I remember a short story by Ray Bradbury that I read as a child. In the story, there has been some kind of devastation, possibly of the nuclear kind, and a man and his son seem to be the only ones left in the world. There isn’t a soul around. The boy seems slightly resentful of that fact. The father tries to be cheerful, but the boy is sullen and uncooperative.

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As you can see, I don’t remember the details of the story very well. But I remember the feelings the story evoked in me vividly.

I felt a little bit like that when I woke up the Sunday before last because it was so quiet. I thought it was 5am or some such, but on normal days, even that early, there’s usually some movement on the road below my balcony that I can hear from my bed.

I checked my phone, it was 9am. The AC wasn’t on to insulate me from any external noise. What happened to the metallic rattle and rumble of the garbage man’s wheelbarrow-like contraption that wakes half of the neighbourhood every morning; why couldn’t I hear battered taxis rattling down the road, bouncing on the pothole just below my balcony; why couldn’t I hear the purring motorcycles or the whine of three-wheeled goods carriers that love visiting my road? There weren’t even any piercing car horns by impatient drivers or snarling lorries rumbling past. Was I the only person in the world? I wasn’t sure if I would like that.

At that point some crows decided to notify me of their presence which is when I remembered: ‘Of course, Bal Thackeray is dead and his funeral is today.’

Now, I don’t want to get into an argument on whether Mumbai should have been that quiet (and it was only because the city shut down on the day of Thackeray’s funeral), but I wish there were more such days in this city.

That Sunday I knew silence of the kind I find at home in Goa. And that’s when I realised how much I miss it. How much I miss spending at least a few minutes of my day in perfect silence without the punctuation of any kind of man-made noise -- be it the ring of my phone, sound of traffic, a neighbour’s television, the whine of a stone-cutter or even the hum of a fridge or AC. All right, even the wretched crows!

You got that kind of silence in Delhi many years ago when the electricity went off in the middle of the night during the height of summer, when all air conditioners and coolers stopped humming and there was a brief moment of silence before people started putting on their generators.

I know some of you may think asking for such perfect silence is a little indulgent or excessive. So I shall settle for at least one day without the noise of traffic. Why can’t we have no traffic days? Or simply no honking days? That will go a long way towards de-stressing many of us.