the silent record

One slow hot afternoon, when there was absolutely nothing to do, I decided the gang would set a record. The record for staying completely silent. The longest the whole gang had ever gone, all of us at once, without one single sound, timed properly, out on the porch, for the history of the kampung.

A record needs a referee, and for a referee you want the most unbearably correct person you know, so I got Faiz. Faiz lives a few houses down and does everything the proper, sensible way. When I told him about the record, he did not just agree to referee it. He went home and came back with a rulebook. An actual rulebook, that he had written out and printed, with rules in it, numbered. What counts as a sound. What does not. Whether a cough counts. Whether a stomach gurgle is the fault of the person it happens inside, or an act of nature nobody can be blamed for. He decided a gurgle was an act of nature. He decided a burp was not. He had a stopwatch, a real one, and he held it the way a doctor holds the thing that tells him whether you are going to live.

Aiman would not play. Aiman charges for everything, so instead of joining he set up an insurance stall on the side. You paid him a few sen, and if you broke the silence you got nothing back, which is just a way of losing money very quietly. The only clause that paid out was if Aiman himself stayed silent the longest. And everyone knew Aiman could not stay quiet for one single minute. In fact, while he was busy explaining how he would win at being quiet, Aiman was talking the whole time.

We sat down on the porch in a row. Faiz held up the stopwatch. He looked at each of us in turn, very serious, like the man who starts a race. He pressed the button.

The porch went silent.

Kavi broke it in about four seconds.

Everybody knew he would. Kavi only knows loud, and asking Kavi to be silent is the single funniest thing you can ask Kavi to do. He lasted four seconds, and then announced, at the top of his voice, "I AM BEING EXTREMELY SILENT. NOBODY TALK TO ME, BECAUSE OF HOW SILENT I AM BEING." Faiz ruled him out, by rule one, regretfully. Kavi spent the rest of the record as a spectator, which he did loudly. Faiz threatened to add a spectator rule. Kavi loudly agreed to be quiet, which broke his own new silence before it had even started.

The rest of us arranged ourselves for the long haul. Hana sat like a girl posing for a serious photograph that was never going to be taken. Divya shut her eyes, because Divya had worked out, correctly, that half of staying silent is simply not looking at anybody. I put my own hand over my own mouth, which is not against the rules, I checked, twice, with my eyebrows, because checking out loud would have ended me in the first minute.

The rest of us held.

It is very hard to be silent on purpose. The second you are trying not to make a sound, everything in the world becomes funny. A leaf is funny. The shape of somebody's ear is funny. The harder you hold the laugh in, the more it fights to get out of you, swelling up behind your face like a sneeze that has changed its mind about where to go.

Divya went next. Not with a word. With a small strangled sound she made while trying not to make a sound, which Faiz ruled, sadly, by rule four, was a sound. She folded her arms and shut her eyes and was out. Then Hana's stomach made a long, slow, complicated noise, an entire opinion of a noise. Hana went purple holding the laugh. But the gurgle itself was an act of nature, so Hana stayed in, sitting so stiff and so serious she looked like a girl somebody had switched off at the wall.

Ah Wei went soon after. Not with a sound, at first. He had a sweet in his pocket, and the rulebook said nothing about eating, so he ate it, silently. Which would have been fine, except a sweet eaten silently in a dead-quiet row of children is a very loud thing to watch. Watching it set Divya off again, from where she sat already out. Then Faiz had to rule on whether a person who is already out can put a person who is still in out, which took him some time and a fresh page.

The makciks arrived in the middle of it.

The makciks always arrive. They came up the steps the way they always come, and they did not know it was a record, so they did what they do, which is talk. "Why are you all sitting there with your mouths shut," they asked. "Are you in trouble? Were you all told off at once? And whose child is the small loud one who has already lost?"

I could not answer, because answering is a sound, so I did the rule with my hands, the new one I invented on the spot, that grown-ups talking does not count against the players. Faiz checked his rulebook, found nothing against it, and allowed it. So the makciks settled in to watch us be silent, narrating the whole thing at full volume, helping themselves to the kuih, telling each other how good we were being, which made being good about a hundred times harder.

And then a strange thing happened. The silence got long enough that I started to hear the kampung.

I do not mean I heard nothing. I mean I heard everything. All the sounds that are always there, that I never once hear, because usually I am the loudest thing in any place I am standing. With all of us quiet at the same time, under the makciks, the whole street came up out of the quiet, one sound at a time.

A gecko, up under the roof, counting something. The drip of somebody's tap two houses down. A motorbike a long way off, then closer, then gone. Atok's radio, low, through a wall, doing the football names and then the jam on the Causeway, to nobody. A chicken having a small private thought. The flap of washing on a line. Somewhere, a baby that was not our baby, grizzling and then not. The afternoon azan starting, far off at one surau, then nearer at ours, the two of them not quite together, and then together.

I looked along the row. They had heard it too. Divya had opened her eyes. Hana had turned her head a little toward the azan. Even the makciks had gone quiet, without being told, without it counting for or against anybody, because the whole street was playing at once, and you do not talk over a thing like that. We sat there, the whole porch, dead still. Nobody was thinking about the record now.

It was Kavi, of course, who ended it. Kavi, who cannot hold a thing in, who had lost in the first four seconds and had nothing left to lose. He leaned over and whispered, far too loud, "Do you hear that," and pointed at nothing. At all of it. At the whole street.

And that was the end. Somebody had spoken. By rule one, the record was over.

Nobody minded. Nobody even asked the time. We sat on the porch a while longer, just to keep listening, the gecko and the tap and the far motorbike and Atok's radio and the chicken and the two azan finding each other at last.

Aiman, who had insured the whole thing, worked out that with the record abandoned, nobody could ever collect. He quietly kept every sen. It was the safest business he ever ran.

The stopwatch lay on the step, stopped, forgotten. Faiz did not write the time in his rulebook. There did not seem to be much point.