The voice of silence

More than 10 million is the population of my home village. There educational institutions, streets, parks, shopping markets, mosques, churches, temples, cinema houses, all were overcrowded. There was a sea of people, clans, tribes, and religious groups, professional cliques, different races, different languages, poor, rich, middleclass and beggars. They did not live side by side; practically they lived on each other. Then there were animals, all lived together in a highly developed system of coexistence. When millions of people communicated with one another, when they listened music, their laughter, their cries, their fights, domestic quarrels, all the sounds created an atmosphere of chaos and yet there was a harmony in the chaos. There were loud- speakers in every mosque. The peddlers used loudspeakers as well in order to reach to wider range of customers. Above all, when electricity went off, which happened very often, all commercial places started their own generators. These sounds were symphony and cacophony at the same time. There was pouring rain of colours, bodily odours and aroma of baking and cooking.

Then I arrived in Stockholm, a well-planned, well-maintained natural beauty. There were majestic buildings, fresh air, Baltic water all around, but no people, no music, no dogs barked, deserted streets, shops and businesses closed for most of the time, no queue outside cinemas houses, no odour, no aroma. My world of sounds, colours and aroma ceased to exist, but here I learnt to listen the voice of silence.