Aakash finally understood what his mother would have felt like when she had been harangued by dozens of people in the garden. Sound of one man speaking. Another. And another. Lots of sounds. Isolation. Cut off. Silence. The more noise she would hear, the more isolated she felt from the world.
Conversely, when Tanisha and Aakash exchanged short, hastening looks, the world he would capture is the world without sound. He would see that his isolating mechanism was rather highly mild in the form of muteness of the people. He would imagine himself as a giant man standing outside the circular throng, the muteness of his world reigning over his being, and his height slowly and gradually reducing: first, he could see their face, then neck, then rumps, then legs, then heels, and finally, a flat land. A blackout. He would witness himself becoming a dot, away from the people, where men and women were clapping and holding each other’s hands and swinging their hands up and down as their one leg would lift after another, rotating and revolving around the center. He wrote in one of the letters to Tanisha, “I wanted my heart to be in your center, not because I wanted your attention but so that I could listen to the sound of your words!”
It is hard to compare the torment of his mother and him—one being isolated in the world of sounds, while another felt the burden of the muted world. For his mother, the sound had become nothing but a noise that she wanted to get over with, whereas, for Aakash, the more enlarged the circle of gesticulation became, the more he longed for the sound, the more unbearable the muteness of his world became.
While sitting on a chair, he wondered about these situational differences between him and his mother. And in this light, he finally understood why his mother had dashed along with him when he suddenly stood up and started to march towards the garden’s exit. The isolation, the silence that enthralled her face was for those meddlesome mouths of whom she never wanted to hear, and the only sound she wanted to listen was of her son that she had longed for, that she had been attached with. But seeing her son marching away, she rushed towards him and pleaded that he must not go away that it was him she had come for.
Sometimes, it is not about the truth but the lost sound that one wants to hear. Or maybe it is this: His mother saw the source of the truth in Aakash’s sound, the truth of whether he still loved her or not, of whether he still cared for her or not. But where is the source of truth in the world of Aakash? What can one do in the muted world? Aakash wrote in the letter, “In the muted world, where the truth is completely devoid of its existence, one needs to become a daydreamer, to turn their imagination into the sound, into the source of the truth.”