Almost 15 years after leaving school, these days I am revising most of the lessons in history, geography, English literature and science. Though teaching Physics in the University, today I learned about the different tributaries of Ganga, and the life of Bhagat Singh. The credit for this continuing education of mine goes to my neighbour’s daughter revising her lessons every morning. This is helping me in two ways: First of all it helps me brush up all those long-forgotten topics like countries and capitals, Daffodils by Wordsworth, how plants prepare food and so on. Secondly and most importantly, it wakes me up. She has achieved what my 60dB alarm clock fails to do, a notorious late riser that I am.
As my neighbour has two daughters and their simultaneous loud reading falls on my still-sleepy-mind, I cannot say to what extent the revision is helping. For all you know, I may be mixing up the causes of the First World War with the administrative reforms of Akbar the Great. But these morning sessions are definitely helping me keep up my daily schedule.
And during the last two months when the girls had their summer holidays, it was as if there was an automatically appointed substitute. For, every morning during the summer, exactly between 6:45 am an 7:00 am someone (I don’t even know who it is) in my neighbourhood was religiously practising whistling. It has to be a practice session. How else would you justify the rather discordant notes!!!
If you ask me for the most-hated sound, that would, without doubt, be the shrill tttrrrrrrrrrringgggg of my morning alarm. Very alarming indeed. Sure, it wakes me up….but cannot stop me from the ritual of turning it off and snoozing off again. It is here that the unsolicited wakeup calls in the form of whistles and textbook-reading help, making sure that I reach for work on time. The success of this system can be attributed to the fact that his vocal cords are not within my reach. I presume it is a ‘he’, since my friend and roommate said that only a ‘he’ will have this good lung capacity to whistle so long, loud and hard!!
This morning raga recital was going on like clockwork for weeks on end before I started associating wakeup time (the upper limit of the safe wakeup time, that is) with his whistles. Little did he know how much my day’s events depended on him. Or else would he have ditched me on that one occasion –the day I ended up late at work- leaving me to wonder what must have happened, …. raising a million questions in my mind - Has he fallen ill? Is he out of station? Or has he decided that he has mastered all he has to in whistling? Or has technology taken a giant leap overnight permitting whistling in silent mode?
Though unknowingly, even I had functioned as a clock for one of my neighbours. When I was a school girl, ever morning I used to call out for schoolmate as a cue to get out of the house so that we could go to the bus-stop together. This I did at 8:20 sharp without fail, regardless of whether I am ready or not. As she was staying two houses away, I had to be pretty loud for this alarm system to work. Very soon, I ended up as the 8:20 siren for the entire colony.
An elderly uncle in the locality once said that he forgot to take his morning tablet, the day I didn’t go to school. I didn’t believe him then, thinking he was joking. But now, I am not so sure. He may have been right; and now history repeats with me being late for work when my neighbour took a break from his whistling sessions.
In this age of hi-tech alarm clocks ranging from laser targets to grenades to equation solvers, such self-proclaimed alarms get you geared up for the day without actually alarming you. Only, don’t rely on their reliability as has already been proved by me and on me. But, that is the charm of the whole affair. After all who wants to run like a clock?
