The Long Silence

by Parth Pandya

It was said that Jayant Ramlal Vasavada had not spoken in over twenty years. No one knew why. It had been so long now that no one could remember how he sounded.

Since no one seemed to particularly know the last pronouncements that came out from the lips of Jayant bhai, it became the stuff of legend in the bylanes of Bhuleshwar. There wasn’t a single authentic version of the story. So naturally, there were many “authentic” versions. Each version reflected a new level of ingenuity from the narrator.

There was one about the astringent sherbet that he drank once that messed his palate such that his tongue forgot all its function. Another was about the jealous neighbour – whose own clothes shop was nowhere as successful as Jayant – who had blunted him on the head with a mannequin when Jayant was trying to close the shutters of his shop after a successful Diwali sale.

The purported last words on both these stories were, ‘Arre yaar’. You couldn’t blame Jayant bhai. After all, what can a man do when he has been jumped and given very little time to react?

The stories started outdoing each other as the silence amplified to annex the suburb they were living in. One went that Jayant bhai went to watch the first cricket match of his life at the Wankhede stadium and a strongly hit sixer inadvertently caught him on the head as he tried to eat vada pav in the North Stand. Even the politicians were not spared. One gentleman who believed that government was the root of all evil suggested that Jayant had been caught up unfairly when the police rounded off protesters at a rally and snipped off their vocal cords lest they protest again.

The doctors who saw him didn’t seem to know any better either. When Jayant bhai was brought over to them, he walked in like a messiah whose flock trailed him. It started with his family taking him to their general physician who was swatting away flies in the middle of a hot and humid Mumbai afternoon and prescribing antibiotics to anyone who showed up, as a catch-all to cure all ills.

And yet, the curious case of Jayant bhai woke him up from his slumber. ‘He has stopped speaking?!’, he asked Jayant bhai’s family, incredulously. He suddenly felt deeply committed to his Hippocratic oath and experienced the inquisitiveness levels of Sherlock Holmes as he examined this mute patient for over thirty minutes. In all his twelve years of practice, he had not seen a case like this. And having spent a considerable amount of time inspecting Jayant, he finally decided that the sickness may be unusual but there was only one possible cure for it. ‘Antibiotics.’

The cure did not come and the pilgrimage to the clinics of other doctors continued. It was not unusual to see fifty people silently standing outside a doctor’s clinic and craning over each other to see if the medical man was making any headway with Jayant. Generalists were consulted. Specialists were referred to. Tests were ordered. Scans were performed. Medical journals were checked. Psychologists tried to unlock the secrets of his brain but failed. The medical community from Charni Road to Bandra suddenly had an unsolvable puzzle to grapple with. And yet, not a word escaped the lips of the silent man.

It would have been a positive reflection on the world Jayant lived in if the horde was there for his well-being. Maybe some were. But curiosity was a force more powerful than compassion. And so, in leading lives that were very ordinary, the masses followed the story of a man whose life had become anything but ordinary.

The silence of Jayant Vasavada assisted many a needy person. One such recipient was an aspiring writer who lived on the floor below the Vasavadas and shared a small room with five more Bollywood strugglers, who was inspired to write a story about a man who lost his voice. The simplicity of Jayant, however, found no reflection in the movie that told the story of a man who loses his voice when he sees his family murdered in front of his eyes and takes revenge on his enemies. In the climax of the movie, when his dog is about to be shot and doesn’t know about it, he screams at the top of his lungs and helps the dog escape his fate. The movie was made with such conviction that people were left guessing as to whether it was a spoof or a sincere story.

While everyone had a peripheral interest in the goings on in the quiet little world of Vasavada, the one affected the most was his wife Parul, who was dumbstruck at his state. She had always been the more garrulous one but even between her twenty-minute monologues, her husband had been able to sneak in a ‘Yes, yes’ and ‘Hmm, hmm’ and even the occasional, ‘You are absolutely right.’

With his silence, she was faced with an impenetrable wall. The one-way conversation, the responses using sign language, the acute awareness of the timbre of her voice resonating through the house – it became too much for her to bear. She decided that silence had only answer. Silence.

And so it came to pass that the household of the Vasavadas became a silent zone where no words were exchanged. Jayant’s shop, now looked after by a nephew, was a gift that kept on fuelling the fires of his house, as Jayant spent his days seeping in his penance like a tea bag left in a cup of hot water for a while. The superfluousness of Parul’s communication before this new phase now depressed her. Was anything she said ever necessary for him? Was using their hands to communicate love, hate, coffee and dinner sufficient for a marriage to last? She pondered in complete silence, choosing an existence in the house where the only sounds she heard were the din of the world permeating into their homes through the thin walls and open windows.

The man in the centre of this drama was content. What seemed like a mystery to others was a choice he had made. Jayant had blanked out his voice to clear up his mind. His voice felt like a vestigial organ to him. He had, in a moment of epiphany, realised that just like the rest of the world, he liked the sound of his voice. Perhaps too much. Believing that listening was a lost virtue, the atheist took a vow of silence for a week to bring that virtue back.

And a week of not talking opened up closed doors to him. He listened. He observed. He absorbed. And a week became a month and a month turned into a year. That little experiment evolved into something unexpected. He saw that his silence shaped the world around him much more than his words did. People projected their own thoughts on this silence as if it were a blank slate. Their opinions, their judgements, their energies, all found a focal point in Jayant’s silence.

Jayant added another twenty-five years to that vow of silence before his vigil came to an end with his last breath. He was surrounded by his wife and two hundred people cramped in the floors of his chawl. They all wanted to hear some final words. A mantra of salvation. A magic charm. But Jayant’s last breath was an ode to the silence that accompanied him.

And they all returned to their homes, murmuring at first and then talking normally next. They returned to the comfort of cacophony.

Picture from https://www.flickr.com/photos/urbzoo/ under CC BY 2.0 license.

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