Silences

I always negotiate with silences. I always found silences to be ominous - not in a big way, but in a way of feeling trapped by forces I did not understand. Our room was separated from my father's workshop by a three-inch wall, beyond which the designer bra-cum-tape producing machines and men clamored away. I would go to sleep listening to the droning noises. Absence of the sound meant less money that week or that the workers with my father have gone away. In the same silent room my cousin fell silent when he ran into it in the middle of our make-believe first person shooter game. He was silent, sweating and had broken his arm while playing. 

Silences hang over you like chameleon tapestry that changes its color to match the texture of our half-real, half-imaginary worlds. We respond to silences in our own fashion. My mother fills silences with her own ramblings, but we know the silence is still there as surely we know that she is filling up the silence. There was silence in that morning as well when my grandfather finally breathed his last. I remember my grandmother begging everybody to see if he was truly silent, as in her delirium the perspiration from my grandfather's still warm body told her something that she wanted to believe desperately. I was negotiating my own silence while inadequate sounds of people crying tried to fill the silence left by him.