I am that

When I first arrived here, I ran from sound of this world and hoped silence was a place where I wanted to be. 

This journey and the mountains taught me otherwise.

In snow country, snow is not snow. It’s fire. It looks white and still carries fire inside it. I learned that early when the wind cut my face and the sky stayed calm, and yet something inside me kept screaming, kept demanding when I came here and standing right in the thick of the snow.

It has been six years since I came to this monastery. A quiet Tibetan monastery, surrounded by mountains and at the foothills of where I always wanted to be, Himalayas. 

Tomorrow, after five full years of not stepping beyond these walls, I must leave at dawn. I must walk down the stone steps, join the men who herd mountain yaks, watch the herd graze all day, and return at sunset. Silent and non dramatic task it may look like but watching something silently with such a busy mind is not easy. Others, a simple task, A day outside. A day among bodies and breath and bells and hooves, Me, a meditation. It feels like stepping into a storm and dancing with rhythm.

For the first five years, I stayed in a room that was mine. Pale yellow walls, like old turmeric left in the sun. One window. Nothing more. Through that window, the valley opened like a long standing wound, and at the bottom of it a river kept moving. A steady, patient river. I always heard its voice. It told me that it had never heard the word “silence”.

I never learned that river’s name. No one told me. Or perhaps they did and I forgot. No, honestly I remembered to forget. By all means, in my head, every river from Himalayas is the Ganga. My mind conceived this thought without my permission. Water reminds me of witness. The quiet thing that observes everything around. In fact, all life saving things air, food, love, poetry, a small kid who is angry on me because I didn’t buy her a chocolate reminds me of this witness, this observer.

The Ganga, to me, is not just water. It is sound turned into something that can be carried. I used to think all the sounds of the world fall into her and become smooth pebbles at the bottom, each pebble holding a thousand voices, a thousand clatters, a thousand cries. The strange part is, if that is true, why are those pebbles so still? Why doesn’t the river tremble with everything it has swallowed? Why didn’t even one pebble jump out and scream? Why didn’t they share the secret of all voices? How can the river know everyone’s good bad and ugly and still say sane?

I told myself I would ask the head monk one day. I told myself that even unanswered questions can be  blessings. I told myself being silent is a profound way of understanding.

But my days were thin and repetitive. I left my room only to eat. Half an hour in the morning, half an hour in the evening. A bowl. A spoon. A few faces. A few words. Then back into my yellow room, back into the window, back into the river that kept moving whether I watched or not.

The head monk was a moon sighting in these days. Only on full moon nights. A glimpse. A distance. After he fell ill and old, even that vanished. Now he appears once in two three months. It felt as he is an old festival everyone wants to forget but the custom keeps it alive. 

The only person who spoke to me like I was still human was the cook, Rinpoche.

Tibetan. Quiet hands. Eyes that looked like they had seen many endings and were not afraid of them. The first day I met him, he introduced himself with a smile and said, “I am only a life that carries memory. A body that carries life.” Then he laughed softly, as if this was a joke the life told and he had finally understood.

In my first week, memories attacked me. Faces. Voices. My mother’s worry. Friends who shared a smoke or drink with me. I had come here saying I wanted nothing, and yet the mind kept reaching out, thirsty.

I asked Rinpoche, “Why does the soul still ache?”

He said, “It is the sound of leaves withering. Small. But once you hear it, you cannot unhear it.”

Sound.

That was the word that ruined me, long before mountains ever saved me.

The smallest sound becomes enormous inside my ears. A spoon striking a plate with ning ning ning sound in a restaurant doesn’t ring, it simply explodes. Shoes scraping a corridor with kirik kirik kirik sound don’t scrape, it tears my ears. A keyboard with tak tadak tak tuk sound in an office doesn’t type, it pounds, and pounds, and pounds, until my skull feels like it is being used as a drum.

Doctors studied me. The best ones. They placed cold instruments against my skin, spoke in careful sentences, used words like “neurology” and “sensitivity” and “misfiring.” They offered pills and routines. Nothing changed. The world remained loud. The world remained sharp.

One night, the doctor gave me tablets to sleep. I swallowed them and sank, grateful for darkness.

Then I woke.

Noise next door. A dog. The neighbour’s dog, left alone every day like an afterthought. It barked, it scratched, it cried. It rang in my ears in loops. I went and had discussion with the neighbour again. She nodded, smiled, forgot.

That day, something inside me broke cleanly, like a bone snapping. I asked myself how can escape all these sounds? 

Answer came in a moment. Cold, I decided, might freeze sound. Cold might turn sharpness into stillness.

So I walked north. The mountains, The Himalayas.

Strangers fed me on the road. A handful of rice. A cup of tea. A blanket in a doorway. People looked at me with that quiet kindness that exists only between those who will never meet again. And like a river finding its way, I reached the Himalayas. Like a river finding a cave to hide in, I reached this monastery.

Here, silence was wide.

For five years, I lived inside it the way one lives inside a hope. I spoke so little that my own voice began to feel foreign. Some months I didn’t speak at all. At night, I slept to the faintest hush, the kind of hush that felt stars brushing the river’s skin and only I could hear the hush.

In my first year, two friends found me.

“Your memory sent us,” they said. My memory. Of course.They know better than anyone that I don’t run toward silence for luxury. I run toward it to survive.

That day, they pulled me into the river. We swam. We laughed loudly. We shouted like children. We sang old songs. We played until the light died.

Then they left at dusk.

After they were gone, I sat at my window and watched the river until my eyes hurt. Love can be cruel, I thought. Love brings sound with it. Love returns you to the world you are trying to escape.

Months passed.

One morning, from the valley, music rose, drums, horns, a thick, living noise. I looked out and saw a hundred monks in a line, wearing masks, dancing and singing. Their bodies moved like a single wave. Their masked faces turned the human into something older, something ritual.

Here, dance is not joy. Dance is an exit.

Rinpoche waved at me from the crowd. I ran down, startled by my own feet on stone, and he pressed a mask into my hands.

“Why?” I asked.

The drums were chewing my thoughts. The sound felt like an animal with sharp teeth, snatching every word before it could leave my mouth.

“Wear it,” he shouted. “Ask nature as loud as you can for what you want. If you ask, it will happen. A dark blue bird on the mountain peak listens. It grants.” 

I don’t know why I believed him. Maybe because desperation makes every myth truth.

I put on the mask.

And I screamed.

Not once. Again and again. Louder each time, until my throat burned.

I asked what I wanted, loudly, as loud as I can,

I don’t want sound.

I don’t want sound.

I don’t want sound at all.

Then I heard it. the mountain’s laughed. The blue bird laughed.

Not a soft laugh. Even the smallest laugh becomes huge inside my ears. It rolled down the slope and struck my skull like thunder. I stood there, mask on my face, begging for silence, and the mountain answered with laughter. A loud laughter. It was not laughing at me I thought. It was laughing at absurdities of human life, and, I am part of it. I am an ant lining up and following the herd knowing if I leave the line I will be crushed to death. It’s not all that of it, by being here, by shutting down from all sounds of the world, I am already out of line.

That night, I couldn’t sleep.

The wind moved through the monastery corridors like a messenger, and every time it passed a room it left behind a tune, a humming, a thin song coming out of thin fingers of kid plucking a string. Room to room, the wind carried music as if it was determined to prove something to me.

The old hell returned.

I walked straight to the head monk.

“Why this ritual?” I asked. “Can’t you live without sound? Is this what you want? to lock me back inside my room? You people came here saying you don’t need faces, you don’t need names. Then why masks? Why noise?”

He looked at me through his covered eyes. For a long moment, he said nothing.

Then he turned east.

He lifted his hand and pointed towards the mountain peak.

“Your time has come,” he said. “Prepare to leave.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to say I came here to disappear, not to depart. But my mouth stayed closed. Somewhere inside me, I already knew that silence was never meant to be a room. It was meant to be a journey.

When I stepped outside, the sky was dark, and yet I saw a small light flicker on the mountain ridge. It looked a moving star. I narrowed my eyes and understood what it was, the dark blue bird Rinpoche spoke about, sitting high above the world, its neck catching a strange shine.

It wasn’t snow that shone.

It was fire.

Tomorrow I will walk down the mountain.

I don’t know which path I will take. I only know what follows me. sound, like a shadow that learned my shape. The wind’s song still dances inside my ears, huge and endless. 

And for the first time, I am not running away from sound, from noise. The mountain taught me the sound I feared is also me. That thou art!