Tonight - 11 p.m. at the Trimutri Hotel - I believe we are enjoying absolute silence … for the first time in three nights.
The Trimutri itself, in the holiday town of Shimla, hardly exists: little more than a single glassed-in hallway off of which seven rooms are glued to a cliff side.
“Trimutri” – the Hindu triad: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the creator or destroyer. After 48-hours of the place, we now know which of the cosmic forces can really call this place home.
The past two nights all rooms but ours have been occupied by extended families or friends of Bengali holiday-makers from ‘Calcutta’ (that’s their usage, not the government decreed ‘Kolkata’) who have been enjoying late nights and early, very early, departures.
“Enjoyed” I say, because they really did enjoy one another’s company, and genuinely seemed to assume that everyone else at the Trimuti – meaning Betty and myself – could only do likewise.
Of course it is impossible for us to describe exactly what they “enjoyed,” only what we, unjoyfully, heard and smelled, which was something like this ….
Evenings filled with six hallway doors randomly and sharply banging closed. People calling one another (loudly, sharply) from end to end of the hallway … then calling again and again with louder and more demanding voices because you don’t always get heard across seven rooms, six blaring TVs and a few dozen other conversations.
Someone clicks through TV channels at high volume, door open; then a second TV featuring some Bollywood number joins the first; then a third featuring a high speed car-gun chase joins in. With a few dozen channels, six remotes and some 40 or so people trying their hand, the possibilities are as varied and as nauseating as a trayful of Indian sweets.
Mid-evening. Cooking pots and dishes are set up on stools in the hallway … and heh, this is a little surprising, the set up is precisely outside our room window! Gas burners are lit, people start milling around, a regular street-side dhaba … “Where’s the rice!!?” “I need some more salt!!!? Where’s the salt!!!? Bapu!!! Bapu!!! Bring the salt!!!!!”
Chai is served, the gathering builds, lots of friendly-sounding and exceedingly loud chatter. Why so loud? The woman’s three centimetres from your mouth? A man answers his eighty-seventh cell call … can he really be talking to someone 100 metres beneath Antarctic ice?
Late evening. Sleep calls us. But a room or two along (their room door wide open – I know, I asked them to please shut it) several people are having an argument with what appears to be a deaf grandpa. The veggies, dhal and rice are steaming hot, the aroma thick as taste seeping through our wall and across our bed. There are random raps on our door (the door of a darkened room), followed by calls for those – Gargi! Chitta! Vijay! – apparently missing at the party.
By now all six room doors are open, the food bazaar is in full swing, the Mrs yells something from the actual kitchen at the end of the hall (Its door features a large sign DO NOT USE THIS KITCHEN) across the multi-channel six-room cacophony … and of course she must yell it again, then again, then yells something like “What?” then yells once or twice more.
A few hours later, one by one the TV voices fade, the last door slams (oops, not quite), then quiet … even the quiet of death can’t be denied …
… until perhaps four a.m. when the whole gang (two mornings, two different families/friends, there’s a pattern emerging here) wakes one another with calls and door rapping (sure, bang on our door as well) up and down the hallway. Then the chai burner is again brought out … certainly, go ahead, set it right under our window. (Do darkened hotel room windows have some special magnetism, offer up good karma, for Bengalis?) Four-thirty. The crowd builds. VIJAY! WHERE’S!THE!CURD! Must be getting hard to be heard out there. And me without the Bengali word for “Hush.”
Now impatient and increasingly louder calls to rise and shine. Doors slam bang, the Trimutri shudders. There’s a gathering of suitcases and duffle bags (yes, right beside the chai cups, just under our window, the good karma site), each arrival necessitating another shout between rooms, Seven to Two, Four to One and back to Six and on to Three.
Finally the last chai is downed, the last plastic cup tossed out a Trimutri hallway window and down the hillside into someone’s rooftop patio or bedroom or the mounting heaps of garbage between houses. Then a last tramping a feet up the stairs.
Oops! a forgotten duffle. Where is it? ROOM SIX! GARGI! GARGI! ROOM … NO! ROOM TWO! TWO! TWO!!! Running, puffing, more running. Then … silence, stillness. Eerie. Unnatural. We hold our breath. Wait. There must be more. But nothing … except silence, blissful silence.
An after-thought …. How not to like someone’s enjoyment? How to oppose infuriating behaviour where nothing infuriating is intended – and hardly conceivable? I’m wondering, guessing here because of the considerable politeness (preceded by surprised, quizzical looks – and from some, the look of “What IS the problem with this man??!!”) each time I asked for a door to be closed or a TV turned down … and of the few moments it took for the ruckus to begin again. Such different understandings of shared and private space, of public space, of “hotels” and “hotel” spaces, and the uses of voice, the understandings of noise and quiet and much else woven into the history of “the public” and “the private.” We have had a glimpse of who we have become … and who we are not.
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