House of horrors

From deadly pianos to exploding cookers, they all belong on the list of justifiable phobias.

One look at the way lichen can thrive on a frozen expanse of tundra should tell you how tenacious life is. But then, one look at the way some innocent office-goer can get mulched by a piano tumbling from an upper storey should tell you that it’s also tricky business.

You might suspect, and rightly so, that airborne pianos probably don’t deserve top billing on the long list of things that working stiffs have to fear. Frankly, I’m a case of what they call damaged goods, but even I walk past tall buildings with my head held high, thoughts of deadly pianos even further from my mind than thoughts of making some kind of financial provision for my rapidly approaching dotage. But I can think of lots of things that do belong high up on a list of justifiable phobias, and many of them are not only not random, but downright clear and present dangers right in your home.

For instance: Pressure cookers. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather use a regular pan and spend an hour stirring and sweating into my mutton curry than put a pressure cooker on the flame for twenty minutes. This is because it’s a widely established fact that pressure cookers are made to lull you into a false sense of security before one day exploding in a way that leaves you unsure which bit is mutton curry and which bit cook’s face. My grandmother’s pressure cooker exploded one day while she was cooking lunch, and not only was I a wreck when I heard about it, but she was really mad about having to scrape daal off the ceiling.

For instance: Elevators. Examine your heart and tell me if you can really ever step into an elevator in the upper storeys of your building without wondering, just as it begins to move, whether the cable will hold all the way until your floor, or whether it will snap and send you plummeting to the bottom of the shaft in a twisted wreckage of metal. (One retarded school of thought holds that the way to save your skin is to jump into the air at the moment of impact. Hopefully, over time, falling elevators will weed these people out of the gene pool.)

For instance: Ceiling fans. We’re talking about a bunch of metal blades spinning at high speed, and if they’re doing this in my house, they’re doing so with a creaky rocking motion. It’s perfectly clear to me that a fan turned on is just a fan waiting for you to take your eyes off it or fall asleep, so that it can fly right off its ceiling mount and either impale your chest or perform a clean decapitation.

For instance: Open cupboard doors. I was brought up on a steady stream of Enid Blyton’s stories about dolls that make Chucky from Child’s Play look good. Before I go to bed I make sure my cupboards are securely closed because, even though I haven’t owned dolls for thirty years, there’s no need to risk getting up to use the bathroom and having some cold little plastic hand shoot out from under my bed and grab my ankle with a tinny mechanical laugh.

For instance: Geysers. These, in my head, are very like pressure cookers. We have experienced a geyser sparking and setting the nearby shower curtain on fire; and I once came home to find a geyser more or less exploded and behaving like the Trevi Fountain. It’s plain stupid to ignore the dangers of being summarily poached in one’s own bathroom.

With houses like deathtraps, who needs falling pianos?

[The author is a Delhi-based writer]