Sound is an underrated curiosity. Perhaps because it’s a less alien phenomenon than light. At least, it feels more indigenous to Earth. We understand it better. We can relate to it. The ticks of a clock are, after all, less mysterious than the silence between them.

Sound is, however, not without its peculiarities. It can’t travel through a vacuum, for instance, and yet can penetrate surfaces. Unlike light, sound travels non-linearly, carting through everything within its sphere of reach. And unlike light, sound is impervious to opacity. You can shut your eyes or look away from a sight you wish to avoid, but there’s no eschewing sound. We are much more in sound’s control than under light’s command.

And that’s why, there isn’t a pretty sight that can be ruined by an unsavoury noise. All the same, nary an eyesore can’t be improved by euphony. At its best, sound is at once both a survival tool and a pleasure source. Silent movies may charm, but are no patch on the talkies. Because to experience something fully, visuals alone are not enough.

But in a jungle such as Kabini’s, sound is more than just a background score: it is the conveyor of life’s great play, of all the gossip, beamed live. Sound doesn’t merely add crucial context to what we see. It helps us see what our eyes can’t. It opens our mind’s eye to imagine, construct and relate. And it’s also the most palpable indicator of that subtle substance that drives us all: energy.

If, as some science postulates, matter is just a form of energy and energy is just any form of vibration – ergo, sound (audible to us or otherwise) – then the jungle is a neat microcosm of the universe. And there’s no better place than it to contemplate the meaning of sound.

Presently, you look ahead at a vista opening up like the doors of some great spaceship landing on a new planet. A cul-de-sac runs to the land’s end, decanting you into a panoramic theatre screen that stretches from side to side, its top only delineated by the sky. A green carpet lies under you, and then a little ahead, is swept under a volume of water. You are by the backwaters! Of the Kabini!

Clumps of bamboo, many dead and some new, line the opposite bank, over which an ambering sun threatens to drop off the radar. “Welcome to Sunset Point,” says your naturalist. But the words barely register. You’ve already found resonance with the feeling that cannot be named, but only conducted.

It’s curious that inner expansion most often occurs when you are reduced by the scale of creation. You may have had the feeling when lying on your terrace or lawn gazing at a star-studded sky: an act that occasions a suspension of the self we so painstakingly construct and then cling to; our limited beliefs supplanted by the infinity of existence, our hunger for more quelled by the receiving of everything at once.

It is that heart-swell that now suffuses you, as a zephyr threads your nostrils with the pleasure of being alive and your mind levitates towards the formless, as if on a high from the snort of pure air. But the wind, carrying not just a fragrance but also a sound, brings you back to the south of ether.

There is at first the break of a single twig. This is followed by a loud swish. You strain your eyes to scan the treetops but see no langurs cavorting in the branches. There’s silence, and a whole world of imagination in it. Your very pulse dilates. Until another branch breaks, this time a larger one. Your heart, which as though had forgotten to beat, now resumes duty in double shift. And then you hear that which is second in intensity and impact only to a tiger’s roar. It starts as a guttural cry, whose origins as though lie somewhere deep in the earth’s bosom, before turning into a ground-shaking rumble and ending up with a raspy, nasal shriek. A trumpet!

It takes you more than a few moments to process this thundering blare, by which time a herd of elephants emerges from the lantana to the river bank, taking your breath away and leaving a lingering surprise in its wake.

Among the branch croppers and leaf crunchers are a few young females, a young male, a magnificent, large-tusked bull, and a most cherubic little calf sheltering under his mother’s globular abdomen. After walking up to the waterfront, with their ears flapping and tails oscillating, they start kicking into the grass in a bid to loosen up the soil and forage on the most succulent parts. You stay in quiet marvel, offering yourself to the grip of the occasional sounds, when one elephant will let out an audible sigh, a loud snort, or a deep tummy-rumble. All the while, there is the sound of the tearing of grass, a violent but necessary uprooting of life to rise to a larger and more complex form. You watch grass find in its death an elevated destiny.

But you’ve never felt more rooted, more in resonance with nature. The elephants’ presence calms you beyond discretion. It’s as if their weight grounds you within yourself. And you learn to remain in the moment, not a stray thought now intercepting your unfettered joy. The only sense of time is served up by the setting sun, in whose golden glow the soil tossed up by the elephants’s trunks to powder themselves morphs to gold-dust, and falls like confetti in celebration of a beautiful day.

Silence is rightly deified as golden. After all, to quote the wise, it is a “timeless dimension”. But sound is not inimical to silence: seen differently, it is simply the ticks between the pauses of a clock; the part of life that moves; the ephemeral component that is integral to eternity.

Sound is the very mascot of all that is animate, fragile, fleeting, and therefore precious. And so sound is symptomatic of life itself. The grass may grow on its own and the trees may flower and fruit, but between their silences, there are also those flitting between life and death, with buzzing wings, thrumming throats, beating hearts, bringing it all together. And they’re worth hearing.

In Kabini, as you set off in pursuit of sights, if you keep your mind plugged to your ears too, you will hear life. And you may find that it never sounded more compelling.

Santosh Saligram

Santosh Saligram is a writer, editor, photographer, designer and content-and-communications strategist from Bengaluru, who is enamoured with ‘all things sentient' and the tragically futile effort of capturing their magic through creative media. Santosh describes himself as a 'pen-and-camera-wielding raconteur', for his style involves narrating a story in partnership with images, films and graphics to sing paeans of the mystery and joy that are inherent in Nature. He's been a photography mentor, leading tours to various wildernesses for nearly a decade, authored at least two known books partly or fully, and been awarded both nationally and internationally for his pictorial work.

An Aural Journey through Nagarahole: The Sound of Life

Santosh Saligram