The sound of silence

MUMBAI: It wasn’t quite a silence; that would have been too much to expect for a city as much in motion as Mumbai always is. I was also at one of its busiest junctions, on the bridge crossing the road at the north end of CST station. Below me the traffic swarmed unstoppably and behind me the rail commuters flowed, apparently insensible to last Tuesday’s blasts.

The signboard above the entrance read “6:25 A”, the exact time that the first blast went off at Mahim Station, which this Andheri-bound train would pass around 25 minutes from now. “Are you from the media?

You should get a picture from here, it would make a good shot,” said a quiet, neat looking man who seemed to be the only one apart from me and a TV cr- ew further up the bridge waiting for the siren to go. No surprise — when I asked he told me he was from the security services.

At that moment, there was confusion suddenly. A booming sound from inside the station seemed to signal the start of the two minute silence, but outside the traffic didn’t stop. The horns blared, the traffic policeman below us kept whistling and waving his hands, the pedestrians kept risking their lives to dash across. Then a higher pitched noise started.

“That’s the siren now,” said the plainclothes man. But the cars and buses didn’t stop and no one on the road seemed to notice. “What! They haven’t stopped the traffic!” said the man with some anger. Mumbai didn’t seem to have the time to stop.

And then I turned around and the station was very different. All the commuters, on the bridge and the stairs stood quite still. The uniformed policemen at the entrance stood to attention, guns by their side, and the plainclothes man next to me snapped to attention too in some relief.

Down on the platform I could just make out the crowds all still and the trains suddenly halted; the 6.25 to Andheri would be two minutes late. All the people there were used to taking the train and perhaps it occurred to all of them how easily they could have been on one of those trains last Tuesday.

Two minutes is an odd length of time. Why not one, or on the other hand, five? Silence has often been used as a way of remembrance, but it took its formal status after the First World War as a way of to mark the Armistice, was signed at exactly 11 am. on 11th November, 1918.

The idea first seems to have been suggested by an Australian journalist, Edward George Honey, in a letter published in the London Evening News on May 8, 1919. Honey had served briefly in the war before being discharged due to ill-health, and now he proposed the idea as an alternative to the standard church services.

Have them by all means he said, but if a moment of remembrance was observed, “in the street, the home, the theatre, anywhere... surely in this five minutes of bitter-sweet silence there will be service enough.”

Nobody seems to have paid much attention to Honey’s idea at first, but evidently it took root five months later as Britain was approaching the first anniversary of the end of WWI, on 11 November, one of the aides to King George-V brought up the idea directly with the King.

George-V, perhaps better known in Mumbai from the black horseback statue of him that used to stand on the area still known as Kala Ghoda today, was much taken with the idea. He got the government to agree, though on practical grounds reduced the period from five to two minutes after a dress rehearsal at Buckingham Palace.

In his proclamation he said grandly, “all locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance...”

Standing outside the station originally named after his grandmother, one felt that George V was right about the time. Five minutes is too long, an unnatural silence in a hurried world where perhaps the best tribute to the dead is to keep leading our lives as before, in defiance of the killers who would not have it so.

But you still want to remember, and one minute is too short and apt to pass before you realise it. In the two minutes of the Mumbai silence, even the busy road traffic took note, coming to guilty halt well after the siren sounded.

As the two minutes ended it was nearly still everywhere, trains halted, commuters standing, roads miraculously stalled with the traffic in small clumps and a white shirted traffic policeman standing to attention.

Across the road, in the courtyard of the Anjuman-i-Islam, lines of school children were drawn up into rows, even their energy halted for the minute under the stern eyes of their teachers. There was uncertain noise in the background, but where from wasn’t certain since all obvious sources were still.

Then the siren sounded again, and the trains shrugged into life and the 6.25 to Andheri was the first out of the station. The commuters on the bridge got moving and soon the station was its usual blur of peak hour chaos. The traffic outside, having started later also ended a bit later, but the sight of taxis and buses coming down the flyover startled those going the other way back to life.

“Well, I suppose that’s as silent as Mumbai will get,” said the security man by my side. Two minutes — but as last week’s victims, who had all been busy Mumbaikars, might agree, those two minutes were enough for this city to remember them.