Sounds were the first thing that struck me when I first moved to Hyderabad. I remember waking up that first morning in the LifeSpring guesthouse and laying in bed for a while, just listening. It's fun going back and reading my journal from November 2007:
Ten months has incredibly turned into fifty-three, yet even as my mind is getting mentally prepared to be back in NYC, it's still the sounds that bring me back to the present in India.
When I was back in Hyderabad two weeks ago, I was shocked at how much the city has developed and grown. In the year that I've been gone, HITEC City has become unrecognizable. What once felt a bit like the Wild West, a dusty playing ground where Tyler first taught me (unsuccessfully) to drive a motorcycle, with companies like Google and Microsoft staking a claim on the land (a bit like that final scene from Far and Away), it is now a major city - complete with hundreds of new high rises, shopping malls, and wide roads.
While the sights left me wide-eyed, it's the sounds that bring me back to my time at Hyderabad: the peacefulness of the call to prayer as the sun sets and the newborn babies crying their first cries at our hospital.
And now that Tyler and I are back from our whirlwind South Asia adventures to Bangladesh, Agra, and the Andaman Islands, it's the sounds again that tell me I'm back in Delhi: the bass-thumping club music on a Wednesday evening... and the musical wails of the vegetable/water/plant vendors as we start to wake up.
I can't say that I'll miss the cars honking, but there is something about the cacophony of sounds (bicycle bells and bird chirps and vendors and children and calls to prayer and wedding parades... and yes, even the horns) that make India, well... India. I used to get annoyed by all the sounds when I would meditate in the morning, but with the little time we have remaining in Delhi, now I just smile.
Mornings are the most surreal. Honking cars fool my half-sleeping brain that I could very well still be in New York City. But then other sounds enter into my slowly-waking realm of consciousness: children chattering in Telugu; a man singing at the top of his lungs—or is he selling something on the street?; the hammer of construction in an ever-growing city; a bird crowing nearby…Add to this a panoply of unidentifiable sounds—perhaps a drum and then the swoosh of an airplane overhead…Most closely, I hear a muffle of voices through my thin bedroom walls and kitchen commotion in my guesthouse. I lay awake in bed for a good twenty minutes, taking it all in. Hyderabad is home now…For the next ten months, anyway. I consider taping the symphony of strange and exotic morning sounds, but for now my bed is too comfortable.
Ten months has incredibly turned into fifty-three, yet even as my mind is getting mentally prepared to be back in NYC, it's still the sounds that bring me back to the present in India.
When I was back in Hyderabad two weeks ago, I was shocked at how much the city has developed and grown. In the year that I've been gone, HITEC City has become unrecognizable. What once felt a bit like the Wild West, a dusty playing ground where Tyler first taught me (unsuccessfully) to drive a motorcycle, with companies like Google and Microsoft staking a claim on the land (a bit like that final scene from Far and Away), it is now a major city - complete with hundreds of new high rises, shopping malls, and wide roads.
While the sights left me wide-eyed, it's the sounds that bring me back to my time at Hyderabad: the peacefulness of the call to prayer as the sun sets and the newborn babies crying their first cries at our hospital.
And now that Tyler and I are back from our whirlwind South Asia adventures to Bangladesh, Agra, and the Andaman Islands, it's the sounds again that tell me I'm back in Delhi: the bass-thumping club music on a Wednesday evening... and the musical wails of the vegetable/water/plant vendors as we start to wake up.
I can't say that I'll miss the cars honking, but there is something about the cacophony of sounds (bicycle bells and bird chirps and vendors and children and calls to prayer and wedding parades... and yes, even the horns) that make India, well... India. I used to get annoyed by all the sounds when I would meditate in the morning, but with the little time we have remaining in Delhi, now I just smile.
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