When silence does the talking...

The tropical summer tiptoed through windows, its warmth skimming the room and its occupants who were catching up with old times. My friend Himanshu, a photojournalist, who had made himself available after a long time, was drinking in the surroundings with his glassy eyes trying to emphasize how they looked when he was here the last time.

Himanshu with my daughter Araina

I was by his side, but his glance jumped off my intruding presence, sprinted across the room and heeding the unannounced chuckle of my four-year-old daughter, followed her out of the bedroom. And, there it rested; at peace with itself.  

Now, Himanshu is one of a kind. Let’s say he is a hermit on the hunt (with a loaded camera). He’s a photo editor of an Indian daily, Hindustan Times, but quite unlike one. He is first a poet, prolific in both Hindi and in English. He trained himself as a pianist and a guitarist and can pale the professionals teeming in the best newsrooms with his incisive writing. Then of course, he’s the photographer, the third eye for thousands of readers waiting for the dawn to see again.

However, unlike most scribes baptized as editor, and who would instinctively scramble for the do-you-know-who-I-am sacrament, Himanshu is fiercely withdrawn. He opens up to books and music and sometimes to the ghosts from his past.

So, I baited him for a rendezvous by promising him what he covets the most: Getting lost in the world around him over a glass of spice-tea. Except this world, this perfect foil for his wandering mind would be invaded by a blithe presence. My four-year-old daughter had come in unannounced. She wafted into the room and stirred our senses before balancing herself on one foot and asking me if my company is ‘the Himanshu’?  She got her answer in my nodding head and was gone inside the room where she was hanging out with Dora, her animated friend.

From that moment on, I found something stir in Himanshu every time the kid would waltz into the living room. He was desperately attempting to get into a conversation with her. He once tried to engage her attention with his camera that rested in his side bag. For a child who casually swipes the mobile screen to take pictures at ease, Himanshu tried telling her the story of a camera so heavy that he needed help to carry it. “Will you not help me?” he asked her making an attempt to lift the bag, pulling a grimace on his bearded face. For a moment she was intrigued, but then skipped the invitation.

This happened for some time, Himanshu attempting an ambush of a conversation with the kid and his plan backfiring every time. By this time the tea had found its level halfway through the glass, where it waited for its seeker to draw it close to his lips once more. But the seeker had set out to seek something else and the tea would neither feel the rush of another fall, nor the whole new perspective of the room, which it discovers every time it settles to a new level in the glass.

For a brief moment we deliberated over each other’s writing, a path we often take in search of an engagement different from gathering news. His hands, presently, were holding the unfinished story of three characters brought to life by his company for a possible adaptation on the 70mm screen. We had barely managed to sift through a couple of disconnected scenes boxed atop one another when my companion broke the news softly. “My invitation has come!”

It took me sometime to gather the meaning of his words cooed to our acknowledgement. His eyes gave away the suspense. They were fixed on the Yamaha that lay unraveled at the wall we were facing. The synthesizer’s cover, a white linen handcrafted by my grandma, lay crumpled on the Divan besides it. The empty space in front of the ‘piano’ was now occupied by a stuffed bamboo stool. Everything else seemed unruffled.

I must have looked incredulously stupid to Himanshu trying to figure out how the sheet jumped off the synthesizer and how the stool walked up the instrument from its place by the dining table because he chose to end my predicament. “She switched on the synthesizer, removed its cover and was about to slip away when she started looking around. She brought the stool up to the Yamaha, navigating hurdles in her way,” Himanshu said romancing the instrument from distance. My daughter wasn’t around. She had disappeared after her act, leaving the stage to the visitor.  

“Were you watching her all along,” I asked. “No, we were talking,” he mumbled approaching the Yamaha, "She saw me in the eye after the seating arrangement was done. That's when I knew I was invited," Himanshu spoke without looking at me. He had already accepted the invite. 

Now, how does a child communicate with a stranger she has come to know through some forgotten banter between her parents? She just chooses a universal language to draw him into her world. Music to her was good enough to bond with a stranger who she knew also understood it well. The two of them never spoke. There was no need. When he started playing a popular kid’s song Lakdi ki Kathi, kathi pe ghoda she straddled her toy horse and started rocking on it by his side.

For Himanshu, defined by his casual admonition of anything loud, it was in silence that he ultimately got through his new friend, a friend who simply by readjusting the furniture conveyed to their mutual understanding, her wish, far more effortlessly than a smattering of some words. He accepted her invite to play without a word being exchanged. She never needed one to play besides him. Two different worlds had seamed beautifully to become a whole where silence was music and music, the language.