The Inheritance of Humming

Illustration by Sankalpa Raychaudhury for Soup

“They asked me to sing too and I was torn. I remember being envious, nervous and elated all at once. I was in my hostel room, embarrassed that my roommates would hear me. That they would be annoyed that I was conceited enough to take up that much space. So I hummed.”

Aashline has never heard her father hum a song, can’t remember her mother singing to her as a child, and yet a history of softly hummed songs guide her towards accepting herself.  

I don’t know what my father’s hum sounds like. Some days when I look at him, his furrowed eyebrows, heavy sighs and folded arms, all drowning in thought, I wonder if he ever hums when he is alone. I look at him and pray that he hums, at least, when he is alone. 

On rare occasions, I’ve seen him listening to music. When I was a child, I would see him crouching near the radio-cum-cassette player, inserting a tape that had a collection of old English Christmas songs. Now he sits in front of his laptop, his spine bent, with an old Malayalam song playing in the background. He never sings along. He listens to songs the way we remember memories that aren’t ours to claim. I don’t know what he listened to when he was growing up, I don’t know how to ask. And it is a loss for me to never have heard him humming. The void between knowing my father too well and not knowing him at all, is a void where growing up has meant growing apart.

My mother is different. Her voice saunters through the door of my room from the kitchen along with the hot smell of garlic and onion and mint; a jagged tune, an unsteady-key-but-confident-

volume hum. On good days I pause what I am doing and giggle quietly. On difficult days, I close the door. She only wants to be heard beyond the cacophony of the pressure cooker, the loud hiss of water flying from searing pans, the crass rub of the metal ladle working against utensils. It seems like she has done this forever, yet I cannot draw a memory from when I was younger, from when my sister used to live with us. The house became quiet when she left so I don’t know if my mother started humming around then, or if it was only then that I started listening. 

I cannot remember if my mother used to hum to me when I was a small child. If I know one thing about me, it’s that sleep has never come easy so I wonder if her humming ever put me to sleep. When I ask her she tries to prise the memory out of me. 

“Yes of course I hummed. I sang to you. Don’t you remember unni vavavo? I used to sing to you all the time, and the stories! I used to tell you so many stories till you fell asleep, don’t you remember?” 

But I don’t remember. The earliest memory I have of someone humming is in an unexpected voice- Jose Uncle’s. Unexpected because I barely know him, an uncle by marriage who lives in Kerala. But I remember him humming through humid Aimury evenings, in a house hidden beyond narrow, winding roads lined with plants on either side. People who have music in them walk differently. Move differently. I think that’s what held me; his walk. As steady and continuous as a quiet stream. And when he hummed, his hands moved but never trembled. At sixteen, yearning for music in a way that is not quenched by listening, I found myself in front of a guitar held by a teacher whose fingers slid from one fret to the next. It reminded me of Jose Uncle’s voice, seamless.  

I think maybe that is where humming began to fascinate me. He was possibly the first person in my life who called a song manoharamaya (beautiful). A quality that at that age I had only learnt to attribute to things I could touch. I saw that there was freedom in humming, a vulnerability that is rare. I used to meet Jose Uncle once a year. Now, my time in Kerala is packed in three days or less. And often, listening to him humming doesn’t make the cut.

I was someone who accidentally took up space with my body, with my unsure and hesitant step that made me stumble. I used to be okay with that. But as a woman growing up in a city ravaged with sexual violence in every corner, I became brutally aware of my body. How it looked when I walked down the street. I wanted to reduce the space my body took up. And by extension, my voice. On cold Delhi evenings passing through silent roads as an adolescent, I remember pulling my hood over my hair and walking like a man. Wondering if this is how a man walks. My tuition backpack against my chest to hide parts of me that eyes rested on. I used to like humming when I walked, in a whisper that only I could hear. Yet, silent roads and loitering men would stifle me. I wonder now whether Jose Uncle could take the liberty to hum because he was a man, or despite it? 

I was still a teenager when I moved to a new city with the rain and the sea. And there I met three women with a childish love for singing. Even when my own love for it by then was buried somewhere in me so I could never admit it, I became the fourth one.  For us, the city was more than the enticing place where, people said, dreams came true. We were living in the hours meant for sleeping, carving our home with memories and whispering secrets in its corners. We were outsiders trying to make Mumbai ours.We found this shared love for song not long after having met each other. We’d spend the day in our classroom and still send voice notes to each other every evening. The three of them sang songs that I did not know, in distinct voices- and one of those voices reminded me of homecoming. They asked me to sing too and I was torn. I remember being envious, nervous and elated all at once. I was in my hostel room, embarrassed that my roommates would hear me. That they would be annoyed that I was conceited enough to take up that much space. So I hummed. In a low voice, pretending that I hadn’t pressed record on my phone and that it was something I did nonchalantly. I sang the verses I could remember and hummed the ones I couldn’t from Forever Young by Alphaville, a song I used to listen to on the cassette player growing up.

The three women used to hum walking through the colossal, almost dictatorial structure of our college, their voices never echoing but present. They hummed in taxis for no one but the breeze, looking at the rain racing against the window. They hummed when they had things to do, they hummed when they did nothing. Somewhere along the way they became we. And we became I. I was humming. By myself, in public, amidst eyes that I wasn’t paying attention to. I still wore my backpack against my chest, but not for the same reasons. I didn’t feel the need to pretend to be a man, or feign my liberty. Suddenly, anything was possible in this city. 

But I was wrong. College came to an end before any of us were ready to say goodbye. And by then the four of us had changed. We had loved, and gotten hurt by each other and our own selves. Two of them returned to their home cities and two of us who were left behind found ourselves in a strange Mumbai. I don’t remember when the rain began to make me fearful and when I started seeing dirt and death in the sea. Or maybe it had always been there.

It’s been some time since I heard those three women humming, the ones who let me borrow their freedom in ways I cannot begin to thank them for. One of them I rarely hear from anymore. Does she still hum the same way? Another, whose hum used to remind me of my teacher’s fingers on the guitar, now refuses to sing. Does she remember that she has music in her? Yet another, whom I have lost the privilege of listening to. Does she have anyone to listen to her song? 

The house I lived in then had sliding glass windows but even after having spent two years there, I hardly remember the view. Soon, I started walking in the city that once gave me freedom, with a heaviness in my chest that slowed my gait. The eyes had returned, this time more aggressive than before. They lived in me now. For a long time I didn't fight it. It seemed easier to stay silent than to scream. To fantasize about disappearing without consequences. To fill my stomach when I felt hollow. To hurt myself with my thoughts than to heal. I had stopped listening to people. To myself. My laughter fell silent. And so did my humming.

By the time I decided I didn't want to live that way anymore I couldn't escape it. I could see it everywhere, in the corners of my room lined with dust, in the dingy kitchen with a fridge full of rotting food, a pile of clothes unwashed in months. I knew I had to be patient, but the reminders would sit on my chest, immobilising me. There were days I could run to the edge of the world and back in my mind, my heart screaming through my ribs, with my body still pinned to the bed. 

That’s when I began to attempt to hum again. I became watchful of any sound that left my throat. Like I had just discovered I could hum, like it was new and foreign. There is something grounding about hearing your own voice when you’ve been silent for too long. If I could use my voice then it meant I could move too. 

I can exist even when no one is looking.  

I started humming more often. Even though it began when I was alone it slowly permeated into semi-public places like where I worked, with people around. Hesitant and quiet, at the terrace, drinking my morning tea or at my desk, glued to a screen, drowning in to-do lists. I used to hum the first verse of Frank Ocean’s Ivy. A song I learnt to love by repetition. But the eyes still lived in me. Told me I was not at liberty to do so. I think there were times I forced myself to even when my voice would tremble. I persisted because it started to mean something. I am, despite my mind. It’s been a while now since humming returned to me like second nature. Now, it happens before I know it. Maybe it had to do something with the fact that I left. The city that taught me so much, the job I thought would make me happy, the house I called home. I came back to Delhi a few days before the lockdown was announced in March 2020. And forced into a space of isolation and introspection, I began to do the hard work I’d shortchanged for hurt back in Mumbai. It took a long while but I could listen to people again, and inevitably, myself. And the few times I stepped out of the comfort of home, I found myself humming, walking in night-time Delhi, its cold air numbing my nose. Still, I don't think I will ever know if depression has truly left me. I constantly look over my shoulder, terrified that it might be around the corner. 

That is why I pray my father hums when he is alone. I do not know how to ask him if he does. Sometimes things that seem awfully simple are the hardest to do, like humming itself. 

Mummy, did daddy hum for us when we were children?

Yes, he did. 

Aashline R. Avarachan is a freelance writer. When not calling herself a writer, she can be found reading a two-hour book in ten, playing devil's advocate while daydreaming or strumming half-songs on her ukulele with a warm cup of chai beside her. She is @manjadi_kuru on Instagram.