She finally spoke 

When she was in her mother’s womb, observers could not help going gaga about how healthy the ‘son’ would be. Eight years after marriage, it was to be the couple’s first conception. No one knew where and when the idea grew into the minds of the folks around that it was certainly going to be a son. Being an accomplished sitar player, the mother played the instrument for hours on end, believing fully that the wholesome music was going to be best during the formative period of the ‘son’. Relatives were never tired of conjuring up names for the yet-to-born male scion. 

Too much can cloy, it can also lead to immunity. Too much music and too many names for an unborn baby, can lead to eons of silence.  

The baby was born. When the doctor announced that the baby belonged to the female of the species, the family did not even make a feeble attempt to disguise their sense of disappointment, multiplexing it with a deep sense of anguish, almost remonstrating a sense of having been swindled. Though the doctor certified that the baby was healthy and normal, it did not take more than an hour to realize that the baby was unusually silent and showed a complete lack of any emotion. Too much hope can lead to disappointment.  

Eight years of effort had culminated into a female fizzle. Mother and daughter were both to face the brunt of dashed hopes. Both of them were treated with an outlook befitting heinous criminals. The mother especially was at the receiving end from her husband too. Alone and a victim of an acrimonious environment, she weaned unabashedly towards the stringed instrument to source the necessary grit to take care of the daughter and herself. 

The father married again. As he explained his rationale, he did not wish to invest energies to produce another child with the ‘whore’. The first wife was privy to a lot of domestic violence. She was almost a pariah in her own house now.  

By the time the baby was a year old, it became apparent that the baby was indeed dumb. She had hardly opened her mouth to speak. Unlike other children of her age who would cry and hanker for attention, she would not even demand the timely nutrition. Most of the time she would sleep tight, and her waking hours would be spent in her playpen. Most of her time was spent with her mother listening to music of strings.  

Music is a language in its own. More often than not it is more evocative than speech itself. The daughter soon learned the language her mother was promulgating and both mother and daughter became voiceless waifs, playing the sitar. Anger, hunger, passion, love, hate, resent, frenzy…and all the other known emotions made their way to her repertoire.  

The second wife soon bore a son, and that lend voice to the thought that the mother and dumb daughter were indeed cursed. The daughter grew up everyday seeing her mother playing the strings, and the surrounding in turn playing havoc. Years passed by, contrary to the popular misconception about time, here time was only aggravating the violence. Quite often on hollow nights, the daughter would hear the voice of a curse and the music of metal strings resonating against the hollow of a pumpkin. 

One day, after receiving some extreme dosage of barbarism, her mother breathed her last. The daughter was eight years old then. Death put a touch of finality for her mother’s silence and her own too. In the eight years she had never spoken even once.  

That night she played the sitar with every bit of melancholy that was permeating around her. It was morning when she finally stopped playing. Her fingers were numb, bleeding and swollen. Pain has a language of its own too.  

Alone and lonely, she was at the mercy of her father, and a family who still saw in her the son that never was. Though she did not have to live with, as much violence as her mother had been through, there was certainly a vituperative streak that would rise now and then. Like her mother, she took solace in the space between the string, and the effect of its vibration. Playing to the wind she ganged up to produce sounds that were narratives in themselves. 

The father utterly neglected the daughter. He was falling prey to the ostrich syndrome, refusing to acknowledge and wishing reality away. Ignorance has a language of its own. He was fully aware that a dumb daughter stirred an obese amount of filial obligations. Her marriage was going to be quite an expensive affair, and not to marry her off would be tantamount to ruining the reputation of the family. The father came up with the oldest solution to this problem. He decided to marry his daughter off into the house of an old sexagenarian landlord, who in this age was still entertaining thoughts of hymeneal urges. This landlord was not finding anyone willing to marry him, because all of his four marriages in the past had ended with the wife’s death. There were rumors that he was jinxed and was a trusted emissary of the God of Death.  

Eight years of effort had conceptualized her. Eight years of mother’s company had  been followed up by eight years of loneliness. She was sixteen when her wedding was effected. Her mother had married sixteen years before death, the daughter was marrying sixteen years after birth. Sixteen years of silence. Time has its very own language. 

The marriage had cost the father nothing. The landlord, too happy to have finally found a bride bestowed a lot of goodies upon the family. What had left the father’s house, was the daughter he had always refused to acknowledge and the sitar that had come in his wife’s dowry. Both were things he was only too happy to give up. 

The night of conjugal bliss turned out to be a night of ravenous marital rape for the sixteen year old. Mute and unable to communicate the pain and accompanying sense of defilement, she went through the motions of ribald lust of her much older husband. Finally around midnight she managed to free herself from the body breaking tribulation. 

Rushing to her sitar, she just stopped short. Her sense of debauchment was so complete, that she could not bring herself to touch it. She was feeling claustrophobic within her own body. For the first time she was feeling the compelling urge to scream out, to hear something being spoken. Being orally challenged a scream was completely out of question. She was also unable to bring herself to touch the sitar and bring out the resonance.  

The sense of despondency in her was so complete, that in-spite of her own concept of chastity, she just could not restrain herself from lay her hands on the sitar. She began playing it with an anger that was both raucous and frantic. As she continued to play, a realization began to hit her shores, that she had vitiated the sitar, just as she had herself been a few hours earlier. As this feeling enveloped her, tears began to run unabated. She had never wept this way before in life. Tears have their own language. 

As her sense of grief and revulsion grew, so did her desire to scream, to release the pent up pain. She wanted to make herself heard to the entire world.  

Minutes into the performance, her frenzy was accelerating. Blood was racing out of her fingers, dyeing the sitar into some gloomy shade of red and maroon. The cacophony resulting out of all of this was too much for the old husband to take, who rushed on to her demanding an explanation. Oblivious to his presence, she continued to play, giving him an icy stare. Eyes have their own language.  

Feeling snubbed, the old man rushed forward, snatching the sitar, and plucking strings with such disgust so to dismember it off the sitar. The whole room was silent again. She wanted to scream and end its purity. First she herself, then the sitar and now it was the turn of the silence that was to be stained. 

In one swift move she had lifted the sitar lying on the floor, and banged it against the body of the old man with a vigor and strength that left him surprised. A moment later he screamed out so loud, that the entire neighborhood was shaken and terrorized. The sense of conspicuous horror in the scream was all pervading. As he continued screaming, the sitar struck him repeatedly with absolute merciless disregard, until he lay motionless, silent and surely dead.  

Silence has its own language. She had finally spoken putting to rest the deathly silence around her.

January 16, 2001 - Amitabh Iyer