Fear: A Fan Fiction

From the corner of my left eye, I could see her struggling with the bed. 

She was trying out different angles. First, she stood upright and gave it a ridiculously weak backward nudge with her calf. Then she bent forward—her left leg at a right angle, the ball of her right foot jammed against the floor—and pushed with both her hands. The mahogany behemoth stayed unmoved as though screwed to the floor. 

She plopped down on the edge of the bed, the memory foam mattress sagging slightly under her weight. 

I waited for her to look in my direction — which I knew she would, even if for a split-second — and catch her eye. When she did, I raised my hand gesturing her to wait and mouthed the words: I will do it a little later. 

Ten minutes on I was standing next to her, fresh from my conversation with the guy who handled finance at my company, a stout man with a handle-bar mustache and a realtor wife. The weekly catch-up call had started on a cordial note, degenerated quickly into a shouting match, and ended with mutual regret and a whole lot of overcompensatory ‘I’m-so-fried-this-week-I-haven’t-been-myself-lately’s and ‘it’s-all-my-fault-I-must-learn-how-to-delegate's by both parties. Making a mental note to ‘never skimp on finance heads’ again, I peered at the perfectly positioned bed, and the woman who was dead set on not letting it be. 

“Again, why do you want the bed in the corner?” 

“It just frees up a lot of space.”  

“Right,” I agreed, before asking, “What do we need a lot of space for?” 

“I’d like it better that way — I just don’t like how it is right now.”

As the founder of a fledgling start-up in a flailing economy, I was a man with many responsibilities and no time for arguments over curtain fabrics or the position of the furniture. I was willing to let the small things slide.  

But things didn’t end there. By the end of the week, the coffee table in the living room was no longer in the center, the dining table was set up length-wise along the wall, and the dining chairs had been moved accordingly. The pouffe Ottoman was banished to a corner of the study room, and the study table too had been further sidelined. Screeching, wailing, shaking — like children in a playground being pulled away from a riveting game of hide and seek at the fall of dusk — they had all been pulled or pushed to the walls or their intersections. Only the crimson tufted settee remained where it was — at the far end of the guest room.

Every room of the house now reminded me of local community halls in the small Indian towns I grew up in, where right before a major event, all the chairs had to be lined up against the drab, patchy walls to make space in the middle for uncoordinated sangeet performances or all-night jagratas or prayer services. I tried to figure out why she was doing this. She would never give a reason, just the perfunctory ‘I like it this way’. 

This domestic drama had unfolded in December when the refreshing nip in the air and the newness of my marriage had together rendered the mild eccentricities of my wife invisible to me. But summers knocked at our doors early, and by February it felt as if blasts of heat were already melting my skin, setting my very bones on fire. It wasn’t time to turn on the AC yet (we didn’t do that until mid-April; not in India), and until it was, my only chance at surviving the weather rested on the slim metal blades of our ceiling fans. 

“We need to move the bed back under the fan, darling. The heat is suffocating me; I won’t — ” I said, stepping out from the bathroom, my vest already plastered to my sweat-soaked back. It was my third shower of the day.

“That’s what I am afraid of,” she spoke so softly I could barely catch her words. 

“Afraid of what?”

“The fan. I — you see, I just have this fear that it might fall one day.”

The chuckle escaped before I could suppress it. So that it was. A silly, irrational fear. I could handle irrational fear. I handled paranoid investors all the time. 

“It won’t fall. It will never fall. These things are secured very well,” I said.

"What if it does?” she shot back.

“What if it doesn’t?”

She went on to recount how, in 1997, in the final minutes of the final lecture of the final term of her final year, a fan had indeed broken free from the roof, missed a classmate’s skull by a whisker, and landed on her shoulders. The poor girl had to spend ‘Hostel Night’ in the infirmary and attend her graduation in a cervical collar. 

Her words did help me place her fear in context, but I wasn’t ready to let our life be determined by statistically improbable disasters. The fan that fell was a creaky old thing that must’ve been hooked to the ceiling of a crumbling old college building in the middle of the last century, I told her. Our apartment was constructed only two years ago, and all its electrical fittings were brand new.

Reasoning didn’t work with her, nor did statistics. All appeals went in one ear and out the other.

Her apprehension largely stemmed from ceiling fans but wasn’t limited to it. She squirmed under chandeliers and quickened her pace while walking past arch street lamps and shop signboards, and often voiced her disapproval of airplanes that flew too close above our building. She didn’t like it when I sat longer than 5 minutes on the toilet — the water heater fixed to the wall right above the toilet tank could come crashing down any moment (just as it did at her sister’s, just missing her brother-in-law who’d finished his business moments earlier.) It was always about things falling on her head or mine out of nowhere.

***

EVENTUALLY, WHEN THE CEILING FAN FELL, it didn’t land on anyone. It flew headlong to the floor, leaving a visible crack on a marble tile but hurting nobody in its way. The fan was clearly faulty, so I didn’t even have to fork out for the repair. The owner apologized profusely and handed us tickets to a Zakir Rehman tabla concert as a peace offering.

It was also such a fortunate coincidence that the bed was still not back to the center of the room. I was in bed and Natasha was in the kitchen, fixing my breakfast. So not a scratch on either of us. Everything and everyone survived unscathed. 

But I do eat more fiber now because my wife knows it isn't healthy for the colon to spend a long time on the toilet (she's a nutrition expert, and her worries are rooted in reason). And the bed, well, it just needs to go back where it belongs but something or the other always comes up.

Sometimes I want to message her to let her know her words did come true. I sent her a text the other day, asking how she’d been. Her father replied. She’s back with her folks. They know how to take care of her. Everything in their house was always in a corner.