANK YOU. Indians seem to drive as much by echolocation as by sight. Anytime they overtake another vehicle, they honk. Anytime they approach a pedestrian (and there are a LOT of pedestrians), they honk. Anytime a cow or goat or chicken or dog or camel or elephant is in the road (and there are lot of those, too), they honk. Anytime they come to a blind curve, they honk. Anytime they come to an intersection, they honk (there are almost no stop signs or traffic lights, so Indians use the horn to establish who has the right-of-way).

Trucks and buses have MUCH MUCH MUCH louder horns, usually tuned to a rapid series of musical notes, like a deafening blast from a frenzied calliope. When traffic is congested, every scooter, motorbike, car, truck, and bus communicates and negotiates with the surrounding morass using a complex language of honks, a call-and-response technique akin to Morse code that has to be heard to be believed.

I have come to believe that Indian drivers may have perfected the most complex non-verbal form of communication ever to be devised in the history of humankind. Some scientist should come here to study it. Seriously, most Indians are multi-lingual, Hindi, English, and the local tongue, but the most common and far-reaching language in the entire country may be the language of the road. It’s certainly the loudest language in the land—even when I’m miles away from the nearest highway, I can still hear the distant conversations between drivers. I’ll even go so far as to propose a name for this language of the road: Honkese. Perhaps this name will catch on and I’ll be famous. Perhaps not.

The best sounds are from the children. There are a lot of them, too. According to the latest census, more than half of all Indians are below the age of 25. That means half-a-billion children and young adults. There are few places I’ve been where I couldn’t hear the sound of children laughing and playing. It’s a joyful noise, my favorite noise of them all.

There are also the mystifying sounds, far-off booms and what sound like air-raid sirens and the truly terrifying groans of the plumbing in some of the older hotels. Weird bird calls. Something like a miniature buzz-saw just outside my bedroom window.  Then there’s the truly staggering array of human-like sounds that I eventually discover come from the neighbor’s goat.

I listen and wonder: what would an Indian make of the sounds of my home in the USA?

To see all the posts in this series (Seven Weeks in India), click here and scroll through the post listings.