The Listeners

The city is different when you’re no longer taking the yellow line to Vishwavidyalaya or the magenta line to Munirka. The underground has that dull intimacy: away from sky, enclosed with strangers in the intestines of Delhi. On the bike-ride back home every day, I stare at houses now. The balconies in Lajpat where the buildings are sutured to each other, the porches in DefCol where there is never any overgrowth. Enclave upon enclave. Waiting in traffic, I end up fixating on the facades, expecting to see someone in their yellow drawing room, framed like a Hopper. Lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows, etc. But it’s mostly just the buildings that stare back, withholding their inhabitants. Very rarely: a woman collecting laundry from the clothesline on her terrace, or a man, smoking. It makes me think that people here live deep within their houses, houses folding inward into themselves, every room a deeper enclosure. Maybe it’s just a class thing.

But I’ve been thinking about enclosures lately.                                                  

My mother came to visit this week. It was her 50th birthday. When she was 32, I was not in school for a few months and we were tired of other people’s grating opinions on divorce. We watched a lot of television. There is a windowsill facing the TV in the living room back home which is the perfect size for a kid to build a fort. I watched Kyu Ki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi from those ramparts. Also Sasural Simar Ka in which Simar at some point transmogrified into an actual fly on the wall. My mother wasn’t always aware that I was behind the drawn curtains, on the windowsill: an enclosure. You can stay inside one of those forever, watching the world outside, listening.

Two days ago, leafing through an anthology I had asked Maa to bring from home this time, I found a poem called ‘The Listeners’ by the nineteenth-century British poet Walter de la Mare. His singsong rhyme schemes were popular at poetry recitation contests in middle school. I forgot the lines to ‘Tartary’ once on stage, but my arch nemesis did ‘Silver’ and won. For the sake of nostalgia, I decided to read this one:

The Listeners
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
   Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
   Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
   Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
   ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
   No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
   Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
   That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
   To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
   That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
   By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
   Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
   ’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
   Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
   That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
   Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
   From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
   And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
   When the plunging hoofs were gone.

(Creepy, yes. Like pretty much anything that’s meant to be children’s literature.)

For whatever reason, I thought, this poem knows something about our cities, our cities that we irrationally defend or scorn with the entitlement of old love. Whoever told me Delhi would be loud and obnoxious was way off the mark—this place can be chock-full of silences. The DDA flats in Sukhdev Vihar, where I live, have large balconies built for having chai in the evening, but people seldom take advantage of that facility. Noone talks to their neighbour upstairs like in The Lunchbox. A hush descends upon the street around 8 PM. But the atmosphere is not so much sinister as it is withholding. Enclosed. Enclosures within enclosures. From my room, which has a jaali door opening into the balcony, I can look straight into the well-lit room of the house across the lane. But I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen anyone there. How deep within their houses are these people living? If someone’s at the door, do they listen? Do they respond?

‘The Listeners’ later reminded me of Shakti Chattopadhyay and his canonical ‘Abani, Bari Achho’ (‘Abani, are you home’):

অবনী বাড়ি আছো

দুয়ার এঁটে ঘুমিয়ে আছে পাড়া
কেবল শুনি রাতের কড়ানাড়া
'অবনী, বাড়ি আছো?'

বৃষ্টি পড়ে এখানে বারোমাস
এখানে মেঘ গাভীর মতো চরে
পরান্মুখ সবুজ নালিঘাস
দুয়ার চেপে ধরে--
'অবনী, বাড়ি আছো?'

আধেকলীন-- হৃদয়ে দূরগামী
ব্যথার মাঝে ঘুমিযে পড়ি আমি
সহসা শুনি রাতের কড়ানাড়া
'অবনী, বাড়ি আছো?'

A translation by Arunava Sinha:

Abani, are you home

Bolted doors, the neighbourhood sleeps still
All I hear is the knocking of the night
Abani, are you home?

Here it rains all the year round
Like grazing herds the clouds here drift
These green blades of grass
Look askance as they choke my door
My heart near-suffused with ache,
Is bound for far away. I fall asleep
To hear the knocking of the night

Abani, are you home?

There’s a funny anecdote about Shakti C’s infamous drinking habit that my grandfather used to tell. The poet, then at The Statesman, was assigned a front-page Kumbh Mela story. Everyone in the newsroom was working overtime waiting on his star article, but he had disappeared. Until a telegram arrived at the Calcutta office around 12:30 AM, with the following words from Shakti, originally in Bangla, translated here:

It is now midnight. One has eaten. And one has drunk.

The story goes that he continued to be AWOL for a few days after that, later claiming to have gotten lost in the Mela. If this apocryphal narrative is to be believed, it makes you think that there might be something about enormous collective experience that stunts expression, the kind of experience one probably has at the Kumbh but also the kind that characterises urban life. Does that mean enclosure then allows for language? Are we utterly unmoored from our own minds by the sweep of the city? Reduced to drifting like flotsam on the surface of a vast and impossible ocean. Abani bolts the door to stop the city from bleeding into his enclosure. The city at night with its gaping maw, eager to swallow him into itself; Abani, shutting his eyes, gritting his teeth. The Traveller with his persistent knocking; the listeners, enclosed, in perfect silence. Is that why so few lean out of their windows, their balconies, at dusk? Do they shut their eyes and grit their teeth till the city stops knocking at the door?

Or it’s just a class thing. The poet was sloshed. I shouldn’t be peering into people’s homes in the first place.

Until next time,

Adreeta