Ready, Steady… oh ! – (A short story)

A constant buzz of cars and buses interjected periodically with sirens from perambulating ambulances choked in traffic, soot covered clothes suffocating helplessly from the balcony, dust laden chrysanthemums in the thin patch of soil baptized as garden and concrete floor circumscribing our building to accommodate the overcrowded SUVs; the picture is not unique to our apartment in an urban environment. Yet the annoyance is amplified by Chennai’s humidity and the canal beneath that serve as the world’s largest breeding ground for notorious mosquitoes.  

It was a typical Saturday evening lazily wasted over a mid-day movie. After our evening tea with freshly made onion bajjis, my nephews, son and I marched to our car parking with our accessories, a plastic cricket bat, a soft tennis ball and a couple of toddlers bicycles. The open patch that could accommodate four cars in each side of our apartment building was our luxurious playground. The combined age of all the three boys put together was less than half of mine. The eldest of the kids who turned 10 last week has been enrolled in `Adyar Cricket Academy’ whence he believed that Virat Kohli would invite him to play IPL. But that’s not quite damaging. My biggest worry is his belief that his uncle is a great cricketer. I hadn’t objected to his assumptions, and in fact fed him with my creative anecdotes on how great a cricket star I was during my school days. I was confident and convinced that my attempts were no different from any other parent who tries to inspire their wards with their non-existing accomplishments. Well, any bluff has to face its judgement day. My cricket experience which was restricted to being a fifth umpire when watching world cup matches in Doordarshan was challenged when my nephew screamed “Mama, bowl for me. Take my wicket… I can handle your doosra…”. As my deliveries were going all around except the stumps, which is nothing but a set of imaginary lines in our compound wall, I complained about the pitch, ball, sandals and even the weather, everything except me was the source of my poor bowling. As I touched my 10^th delivery, I was already panting with a sharp ache near my shoulder. My nephew, on the other hand, was a tough batsman hitting boundaries for every delivery. The fourth boundary jumped cross the wall and fell into the neighbouring apartment. I leaned over the compound wall to ask the kids playing there to hand over the ball to me. As I balanced on a left-over stump of an Ashoka tree in our compound, I noticed my neighbour, Anand playing badminton with the kids there. I waved at Anand and he acknowledged me with a half wave and a split-second head nod before receiving a shuttlecock for a tricky backhand stroke. But he missed it, not because of my interference; he would have missed it anyway, for he too had bluffed to his kids that he was a zonal champion in school days. As Anand picked the shuttlecock, he smiled at me, we understood the physical exertion with the only satisfaction that we were not alone. As some other kid threw the ball at me, I was caught off-guard and nearly fell from the stump tearing a portion of my dhoti. In the intervening few moments when collecting myself before my next delivery, I was wondering how these kids are enjoying themselves even with the limited space they have. I questioned my egotistic nostalgia about my childhood days free from traffic, assignments with endless time and too many kids to hang around. We had a perennial supply of stories from our grandparents in exchange for massaging their legs during bedtime. Will these kids believe that our dad used to be back home from office before 6 PM every day? The silhouette of those memories hardens as we pity the present generation of kids. But childhood happiness is like the music notes, we might frame it with Mozart or Bhimsen Joshi for our comfort, but the notes are never constrained. They flow through the hollow bamboo and produce new compositions for every generation that it embraces.

That forty minutes of kid’s time in the car park might have burnt more calories than the weekly targets of fashionable beach joggers. Luckily an SUV of our neighbour honked at the gate, the old disgruntled watchman who has forgotten laughter in who knows how many decades paced to open the gate. Our watchman hailing open-door policy and hating us for closing the gates is perfectly understandable; seeing him running to unlatch the gate for every car honk satisfies his arthritis that grins with its spanner near his knee joints. But our neighbour behind the wheels too loathes our playing in the car park, as we close the gates when we played and our watchman sometimes exercises his choice of being deaf to car-honks. As he descended, he spilled loose a decoction of casual and authoritarian stare, containing multiple emotions including his supremacy over the parking lot which we had encroached in the past hour, his hatred towards the kids whom he believed were responsible for the scratches in his shining SUV’s bonnet and of course a shamming smile, out of courtesy. When you are taking care of three kids, you have a perfect excuse even to ignore the pope’s presence. So, my neighbour’s cold stare went unacknowledged as he walked past us. Nevertheless, I was thankful to him as his car brought an end to my ordeal of bowling.

It took some time to collect all of them before marching home and none were even remotely prepared for what followed on that warm evening. We assembled in front of the lift, waiting after its thumping departure from the top floor. It came to a stop a foot above the floor level. Then, the haggard lift box was careful in descending its last 30 cms, like a cautious elephant. But the kids were impatient for its sport and pulled open the old-fashioned rusted shutters. The tiny wheels on the top and bottom edges of the shutter had unevenly worn out and you need an acrobat’s skill to pull the shutter straight. The mechanical limit switch to sense its door closure had its hay days long past. It’s probably older than our watchman and was never convinced that the door was closed until we jolted it three times hard. As we squeezed ourselves into the tiny stainless-steel cabin, we were oblivious to the dirt and ragged lift floor. The kids were jumping to reach the lift buttons, a game I am not very fond off. My nephew shoved my son with his elbow and my son with his shoulder as they squandered time, pressing all the lift buttons they could access with their tiny fingers capped with dirty nails. The geriatric control panel reading signals through its thick lens blinked at the random requests passed by the toddlers behind the stainless-steel plate and like a old barber confronted with new names of hairstyles from the internet, just gave up. The lift motor, a cousin of control panel made an effort to push us by a couple of inches against gravity and then stalled. The lift stopped permanently, a revolt against the miseries it’s been subjected to.

Amid the jumping, it took me a few seconds to realize that the cabin wasn’t moving. It was my elder nephew who noted “mama, lift is stuck”. I pulled the kids away and pressed the lift button for 1^st floor. Sensing no movement, I pressed again and again. Thoughtlessly, I pressed other buttons hoping defibrillation in action behind the walls. Seeing my alternating button squeeze, the kids came back gleefully thinking that I was competing with their game. I pulled them back; frustrated, I decided to take the stairs. When I tried to pull the shutter back, it wasn’t opening and was stuck. Only after draining all the left-over energy in my shoulders post-bowling, which wasn’t much anyway, did I notice the lift floor. The lift cabin was a few inches above the ground. The lift motor had overestimated its capacity to lift us by a floor before failing after a few inches. Now, we can’t open the shutter which had locked the limit switch’s lever in a tiny slot that opens only at the floor level and not even an inch above.

Before common sense prevailed, I tried to pull the shutters open, pressed the lift buttons, and kept alternating, hoping that something would work. But the particular event of our being locked inside that dirty cabin wasn’t probabilistic and fate just stood behind me staring, unperturbed by my stupidity, perhaps with some understanding from its past experience with others. I finally accepted the reality that we were locked and panicked. But, I hid, or at least tried to hide it from the kids “it’s all right, I will take care” I lavished my assurance with a beaming smile. You should have seen my elder nephew’s instantaneous disappointment that crawled quickly under his eyes when I shouted “Help, Help !…” Oh god, what innocence have you stuffed these kids with, the two younger ones thought it was another game and shouted with me “Help, help”, giggling all along. Only my elder nephew was shocked, whose eyes I avoided. After a few minutes of repeated calling, the watchman heard us. He came and looked us through the broken shutter; yes the broken panel in the shutter door was a blessing in disguise, for a faint tunnel of ventilation and a glimmer of dusk was available. Masking the dusk light appeared one half of the watchman’s dark face with a contrasting line of the thick moustache. Even in that dimness and amidst my anxiety, I failed not to register a distinct nonchalant lopsided smirk in the watchman’s face, which twitched his grey moustache line. He probably thought that it was god’s punishment to us for torturing him by keeping the gates closed every evening. Or did he even have a hand in this? Even if it was so, I had no choice and I continued to scream “Help, help, we are stuck !”. 

My repeated shouting and watchman’s presence slowly attracted attention, the old grandmother of the ground floor kids, a delivery person from the grocery stores nearby, servant maid of the 3rd-floor business man kept peeping through the broken shutter. The buzz by the swarm of random people around the stuck lift rose upstairs and reached Gayathri (my wife) and my mother who came running down. I couldn’t even fool my nephew with my confidence, Gayathri read the desperation in my eyes and voiced it on my behalf. She let off a lung-full wail. It was a new experience to listen to her screams outside our bedroom. The kids were scared and so were the neighbours who started pouring in. A `swiggy’ and another delivery man joined the neighbours around; even amidst the chaos I was annoyed by the frequency of delivery men entering the apartment. I made a mental note to raise this clear threat for safety in the subsequent apartment meeting. But, the delivery man from the grocery store, unaware of my thoughts earnestly tried to help me, he lent a screwdriver and said “Can you try something?”. Gratefully I accepted it through the tiny opening in the shutter we four shared with rest of the universe. But what to do with that long screwdriver. I looked around wondering, like some people who thoughtlessly open the bonnet for divine telepathic knowledge when the car engine stops. I then saw the tiny lever of probably an inch thick that had locked the shutter door. I tried to unscrew the limit switch around it, but nothing happened. Then I asked for a hammer. Along with the hammer, came frantic shouts muddled with Gayathri’s weep to break the shutter from inside. I hit the lever using the screwdriver and hammer. Nothing happened. In fact, it is not surprising that the hardened lever that had survived a few decades could be vulnerable to a screwdriver attack from a tired man. Had the lever broken, it should have caused a perennial worry for everyone using the lift henceforth. I tried a few more tricks with no effect. Someone was suggesting jumping from the first floor onto the top of the lift cabin and pulling us out. Well, I wish we could satisfy his thirst for `Mission Impossible’ Tom Cruise stunts.

It was more than an hour in our new home and a light shaft of bright LED lamps in the corridor replaced the sunlight we had had when we were trapped. The apartment association secretary had called the lift service in Anna Nagar. They said they would send someone soon. But, given the evening traffic between Anna Nagar and Adyar, the service people cannot reach before the wee hours of the following day. I overheard the apartment secretary explaining about the service people. Suddenly, there was a commotion outside, the voices rose and within a jiffy, the average pitch increased steadily. The tiny orifice wasn’t enough to grasp what was happening around. But I gathered in bits and pieces thrown by different disinterested people that Anusuya of the ground floor, who had recently moved in, had called the fire station for rescue. She came out and announced when the annoyed apartment secretary, a retired state government official who had long lost his sense of humour and half of his senses too started shouting at her. “Who told you to call fire service? Am the secretary and I am arranging service people. If those fire brigades come, they will ask us to register police complaints, and will ask unwanted questions about lift license etc..”. Really?? Was that the biggest problem Mr.Secretary ? By the way, did he pronounce fire brigade or brigand? His semi-broken pronunciation was further fractured by his lost teeth. Anusuya was perplexed about how to react to this cold response. Gayathri shut him up with her high pitch “The child locked inside is mine and not your grandchild, that’s why you act like this”. I chuckled. Let Mr. Secretary face the music now. Then Gayathri started “Call everyone possible, fire or police or military.. I think the association is hiding something, they have not renewed their license. I want to file a police complaint against this association for trapping my children”. There was a deafening silence for a moment. I wasn’t perturbed, for when Gayathri is triggered, she won’t stop till silence prevailed.

In that momentary silence, I heard a mumble. I guiltily turned back, for I had ignored the kids for quite some time. The elder nephew was crying silently, I pitied him and tried to console him with a pat on the shoulder. But I was shocked when I noticed my little son in the belly of darkness standing next to my nephew and biting his wrist. I hurriedly removed him and quizzingly looked at my nephew. I was pained by a truck load of guilt when between gentle sobs he said “mama, both of them were fighting and you were busy trying your hands on the shutter. When I separated them, he bit me. I cried silently so that your concentration isn’t disturbed.” I was appalled over his suffering and was equally astounded by his maturity. Is it true that distress and suffering can transform a person into multitudes? I was close to tears and hugged him. My son and younger nephew jumped behind my back. I hugged them too. Waves of mixed emotions splashed inside, wetting my hearts and sprinkling tears out. I didn’t know whom to pity, or whom to console. I just held them tight and told them “don’t worry guys, its just a game. We are waiting for them to find us. Shh”. I tried to mimic an English movie “Life is Beautiful”. Either my acting skills were pathetic, or the dialogue wasn’t delivered well. The kids didn’t appreciate my attempt. My son and the younger nephew started beating me and soon started weeping louder “ I want to go out and see amma !!”.

I went back to our peephole, called Gayathri, and asked her to bring water and some biscuits for the kids. She woke up to a realization that she had forgotten about the kid’s essentials. She went back jumping steps, like a mad rush in morning hours to catch the last wagon of a local train whose guard had just given a green signal. She returned as quickly as she ascended, with a bottle and a plate of biscuits, and three bananas. The bottle came quickly through our window and was greedily gulped by all. But the plate of biscuits couldn’t enter. I should remember using this analogy later to explain Easop’s story of a fox trying to feed a stork in a plate. Then the biscuits came one by one followed by the bananas. But the distraction was short-lived. With additional energy, they sobbed louder asking to get out. Just to pacify, I randomly hammered here and there. But, by then they had decided not to buy anything except absolute and non-negotiable freedom outside the lift. I sensed they perceived me as a failure, or worse a traitor who tricked them into this tiny cell filled with the pungent odour of our sweat mixed with the decade-old grease and dirt.

I decided not to look outside and decided to stay with my kids. I sat down, holding each of them. I made the younger ones sit on my lap and rubbed my elder nephew’s hand affectionately. The tiny cycles cramped against my back and the handlebars stuck to my neck. But that didn’t bother me. It was our new home, our new normalcy, me and the children. I was silently trying to persuade them to accept that. We cut off the connection outside. It was a like a life without Arnab Goswami thumping inside our television, a life without WhatsApp messages or phone calls or school assignments, a new world under the deep sea once discovered by Jules Verne. I can’t recollect how long we lived in our hibernation. I only remembered pressing the kids together and them struggling to free themselves from my hold. I silently offered prayers to give us strength. I guess I was in a deep trance, suddenly the voices of my mother, Gayathri, and other neighbours faded away from me like a bubble moving up from the bottom of a Coke bottle. I don’t remember how long did we remain in that meditative state when time and space warped and spilled inside an oven of imagination. But we felt a sudden jolt and the gravity girl clad in a bright blue skirt overwhelmingly pulled us towards her bosom. We felt her upheavals, or was it our heart thudding out? My nephew got up and pulled the shutter, which danced to his tunes taunting us. We all sprang outside the lift.

The climax might appear clichéd, but any form of our exit from the lift would appear so. But there was a minor difference, when we came out, no one was there! What happened to all of them, it couldn’t be that long even for Gayathri and amma to forego us. Disturbing our thoughts came the rushing footsteps. Gayathri came down to hug the kids. Apparently, the service personnel had braved the traffic in their two-wheeler and reached in less than two hours. So, the trance, meditation, and the voices moving away from us were after all real, when the service men ascended to the motor room on our terrace to reset the lift.

It’s been a year since then. Even if I had to bring 25 kg rice bag, I use the stairs that hugged the lift column. And as I passed the lift with two hands full of groceries, I noticed a tiny fresh sticker right near the shutter’s limit switch advertising “Lose your weight, burn your calories”, I smiled as I walked past it to the stairs.

(The above story is published in online magazine, Kitaab , May ,13,2023 “https://kitaab.org/2023/05/13/short-story-ready-steady-oh-by-hariharan-k/” )