The Fear of a Fall

Last week I was standing on the edge of a canyon, the Grand Canyon and wondering to myself, "What if I fell from this great height?". The wife pulled me back before I could pursue that chain of thought. I wonder if men and women who reach great heights of success suffer from a similar fear of falling to ordinariness. Maybe it is this fear that keeps them going. I who have never stood that high will never know how it feels.

I must confess that as a child I had always been trepidatious about heights. And by that I mean any elevation above five feet or so. To conquer this great fear I had once jumped from the top of my kindergarten school's boundary wall, and promptly broken my left wrist. The wrist healed in a month, but the fear lingered.

In those days there was always some mela in town to celebrate one festival or the other. Among them the one I distinctly remember was held during the Rath Yatra season. What fascinated me most was the vertical cartwheel that was installed in the middle of the school ground. It was a clumsy assimilation of wooden pieces assembled to look like a giant wheel. I am sure you agree that a twelve feet rotating wheel qualifies as "giant" when seen through a child's eye. So I waited in line with bated breath as a man in chequered lungi kept heaving the cartwheel with all his might.The contraption creaked and squealed like a captive monster as the man's voice traveled loud and clear above the medley of children, announcing the combination of rates to lure and dare them to ride it. The synchronized cacophony of the periodic squeak of the cog laced with screams and cries of children aboard that went with this ritual had a siren's effect in attracting more naive children, their parents and relatives towards it. In a way this was more a whirlpool than a cartwheel, I thought.

The wheel had several wooden "buckets" hooked to it. These buckets dangled precariously as they went higher up one after the other. One could see several heads pop out of each bucket. These heads had paid for the tortuous (and torturous) ride and were just a few paces in time ahead of me. Some of the heads screamed as if their lives depended on the decibels they generated. Some had already overstepped their limits and now stayed still with silent open mouths, like gargoyles too scared to scream. There were other that silently bobbed around without a reaction on their face. As they came down I could momentarily see their faces wet with tears. These were the unfortunate ones who rode the monster to prove to their proud parents standing below that their ward was a veer putra and not a puny little kid.

With all the spotlight on the cartwheel one could easily miss the actions of rank adults down below. But then, out of the crowd appeared a man with an analog camera in one hand and a flummoxed kid in another. The man sent the reluctant kid for a ride on the wheel. As the kid rode the cartwheel the man held his camera close to his eyes and followed it's motion trying hard to focus on the kid. As the bucket made a descent the camera flash lit up in front of the kid's eye and sent him on his way upwards, wailing for the agony to end. The attempt had perhaps resulted in an unsatifactorily hazy shot of a moving child's wailing head. So now, determined to succeed the man made another attempt. But by then the cartwheel had picked speed resulting in a few more hazy shots. By then the crowd had gathered to watch the tamasha of a loony cameraman. From a distance it looked as if an evil spirit (perhaps of the cartwheel monster) had gotten inside the man's head and was making him revolve his head in rapid circles with a camera aimed at his kid. Obsession had turned a decent man into an art photographer. Once the ride was over he paid the lungi-man to take his kid for yet another ride. The episode finally ended when the mother of the child arrived after having devoured a dozen phuchkas from the nearby stall. She quarelled and clawed and screamed and pleaded till the father inside the man overpowered the photographer in him.

I slid away from the moving line as the orgy continued and walked towards the temple of goddess Kali nearby at the shore of the Ganges. I prayed for strength and other things that a little mind finds suitable to ask a goddess. The mela repeated itself for the next several years, but I never took a ride on that creaking cartwheel. Not once. Last week I was standing on the edge of a canyon. I was not looking to jump, or trying to be brave. I was asking myself what causes this fear. If I was standing at the same spot on a dark moonless night, not able to fathom the depth of the empty space the lay a step ahead, would I be afraid? Was it the knowledge of the consequence that scared me now as it did so many years before? Perhaps there is a little lesson to be learnt here. Perhaps the most important things I do in this life will be because I refuse to pay heed to the consequenses. Perhaps.