Me and My Claustrophobia

Like all parts of India, my home state Odisha, is also the embodiment of diversity. Anyone having any idea about Odisha will know the three parts of this state (eastern/costal, western and southern parts) are different in many ways from each other, although there are underlying commonalities among these three.

Both my parents are from coastal area and they got settled in western Odisha. Born and brought up in Sambalpur, we sisters considered ourselves pure Sambalpuri but we used always miss a thing, which is having surrounded by relatives, especially the elder ones. The chief reason of this being our elder relatives were walking and talking treasure of stories, although according to them those were not “stories” but stuffs which really happened to them. Surprisingly they used to encounter Godesses both angry and benevolent kinds, Gurus aged seven hundred years, different kinds of ghosts, freedom fighters and what not. We got to hear all these stories only during vacations. The rest of the time we used to discuss and imagine all those stories happening.

After few years my father’s cousin brother shifted to Sambalpur. His wife whom we call ‘Bada Maa’ literally translated in English would be ‘elder mother’, used to visit us frequently. She is extremely patient with kids, very affectionate and loving. She was motherly and very solid looking woman; who loves you so can take care of all your problems. We loved her and still love her a lot. We used to force her to stay back at our place overnight always, not only because we adored her but chiefly because she was a treasure of stories. Apparently amazing things happened to her too.

One night she told us about this traveling theatre show in her village. In 1950’s in a village without electricity and even a radio this was a bigger than a big event. It was a winter night the audiences brought their mats to sit on and blankets to cover. The drama went on almost for whole night. The story was about a king and his 2 wives; one nice and one wicked. The wicked wife with her wicked son made life of nice wife and her son miserable. Finally the king got to know about their wickedness and punished them. I don’t remember what punishment the wicked queen got but I will never forget her wicked son’s punishment. He was imprisoned in an airtight iron trunk.

The whole thing I wrote in a paragraph but Bada Maa told the story in a lot more colourful language with lots of twists and turns  taking a couple of hours. At the end of the story we were very happy for the good queen and her good son however we were very curious about how the theatre people showed locking up the wicked son in the air tight trunk. So we discussed among ourselves the possibilities including not showing the act just taking him to backstage or a fake iron trunk made of cloth and so on.

After a while we went to Bada Maa to ask her what really had happened. She made a very serious face and said ‘it was an airtight iron trunk, as I told you’

‘But how did they show it’

‘Like an airtight trunk’

‘How can they lock someone in that kind of trunk? How will some one breath there?’

My Bada Maa in a very matter of fact voice replied ‘oh, this boy could not breathe and the next day they threw away his dead body’

Then few moments of silence followed by confused questions shot towards Bada Maa and in reply we got lots of gory details which I am not going into now.

That night one more phobia was added to my list of phobias, ‘claustrophobia’. I kept on imagining about the boy and was shaking. Gradually in my mind I, myself took the place of the boy. Many a nights I woke up sweaty after nightmares involving me locked up in airtight iron trunk. And with time in place of iron trunk there were other stuffs like a room, cloth bag or anything which can be closed tightly with me inside.

I got scared being in a closed room, in case someone lock me from outside. It was difficult for me to read or watch something involving people trapped in any place or people taking pleasure trip in tube or people having actions in submarine. FYI, I never could read Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ and Journey to the Center of the Earth’ and had a very tough time watching Mel Gibson’s ‘Forever Young’.

Once I remember I saw a still of a movie in a magazine. The name of the movie I don’t remember. In this still, Mithun Chakraborty was catching some heroine in a fishnet a la angler. Remember it was 1980’s so the scene was supposed to be very tastefully sensual! I can’t tell you how glad I am the decade of side ponytails and oversized earrings are a thing of past now. Anyway, I got very scared just looking at the picture. What if I am tied inside a strong net which I can’t tear up and people just forget about me and leave me like that. Like this, my claustrophobia just increased by day and overpowering me completely.

Then when I went to hostel it became very difficult for me. If you sleep till late and your roommate has an early class then there is every chance that she will lock you up by mistake. And this happened to me too. Unfortunately for first year in my hostel our balcony was jammed. I went crazy being latched in the room; yeah lucky for me she just latched it. It happened twice and on both the occasions I screamed and screamed till the whole hostel gathered near my room. They gave me very odd looks because girl getting latched in was fairly common in our hostel and other girl just bang their doors don’t bring down the roof by screaming.

You know how difficult it is to fit in a new place I did not want them to think I am a cry baby. I wanted to rationalize my fear. With a more mature mind I thought about all the stories narrated to us by our Bada Maa and other elder relatives. And it dawned on me they were stretching the facts a lot to give us interesting stories. In fact in some stories there were only stretching no facts. If someone was alive till his 700^th year, it would have been in record books; if you meet Godesses so easily you can’t have so many problems in your life and like this I rationalised each and every story. Then coming to Bada Maa’s story I explained myself they just can’t kill a boy for performance, even if they would they would get arrested or at least would get lynched by the mob.

I worked hard on it and although my claustrophobia did not go away entirely but it went to background and did not bother me so much.

After going to hostel I could not meet Bada Maa for a long time then after few years I met her. By that time I was so proud of myself for exorcising my demon almost completely. Bada Maa was looking solid and loving as ever only now toothless. As a funny story I recounted her how she told us the boy really died and we believed her. And started laughing.

My laugh stopped halfway when in her most serious tone she told me ‘I didn’t lie. The boy really died in the trunk and they threw his body next day.’