The Afternoon

My granny's village wears a quaint sound of silence in the afternoon. A sound of quietness laced with some sparrows' chirps from the branches of guava, mango or banyan trees, or from ledges or parapets of napping people's houses. A sound of quietness striped by the grin of leaves, perched on the branches of sacred fig trees, swerving along the soothing breeze that relieves us from heat in summer and badgers us to put on woollen clothes in winter. And a sound of quietness accentuated by the huge pond rippled by dainty ducks scurrying across the water surface. Maids tip-toe out of the napping people's backdoors with cooking and dining paraphernalia to wash them in the pond water. The older ones have learnt to amalgamate their sounds with this silence. They cautiously swab the steel ware, immerse them in water, arrange them in order to tiptoe back to their masters' homes. The younger ones, shuffling out of childhood and donning the garb of newfound youth, are too preoccupied to notice the afternoon's rhythm. Too naive to submit to this quaint silence, they rush to the bank, dump the utensils and crockery down with a thud, swiftly mop the surfaces, plop them on the water, bang them one on top of another, scoop them and rush back, leaving the afternoon sound to recuperate.

The quaint silence, laced with sparrows' chirp, striped by leaves' grins, accentuated by middle-aged maids and fragmented by the younger ones, thaws later with the approaching evening. As the napping people wake up and pandiculate, step out of their bedrooms, ease around for a while and then go about their daily chores, the afternoon sets sail for some distant land. However, next day when the children are back from school and the local shopkeepers have shut their shops and headed home for lunch, the quaint sound of silence makes its way back in the village.