Let’s speak of a time when there was sound.
We used to linger in the auditorium
We had players and audience.
An existence meant for each other.
A belonging sans personal acquaintance.
Let’s think of a time when there was sound
And we had kicked it across like a pebble
From one place to another. Reverberated.
We were players and audience.

The auditorium was a convergence of sounds.
Sounds stitched across each other.
Sounds that made no sense
Sounds that never tried to make any.

Then one day, we thought of publishing
A newspaper in our town, for our town,
By our town. And we came to realize
That individual voices were important too
If we wanted to make news.
We started unstitching the sounds, therefore.
But individuality was not a property of the auditorium.
And it was difficult dissecting them.
We tried making more spaces for our voices.
Shoved each other aside while we spoke.
And later, (since none of it helped)
We engaged ourselves in the tedious job
Of erasing each other’s voices.
And one day, no more sounds were left.

Sounds left us the way we left the auditorium.
Silently.
Letting go of each other’s hands.
But silence was a form of sound too.
There are silences unlike each other.
Just like the silence of a soldier’s death
Being mourned, is different from
The silence in the shade of an old tree.
It didn’t take us too long to learn the language
Of silence.

We told each other about our speechless days.
We told each other about the days of glory
Of stitched sound across the auditorium.
We started reliving our days of sound in these silent times
Until the consciousness of silence was lost
And we couldn’t differentiate  our sounds from our silences.

And in the dusks,
When the music of the playing winds passed through us
As we sat on the empty auditorium benches
One of us would just silently say –
“Let’s speak of a time when there was sound.”