Exercise: Household Sounds

The sounds - sizzling oil in the kitchen, into which a batter of flour and vegetable will be fried with perfect timing, its skin crisp and golden, while inside the vegetable will retain its soft crunchiness; the deep-vacuum cleaner, operated by a technician from a cleaning company that I hired through an app from my phone, sucking out bugs, dust and debris, germs and bacteria, invisible terrorists that are powerful enough to induce unexpected and unwelcome allergic reactions that resulted, last night, in my son’s rashes and bumps covering almost all of my son’s torso and some under both of his eyes, reminders also of his sore throat, the hoarseness of his voice, the fever that took place only at night, over the last couple of nights, getting to 38.6 degrees celsius some 12 hours ago, requiring an appointment to the paediatrician in 2 hours; voices of my son and daughter talking to their father in front of the TV, barely audible from my study at the back of the house; from the kitchen again, beeping from the fridge that was left opened just a little bit longer than it should, a knife scraping vegetables off the chopping board and into the waste bin, the tap being opened and water running out to wash who knows what, less than a few seconds; noise from the streets outside, various vehicles zooming up and down, now a motorcycle, now a car, now lorries that would hardly pass any substantial health and safety measure protocols, the clumsiness of poor-quality engines, wheels crushing badly-made, uneven roads, with potholes haphazardly covered and filled with rocks and whatnot - create a perfect background for the rising business in my own mind, the unattainable luxury of an inner stillness and calm that I am longing for. Now comes on the adzan, the call for mid-day prayers, from several mosques at once, all with their own loudspeakers, drowning out all other noise, each missing each other’s beat by just a split second, and their disharmony, together with the buzzing motorbikes and the horns, simply adds to my feelings of unrest, my imagination about the radical Islamic communities that form the majority of the neighbourhood in which I live.