OUT OF EDEN WALK

It is harvest season in Punjab. National Highway 7, the aorta of agrarian commerce in northwest India, is a wall of noise.

Tractors provide the percussive underpinning to the soundtrack from hell. They flow past in endless sequence, the thup-thup-thup-thup of their engines counterpointed by the brazen beats of bhangra, the folk music of Punjab, blaring from custom-fitted stereos. A truck overloaded with wheat teeters up the road, its banshee whine a ceaseless protest against the impossible load it is carrying. A groaning tractor-trailer, bulging with chaff, nudges us off the shoulder of the road.

Paul Salopek and I are embarked on the India leg of the Out of Eden Walk, across Punjab, en route to the deserts of Rajasthan. With us is our little pack donkey, Raju, and Virender Singh, the donkey handler.

We walk a blacktop road, pulled taut between villages. Car cocoons zoom by, trailing booming bass thumps in their wake. One car speeds by so fast, the energy of its wake slams us sideways. A truck growls for right of way as it veers to the wrong side of the road to overtake the lumbering vehicle in front. Motorcycles with defunct mufflers weave in and out of this chaos, revving their engines a notch higher as they roar past us. A construction worker starts up a juddering jackhammer beside the road.

I wince.

Paul and I exchange empathetic glances. It is just 20 yards off the tarmac to some trees, Paul says. Twenty yards from the blare of horns to the rustle of wheat, from the whine of speeding trucks to the lowing of lazing cows. Just 20 yards, Paul says, from blaring bhangra to lilting birdsong. We crave quiet in what must be one of the noisiest countries in the world.

Summer is upon us. The mercury climbs past 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit). The sun bakes the asphalt to a sizzling 50 degrees; it bubbles under the assault and bounces the heat back up, searing through the soles of my sneakers and raising blisters on my feet. The riverlands of the Sutlej and the Beas are morphing, with every mile walked, into the sandlands of the Thar desert.

A few days of the heat, the dust, and the relentless noise of NH7, and our longing for the silence of backcountry dirt roads becomes an obsession.

We search for untrafficked, untarmacked back roads. We pore over maps, we badger shopkeepers and farmers and cyclists and hoteliers, we scour Google Maps for traces of light white paths—hints of goat tracks, camel tracks, shepherd paths, anything but tarmac—that will take us from torture to tranquility. On some days we get lucky, veering off the blacktop onto little used back roads.

Here, the sand underfoot is fine, of surpassing softness and a pale straw color. It yields beneath each tread, and our shoes make a soothing chush-chush as we walk. The lack of noise frees up our attention, our mindspace, to the astounding array of sights and sensations the desert teems with.

I hear the rustle of a wren in a bush. I compare the wing beat of a sparrow with that of a mynah. I crouch next to ripe wheat and tune in to the papery rustle. A warbler swings from a stalk, its song sweet in the silence.

While walking through the riverlands several weeks before, we’d come upon a vast wetland, formed by damming the Sutlej and Beas. I’d leaned over the wall of a small dam that cut the river. Water roiled below in fractals, its sound loud, but not as loud as, say, a dishwasher. We’d pushed upstream. The river there burbled softly, eddying, breaking up, and flowing on glassy and smooth.

I’d persuaded a boatman to ferry me across and back in a row boat; I wanted to find dolphins. Bobbing midstream, I listened intently for the plops of fish this stretch teemed with. A kingfisher rattled past and faded out of sight. And then, I heard one of the sweetest sounds in all the world: the blowhole sigh of a river dolphin. An Indus dolphin, one of fewer than a dozen remaining in this river, arced out, sighed, and dived back underwater.

Silence, for me, is neither an absence of sound, nor is it uniform. The silences of the river are different from the silences of a desert. Yet both are vast, and they are full of surprises.

One mid-morning, we wait out the desert heat under the illusory shelter of some trees. Paul reclines against his backpack and writes in his journal, the soft turning of pages audible in the hush. I lie under another tree, stretching to get rid of the kinks from a morning’s walk of some 10 miles. Raju, our pack donkey, rolls in the dust, treating himself to nature’s sunscreen, then gets up and noiselessly ambles over to the shade of another tree.

These are khejri trees (Prosopis cineraria), sacred to the people of the desert. The “loo,” the hot wind of summer, whooshes through its feathery leaves. The call of a spotted dove rises above the gush of loo. A dung beetle scuttles by. An owl hoots in the distance. A hysterical lapwing, screeching “tireee! tireee! tireee!” takes off in unnamed fright, flying sideways against the wind, and away.

I take it all in, my senses heightened by my own silence.

SOUND IS MECHANICAL ENERGY that has a physical impact. The vibration—the sound wave—travels through the air to the ear, where sensors pick it up and translate it into what we hear. What sound waves do is tap on your eardrum. A strong enough sound wave can whomp us to the ground. The loudest sound can kill us.

Sound is measured in decibels, a logarithmic unit. A whisper measures 20 decibels; normal breathing is 10. But it is all relative: A vacuum cleaner at 70 decibels is twice as loud as a restaurant conversation at 60. If you were to subject yourself for eight hours to the juddering of a jackhammer, the revving of a motorcycle, or a farm tractor running at full throttle, you would risk serious damage to your eardrum. Those Punjabi tractor drivers, with stereo speakers blaring bhangra inches from their ears, run risks they have no awareness of.

Our ears may recover from a sudden loud sound, but a constant vibration on our eardrums at 80 decibels and more can be downright dangerous, causing lasting damage. Hence sound is used as a method of torture.

As I write this, a girl giggles from somewhere behind the wall of my living room in Manhattan. A siren’s distinctive three-note wail pierces the street with its urgent demand for right of way. Something thuds onto the floor of the apartment above my head. The theme song of Friends wafts in from a nearby apartment. My phone pings. I open my notebook and scratch a thought—the sixth in a growing list of notes to myself. I stand up and pry open a window, which swings outward with a protesting shriek. Summer rain falls noiselessly to the pavement below. A jackhammer starts up, its judder ricocheting against the walls of cheek-by-jowl apartment blocks and barging into my space 15 floors above. An impatient driver presses down on his horn for a full five seconds. The refrigerator compressor starts up. Thunder rumbles in the New York night. Two-hundred yards away, a ferry sounds a long sonorant whistle. I close the window on one of the noisiest cities in the world.

Noise is often termed the “ignored pollutant,” one that can lead to hypertension, anxiety, heart disease, and depression.

Nature can be noisy too. The blue whale and the sperm whale are noisier than jet planes at take-off. A snapping shrimp lives up to its moniker of a pistol shrimp, producing a shock wave that measures 200 decibels underwater which, outside water, is as loud as gunfire. The greengrocer cicada stridulates at 120 decibels.

On our walk, the “noise” of the desert does not grate on my nerves the way a car roaring past on baked asphalt at 60 miles an hour can. The car is not only eight times louder than the sound of crickets in a national park, but also a zillion times more repulsive. I shudder at the sound of a revving motorbike but revel in the trumpeting of an elephant. The horn of a truck sets my teeth on edge, but I can listen to an orchestra of Pompona imperatoria, a cicada in the old forests of Borneo, which sounds just like a truck horn, for hours.

Studies have found that natural sounds do not have the same effect on us as artificial sounds. For example, in a 2017 study that used brain scans and heart rate monitors, along with behavioral experiments, people showed a higher level of stress when exposed to artificial noise than when exposed to natural sounds. The latter helped the body relax and function better, while the former exacerbated the body’s “fight or flight” response.

On the Out of Eden Walk, we have a rich complement of both kinds of sounds. Of all the things I expected to take away from the walk, I did not expect this: a craving for silence, a keener appreciation for the nature of sound, a heightened sensitivity to metal striking metal, motors, beeps. A sentiment bordering on misophonia.

The summer dawn comes early. Sindh sparrows and warblers and doves and peacocks make up the dawn chorus. We rise before the sun and walk between villages on dirt roads that flank stagnant canals, the plumbing of an agrarian dream in the desert lands. Paul walks under a ficus tree and alarms roosting ibises, night herons, and egrets. Squawks rend the air as the large birds circle the sky before gliding back to their silence.

We walk on.

We find a roadside trucker’s stop, a dhaba. It is eleven in the morning, and the sun glares down from high overhead. We try to rest. Around us, vessels clang, people talk at unnecessarily high volumes. A desert cooler whirrs and groans, blowing dust into my face. A diesel truck idles in front of the dhaba; another revs up and powers away. A television blasts a Bollywood movie at full volume. I squirm.

Eventually, we trudge on through the most populated desert in the world, reaching a village of about 2,500 people where we find shelter for the night in the home of a farmer. Night descends with a startling suddenness, like a hood pulled over my face. There is no electricity—the Indian army, engaged in desert exercises, has blacked out all villages within a three kilometer radius.

We lie on charpoys—beds made of four stout wooden legs held together with woven cords—under a cloche of stars. I watch one break free from its moorings and streak brightly across the sky. Its flight is silent, but that is only because we are too far to hear. The Tunguska event, probably the single loudest event in history, was a meteor breaking up perhaps five miles above the Earth. It shattered the 300 decibel mark.

A David Wagoner poem sounds gently in my mind:

“When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him.
They looked at him,
Half-smiling. They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened. One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No. They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now…”

Paul snores gently, rhythmically. Raju, the donkey, crunches on chickpeas. A bull shifts under a tree in the courtyard. The voice of our solicitous host cuts into the silence: “Go check on the donkey.” I hear soft footsteps fade away, then shuffle back into earshot. A younger voice, that of the son of our host, whispers, “He’s fine.”

The desert falls silent. I try to catch the sound of stars singing.

Arati Kumar-Rao is an independent environmental photographer and writer who documents the effect of ecological degradation on ecosystems and communities in South Asia.