Babu in a spot, between the devil and the deep blue sky

(Representative image) Trekking through forbidden forest lands with friends, 23-year-old Babu slipped and fell. Luckily, he landed on a ledge.

Reality TV thrives on cliffhanger moments, so the news coverage of a live event unfolding right before our eyes is suspense personified. It is a 24/7 thriller. When things get too static at the hotspot, previous recordings play on a loop; slick editing ensures we remain at the edge of our seat. Not a dull moment. The stakes are high in life-or-death situations. Viewers are right where it is happening. In the miracle of live telecast, they are so close to the person to whom it is happening that they become the person.

When Babu got trapped on a mountainside in Palakkad, Kerala, no Malayalam TV channel could take their eyes off him. Trekking through forbidden forest lands with friends, the 23-year-old lad slipped and fell. Luckily, he landed on a ledge. Though life-saving, it was also too tiny an area. No water, no food, relentless sun. Falling asleep would mean sure death. If he missed his footing, if he fainted, if he lost his nerve… The 43 hours he sat crouched on a ledge on Kurumpachi hill, entire audiences sat up with him. He became everyone’s son, everyone’s brother.

He was trapped on Monday. By Tuesday night my mother was exhausted just watching him unblinkingly. She was refusing most of her meals on the grounds that he wasn’t eating either. On Tuesday night she resisted going to sleep despite knowing darkness hampers rescue operations. If she could have stopped the sun from setting, she would have done so with her bare hands. Around midnight she went reluctantly to bed, after promises from the rest of the family that she would be woken up the moment he was rescued.

Wednesday morning, she was reporting the news as animatedly as the journalists. They got him, he is smiling, he is drinking water, he is clicking selfies with his rescuers – visuals of him being carried up in a human embrace to the helicopter. Get laddoos, mother screeched. Before we could remind her politely of her diabetes, she barked, ‘no laddoos’. The reason being he appeared to be unconscious on the stretcher. 'What is happening to him?' she wailed; we feared something was happening to her.

Physically separating her from the TV was a Herculean task, but a necessary one, seeing her emotional state. He is fine, I said, as if I had just gotten through to him on the phone. ‘Really?’ she gasped, happy that her prayers were high priority with the gods.

The only minor agitation was the next bit of news that a case may be registered against him for straying into a  barred area. Mother is sure he won’t be able to take this new stress on top of everything else that happened to him. With Kerala’s minister of forest A.K. Saseendran stopping the forest department from registering a case, our household is slowly limping back to normalcy.

For a while there all of us were suspended in the same spot as Babu. Heart in mouth, fingers crossed, breathing as one person.