Speaking Walls…

She dragged the last suitcase inside the room and flopped on the couch. She heaved a sigh of relief, closed her eyes for a moment and dozed off. A creaking sound woke her and she opened her eyes, squinting at first, then wide as she realized she had left the main door ajar. She got up to shut it.

The moment she locked the door, she heard the strains of a bagpiper. She walked towards the window, still in her boots and opened it slightly. A fresh breath of cool wind swept over her face  and the sound of the bagpiper became louder. She craned her neck, half-hoping to spot someone in a Scottish kilt but could see no one. The sound of the bagpiper continued to flow as she looked around her new house.

The walls were cream-yellow with some sort of coating on it, most probably to dissuade students from spoiling the walls with any sort of graffiti. Right next to the window lay the study table. A sofa, two chairs, a coffee table and dining table filled up the rest of the room. She walked towards the shoe closet facing the bedroom to take off her boots. As she took them off she knew it would be just a matter of a few days before she would make this house her own.

She walked inside the bathroom, right next to the closet. The floor felt cold on her bare feet. When she flushed, the flush tank reverberated loudly in the silent house and she shuddered, thinking it would disturb her next door neighbours. She waited for pounding fists at her door but no one came.

It took the flush tank about 10 whole minutes to subside and even then it kept gurgling like a disgruntled old man ignored in his old age. The walls these days…they transported every single sound from one house to another. Even every whisper.

Her father was a retired Civil Engineer in India and he kept complaining about the thickness of walls these days and how one could not be angry and loud in his own house. This reaction was normally provoked during one of his regular arguments with Ma as she kept shushing him to lower his tone. But what Dad never noticed was that their old house in Delhi, which had thick walls, also carried sounds.

She clearly remembered how all the houses in the street were stuck to one another as if their fates were sealed forever. One had to move out of those houses to change one’s destiny or else they were fated to lead a complacent life in those narrow gossiping streets. Once when she was playing hide-and-seek with her cousins, she remembered hiding behind the wall on the ground floor and leaning against it. Suddenly, she heard some sounds. She strained her ears to listen to more. The muffled sounds, even though not audible, told the story of the house next door. Screams, shouts, pans being clanged…maybe even thrown, abuses being hurled and more…the child in her cringed in fear as she was ‘found’ by her cousin. She lay exposed and so did the house next door.

Ira, her friend next door came the day after, carrying a doll and a mark across her face. She looked apologetic as she said, “Papa was passing the pan to Ma and I came in between.” Many years later, Ira fled from that house and the walls of that street whispered for months to come until she came back home, pregnant, without a husband. After an abortion and years of loneliness, Ira started talking; day in and day out, to herself,  perhaps  because she heard the walls of her house listening. Or talking back to her.

She switched on the only light in the living room as it had begun to grow dark. The cloudy Canadian September was slowly creeping into her house and she shut the window. The bagpiper had long ceased to play. She began to unpack. The first time she had unpacked on her own was when she had moved to the hostel in Mumbai for her post graduation. Dad had packed everything neatly and her friends had laughed at her for her inability to pack on her own even at 21. She smiled now because she knew that even today she didn’t know or understand the ‘optimum usage of space’ that her dad talked about. Back in the hostel, she was petrified of staying alone for the first time. The slightest of sounds would wake her up.

Once, she stayed awake the whole night by the sound of a rustling paper. Sometimes, she would be awakened by the girl next door. She could hear the girl’s boyfriend stealthily creeping up the balcony adjacent to the hostel and climbing into her warm bed. The walls spoke of clandestine meetings, breathlessness, whispered giggles and soft, gentle breathing of sleep induced by passion. She remembered falling asleep too once they drifted off into slumber.

Studies in Mumbai went by in a stupor. She mastered in Mass Communication even though she knew she would never face the camera. She was always conscious of her face, her body, her hands and especially her feet. She would squirm in discomfort every time she came across pretty feet around her. Had it not been for her mother, she would have never got married as well. She had never had a boyfriend even in college. Everybody knew her but she was never popular. She had a group of friends but no one really missed her in her absence. She was just there; somewhere in the background…plain and unobtrusive… just like a wall.

She switched on the TV and remembered the early weeks of her marriage to Amit. How the television footage of an earthquake in Gujarat haunted her and made her go to bed almost fully dressed.  Brooder. That’s what Amit called her. He called her depressing at times, not in so many words but he always implied it.

She switched off the TV and felt hunger churning her stomach. She hadn’t eaten anything since morning and her head was throbbing. Thankfully, she had bought a few packets of noodles. The whiff of noodles from the pan brought back memories of their first night in the house in Bangalore. There was nothing in the house except their trunks and their suitcases. Soon after the flight landed in the morning, they had kept their luggage in the house and taken the same taxi for sight-seeing. Even though she had never wanted to move there, she fell in love with the city.

Four years had gone by in a jiffy. She had started working in a small news company called Network 24. Every day she would sit behind the desk, writing news stories which had no urgency whatsoever to be heard. The pace was lax, the other employees were neither interested in their work, nor in her. She simply occupied one of the many cubicles that lined her office…small little pretensions of walls, always permeable, always encroached upon. She would hear giggles when Anitha, the girl in the next cubicle laughed at the boss’ jokes as he leaned across her table. Nobody had ever hit on her like that. Her cold exterior and aloof stance soon distanced her from a lot of potential friends and a whole lot of potential promotions. But she didn’t mind. At least on the surface of it.

Amit’s career was going well. He was yet another software engineer in yet another software company in Bangalore. His bedroom became hers…his bathroom became hers and soon enough his friends became hers as well. For the first time in her life, she and her opinions began to feel accepted.  The colour of the sofa in the house was picked by her. The list of groceries was decided by her. The colour of the walls was decided by her and the arrangement of the paintings on those walls was also decided by her.

She had always painted, right from the childhood. Pictures of her own house. And of one house after another in the street. Awkward buildings on the roads, messy rooms of friends, her father’s cabin in his office, the bookcases at the British Council Library, the Parliament House and her maid’s living quarters-all in the same brush stroke. Her mother wondered why she didn’t sketch people. But she didn’t know an answer to that. She would conveniently leave out from her paintings, friends smoking inside their messy rooms, people sifting through rows and rows of books in the library, cars with red headlights zooming in and around the building, her maid’s baby crying herself hoarse. Her eyes just wouldn’t see them .

Even on the walls of her house in Bangalore, she had painted the skyline of the city visible from the top of the Thirteenth Floor, the famous restaurant in the heart of the city. The outline of the UB City Mall…a small detail of the Chennaswami stadium and all of it lit up in blue, red and yellow. Before the wedding, Amit had taken a keen interest in her paintings but soon after that, his interest fizzled out. “They all look the same,” he remarked in one of his callous moods. He was right. There was a splash of colour on the canvas and then the form of a building emerged out of her dexterous hands.

But she didn’t know how to make one building look vastly different from another. Weren’t they all the same? Except maybe the Taj Mahal or for that matter the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Great Wall of China? But she was sure that if she were to visit all these buildings, she would hear the same hollow whispers reverberating through their walls.

When she quit her job, Amit didn’t like it. The expenses were huge and whatever little she was bringing in was additional help to Amit’s seven-figure salary. He asked her why but she just told him that she didn’t feel like it. She was bored. Amit shrugged at this answer and walked away for fear of saying a little more which would tear the fabric of their four-year old marriage.

The layers of political games and sleazy favours behind the office walls had not found favour with her and she knew it was time to go. But she could never tell all this to Amit. Maybe she never tried. Maybe he never listened. She cried the whole time that he was away that evening but when he returned the crinkled bed was smoothened out, the hot dinner lay ready on the table and the stolid calmness on her face, was intact. Amit never broached the subject again.

Months passed and a mad frenzy overtook her. She began to paint like she had never painted before. This time also, there were walls but there was a difference. This time it was not just an outline. She depicted what she heard, what she saw and what she felt behind those walls. Bold strokes of black, blue and red smeared the canvas and spluttered across the painting. It was like she had finally spoken. And the listener was anyone who could understand the language of colour…the words of those walls. Ira was in those paintings nurturing a life within…the girl next to her room in her hostel was there and she herself was always there…always listening, sometimes merging into the background of violets and blues and at other times she became the ears and eyes of the colours.

Abstract. The people called her work that at her first solo exhibition. But she knew that nothing was more concrete in her life than those paintings. Nothing defined the stark reality of her life more than the walls in her paintings. One day Amit returned from office only to find the guest room turned upside down and her standing and painting wildly, her hands smeared in colour. Her wavy-curly hair carelessly mussed and the dark embers of her eyes burning as she painted. Amit stood there quietly for a long time before she turned around to see him. He turned away with frank disapproval in his eyes.

A week later she received confirmation for an International Residency that she had applied for, to the Toronto School of Art. Amit was numb this time. “When? Why? Why didn’t you ask me?” A volley of questions followed by yet another silence. She looked at her paintings and that was all the answer he got.

The day she was leaving, Amit had silently helped her pack. It was eerily silent that day. There were no noises, no voices. Even the old man at the neighbour’s house had not gargled his lungs out that morning. His usual spate of coughs which woke them up from their sleep every morning had not been heard today. The only sound was that of the rain falling on the  windows. It was almost as if the walls were mourning already because someone was leaving. Amit duly dropped her at the airport and now she was here in Toronto, sitting in her living room.

The phone rang. It must be mom…she thought and picked up the phone. “Hello?” There was silence on the other end and the sound of breathing. She recognized that sound..that soft, gentle breathing that she had heard next to her every night for the last four years. He finally sighed and asked, “Have you reached safely?”

“Yes”, she replied. “I’m a little tired but I will be fine.”

She asked, “How are you? Did you have dinner?”

He answered uncomfortably, “Uh—huh…yeah…I had noodles.”

She smiled. And it looked like the wall between them was finally speaking. And listening.

Roopal Kewalya is a film graduate from NID, Ahmedabad and   has been an active independent writer for television, short films and even song lyrics for various organizations. She has also had short stints as a stage actor, a radio jockey for FMII and loves to dabble in all things creative.