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Dhruv Saxena
I noticed it for the first time in a way I could name about two years ago.
I was home for a long weekend. It was early morning, still dark, and I was in that half-awake state where you are conscious but have not yet committed to being conscious. And from somewhere in the house I heard it.
The shuffle. The specific rhythm of my mother's slippers on the floor. Moving from the bedroom toward the kitchen. Unhurried. Familiar. Exactly as it has always sounded.
I did not get up. I did not need to. I just lay there and listened to the sound and felt, without being able to fully explain it, completely fine.
Not fine in the way that means nothing is wrong. Fine in the deeper sense. The sense of being in the right place. Of being safe in a way that does not require any active work to maintain. Of being, for a moment, the child who lived in this house and knew that the shuffle of those slippers meant someone was up, someone was taking care of things, someone was making the day begin.
I am thirty-one years old. I live in Bangalore. I am, by most measures, a functioning adult.
And the sound of my mother's slippers on the floor in the early morning still does that thing to me. Every time.
I told a friend about this last month. He looked at me for a moment and then said he knew exactly what I meant and described his own version. His mother wears different slippers than mine. The sound is slightly different. The effect, he said, is identical.
I was home again recently. She was already up when I woke, as she always is. The chai was on the table and so were the Mom's Magic biscuits, which are always on the table when I am home, and she was moving around the kitchen with that unhurried efficiency that I have watched my whole life. I sat down and watched her for a moment before she noticed me. Just the ordinary sight of my mother in her kitchen in the morning, doing the things she always does.
It is the most comforting thing I know.
The Inventory of Sounds
Once I identified the slipper sound I started noticing the others.
The specific sound of her putting a steel container down on the kitchen counter. Not loud. Just the particular contact of steel on granite that I have heard ten thousand times and that means something is being made.
The sound of the pressure cooker, which I can hear from any room in the house and which means a meal is in progress and will arrive at some point without me having to do anything about it.
The sound of her opening and closing the fridge. Twice, usually. Once to take something out. Once to confirm she has taken the right thing.
The sound of her talking to my father in the other room. Not the words. Just the cadence. The specific rhythm of their voices in conversation, which is the background sound of my entire childhood.
The sound of her chai cup being placed on the table. She puts it down with a particular quality. Not hard. Just definite. The sound of someone who has a place and knows it.
I have not been conscious of these sounds while they were being made. I have been absorbing them my entire life without registering them as something I was absorbing. They are the sonic wallpaper of home. You do not notice wallpaper until it is gone.
The First Time the Sounds Were Absent
I moved to Bangalore twelve years ago. The first few weeks, I noticed the silence in a way I had not expected.
Not absence of sound. Bangalore is not silent. But the specific sounds were gone. The particular sounds that I had not known I was tracking.
No slipper shuffle in the early morning. No steel container on the counter. No pressure cooker from the other room. No cadence of voices in conversation at a specific volume in a specific rhythm that meant everyone I loved was in the same space.
Just my flat and its sounds, which were not those sounds.
I adjusted. Of course I adjusted. You adjust to everything eventually. The new sounds became familiar. The silence where the old sounds had been became normal.
But it never became nothing. And every time I go home it is still there, the relief of those particular sounds, as immediate and complete as it was the first time.
What the Sounds Carry
I have been trying to understand what exactly the slipper sound does.
I think it is this. It means she is there. Present. Moving through the house with the same rhythm she has always had. The same unhurried shuffle that means the day is starting in the way the day has always started when I have been in this house.
When I hear it I am briefly, completely not alone. Not in the way that requires another person to be actively engaged with me. Just in the way of knowing someone is there. Someone specific. The person who has been there, in various rooms of various houses, for my entire life.
She does not know what the sound of her slippers does. I have not told her. It would be difficult to explain without it sounding like something it is not. It is not sentiment exactly. It is something more physical than that. A calibration. The body recognising a sound it associates with safety and responding accordingly.
The Part I Think About
There will be a morning when I go home and the sound is different. When the slippers are different because the old ones wore out. When the rhythm is slower. When the path from bedroom to kitchen takes a little longer than it used to.
I will notice these things the way I notice everything about her now, with more attention than I used to have, because I have learned the cost of not paying attention.
And there will be a morning, at some point, when I go home and the particular sound is not there at all. When the morning is quiet in a different way.
I do not want to think about that morning. But I think about it sometimes. And when I think about it I understand, more completely than I can usually access, how much that sound contains.
So when I am home I stay in that half-awake state a little longer now. I listen to the shuffle from the bedroom to the kitchen. I let it do what it does.
There will be time to get up. The chai will be ready when I do. She will have put out the biscuits already.
Some things do not need to be rushed.
