The Silence Spectrum: From Mumbai Noise to London Hush

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sound of Nothing

Let me tell you about the first time I heard actual silence in London. Not the fake kind you get in Mumbai at 3 AM when the workers step away for chai, but proper, uncomfortable silence. The kind where you start wondering if something’s wrong. I remember standing in Richmond Park, and for a second, I thought - did the world shut off? Should I call someone?

Nope. Just a regular Thursday evening, apparently. A few birds chirping. A labrador losing its mind over a squirrel. That was it.

Mumbai: No Whispers Here

Back home, quiet was never a good sign. If you didn’t hear at least three people arguing, two scooters sputtering past, a pressure cooker going off, and the neighbour’s TV blaring the news, something felt off. In Mumbai, noise isn’t background - it’s just part of being alive. Quiet made you uneasy. It usually meant a power cut, curfew, or that someone nearby had died.

One evening in London, I called my 80-year-old mother, in India. At my end, in London, it was unusually quiet in the house - no traffic outside, no kids yelling in the park nearby, just silence.
“What’s wrong?” she asked the moment she picked up. “You sound weird.”
“I’m fine, aai (aai meaning mother in Marathi - one of the languages in India)” I said. “It’s just… quiet here.”
She paused. “But it’s 7 PM.”
Exactly.

And how do I explain to someone whose idea of normal includes construction dust, street vendors, and doorbells ringing mid-conversation, that I’m in a place where people try not to disturb their own thoughts? My daughter, still in Mumbai, sends me voice notes that are basically audio documentaries. Not because she’s talking in code, but because every message includes a full background score - someone testing wedding drums, a hawker yelling about bananas, maybe a protest or a cricket match or both. She’ll be calmly describing her day while chaos unfolds like it’s part of the conversation.

London: Where Even the Trees Are Polite

I’m three years in, and I still don’t fully understand London’s quiet. People lower their voices like they’re in a museum, even on the street. If someone sneezes, they apologise as though they’ve dropped a full plate in church. In Mumbai, someone could sneeze during a loudspeaker aarti and nobody would flinch. There’s this constant effort here to be acoustically considerate. Everyone's volume knob is permanently set to ‘soft and non-threatening.’ My husband has adapted so well it’s a little unnerving. He now speaks in this low, steady tone I barely register from the next room. The man who once competed with rickshaw horns to get a word in is now basically a whispering monk. And our 18 year old son? Fully bilingual in volume. On video calls to his grandmother, he raises his voice like he’s announcing arrivals at the local station, and she still tells him, “Speak up, beta (son)!” Meanwhile, I’m sitting there thinking, “he’s shouting, aai. This is the London version of shouting.”

The Great Silence Learning Curve

It’s been a strange adjustment. In Mumbai, I could sleep through a concrete drill. Here, the wall clock ticking has become my sworn enemy. A clock! I never even noticed them back home. Here, I’ve nearly taken one off the wall in rage.

Phone calls are weird now. In India, if you weren't practically shouting, people assumed you were ill or dying. Here, entire relationships are maintained through soft-spoken conversations. It’s like everyone took a masterclass in quiet expression.

Two Cities, Two Soundtracks

Mumbai is noise, and noise is Mumbai. It’s not a problem that needs fixing - it’s just how the city breathes. You wake up to bells, bargaining, people shouting affectionate insults across balconies, and traffic that moves mostly in theory. It’s loud because everyone’s living their lives out in the open.

London is different. People here don’t need to raise their voices - things mostly work, people wait their turn, and no one’s trying to shout over a collapsing system. Sometimes it feels like everyone’s playing along to rules you weren’t told about - like you arrived late to a very quiet game.

The Unexpected Joy of Actual Silence

Here’s the part I didn’t see coming: I like the quiet now. Not in some spiritual “I’ve found inner peace” way - just in the very basic sense that it’s nice not to have to fight the air to think. Libraries are actually silent. Parks feel like they exist so people can be alone with their thoughts. Evening walks happen without three competing sound systems in the background.

My mother, of course, finds this deeply suspicious. “You’re getting too English,” she says every time we speak, as some kind of festival explodes in the background. “Soon you’ll be drinking tasteless tea and standing in lines for fun.” She’s not entirely wrong. I’ve become oddly specific about queues, and I do find weather small talk strangely comforting. But what I’ve really discovered is this: silence makes room. For thought. For focus. For just existing without being pulled in twenty directions. 

The Beautiful Contradiction of Home

The truth is, I'm homesick for Mumbai's chaos and deeply grateful for London's quiet. I miss the comfort of constant noise – the way it made you feel connected to the heartbeat of eight million people living their lives simultaneously. But I also love being able to read without someone's television drama providing unwanted commentary, or having phone conversations where I can actually hear the person speaking.

Mumbai comes alive when I geet calls from the family back home - horns, someone yelling across the street, music playing from somewhere, a pressure cooker whistling like it’s on a mission. It makes me laugh. That’s home. Then I hang up and sink into London's gentle hush, and this is home too.

I’ve become bilingual in silence. I can sleep through Mumbai's midnight construction and London's aggressive quietness. I can have a conversation that's audible over traffic chaos and one that happens in whispers on London bus. I've learned to miss the noise and appreciate the quiet, which makes me either culturally sophisticated or completely confused.

But when my son asks me which city I prefer, I tell him the truth: Mumbai taught me that life is loud and messy and wonderfully human. London taught me that sometimes the most beautiful sound is no sound at all. And somehow, I've learned to call both of them home.

Though I'll admit, sometimes I put on Mumbai traffic sounds from YouTube just to feel properly nostalgic. Don't tell my mother – she'd never understand why someone would voluntarily listen to honking horns when they could be enjoying the suspicious quiet of a Wednesday evening in London.