Sleepless in India

What a noisy country India is! In the 28 days that we traveled around the Northwestern regions, there was only a few nights that I felt I had a sound sleep. Combine this with waking before sunrise to make photographs in the soft morning light and I'm at the point where I really could use a few nights of quality, quiet sleep. Here in India, it seems that the truly quiet hours for good sound sleep are limited to the time between two o'clock to about 4:30 am, before the raw energy of India life begins with its various colorful chaos and mysterious religious ceremonies.

India is a land of religious diversity. In the small area that we have explored, we have found Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism, all mingled throughout the communities we've visited. Each of the temples, mosques, shrines and even ashrams are equipped with amplified sound systems that often crackle and pop along with the prayers, sacred chants and songs that are played at high volume. At the mosques, the chanting of prayers begins at 5am and is repeated five times throughout the day. Add to this the Hindu and Jain temples that offer their own flavors of chants and prayers and you can understand how precious a moment of quiet sleep is to me. Along the streets leading to these places of worship are shops selling tapes, CDs and VCDs of the sacred music so that the devout can play them at home, at high volume, of course. While Moslem prayers are conducted according to a fixed schedule, we can't figure out the schedule associated with Hindu temples, and to us, it seems that the musical prayers can start at any time of day or night. The Sikhs are very solemn and serious about their prayers, and their sacred music is unsurpassed in the beauty of its sound, no matter what time it's played.

The amount of noise in any town, especially on and around major roads is overwhelming during the daytime. Drivers are constantly using their horns as turn signals and warnings for overtaking and passing, and the practice is widely encouraged as a form of communication between each other. There isn’t a moment in the day when all of these loud noises come to a halt. Large trucks and public buses have comically melodious but deafening horns, and many motorcycles have upgraded to those that are normally heard from full size cars.

Add to all that noise the celebrations of Diwali, where the firecrackers and fireworks began to blast everywhere in India just before the start of the festival and continued for several days after. The explosives, especially those detestable "Atom Bombs" echo far and wide through the night air.

You might think that when people are conversing close-by to people who are sleeping, that the speaker might lower his voice as not to wake them. In fact, it's quite the opposite, they raise their voice just to get through all of the other noises, and end up almost yelling to be heard.

Around 1AM, all these noises finally start to die down as most people begin to go to sleep and traffic becomes sparse. This is just about the time when the dogs come out to wander the empty streets looking for food or a fight. The barking, growling and howling begins to echo through the narrow streets, reaching the ears of other dogs, which answer the call with their own howls, and trigger a citywide dog barking chain reaction.

When we look for a room, many hotels lead us to their "rooms with a view", which usually means it faces a busy street and will offer all kinds of non-stop noises at night. To top it off, the minute I lay down to sleep my mind begins to spin with all kinds of unexpected thoughts and emotions. The train of thought leads to another and then yet another until a temple or mosque in the neighborhood begins their high-volume prayer broadcast.

Now that I've explained just how noisy this part of India is, there is one strange phenomenon that I find quite interesting. It seems that while my brain is preoccupied with all these loud noises, which results in a lack of sleep and fatigue, some small area of my brain registers the unknown sound as a new experience, and I think to myself "What the hell is this? I've never heard such a strange, unique, interesting sonic effect before. This must be India…" Then I let out a smile before I fall into a shallow, short sleep.