And Thats How Papa Cured Me Off My Fear Of The Lightning

Right from the days I started to know the world around me, I had an untold fear of the lightning and of course the thunder that followed. I have met many who actually(to my amazement) enjoy watching those flashes of light sometimes behind the clouds and sometimes like twisted fingers of light reaching out from high above to the earth down below.

I come from Kerala, a land that has seen only two seasons, rainy and no-rainy. So be it June-July monsoon or the September-October thunder showers or the filler rains that come in between, I would automatically move away from the windows, huddle in my bed and await the worst while it rumbled and flashed outside.

I was no brave heart but did so badly wanted to overcome this fear that I once asked my mother the reason for these bright flashes in the sky and the drum roll that followed. I concluded that if I were ever to get over this dread, I might as well know it better. My mother, a very pious woman, bent on bringing me up in the paths of righteousness explained to me that God looks down from behind the clouds at all the humans down on earth, watching our every action. If we go astray, He gets angry and there is fire and whip lashing, which is what is lightning and thunder all about. Whoa! I listened open-mouthed, swallowing every word, after all I was only 6. The next time, the sky grew cloudy, I was quite sure that this was of course due to my misbehaviour and I started praying, confessing, asking forgiveness, vowing never to repeat the mistake in quick succession, the frequency and fervency proportionately increasing with the raging thunderstorm with pink, white flashes of light that illuminated my room from the latched window!!

Then I happened to hear about a song to sing (Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens...you know) when the thunder-lightning drama unfolds outside. I did try it a few times but instead of my favourite things, all that came to my mind was a huge flaming sword, a whip with hooked ends, trees on fire, more clouds with bright veins of light branching out in all possible directions, wet, dripping leaves shaking in the wind and occasionally brightened by the blinding light from the heavens, a wet puppy sitting somewhere in the rain howling and sounding altogether miserable...

I learnt in school that lightning and thunder happen together and also the real reason behind this phenomenon. Yet the fear would never leave me. My teacher told the class about her grandmother who used to clear the kitchen off all metal objects when there was a thunderstorm and I followed suit at home throwing away every knife and fork I could find in the kitchen when the clouds gathered. My parents weren't quite pleased about this.
Then I would take all the precautions, just in case, which sort of became a ritual before a thundershower; close the windows, unplug cords, remove my gold earrings, sit in the middle of the room and shiver!!! As I learnt the speed of sound, my mind would involuntarily start calculating the distance from where the lightning struck when you hear the thunder.

I was too embarrassed then to confide to my friends this weakness of mine (but now I have thicker skin, I guess) and imagine their shock when in school, as a class was in progress, they hear a shriek from me when a lightning almost struck the building followed by the loudest of thunders I had ever heard in my life!! My fellow bench mate had the joke of her life when I went under the desk with my ears tightly covered!! This was 11th std.

Now I was determined to get over this morbid fear once for all and I asked my father, the once rocket engineer, to help me out. He smiled, gave a shrug and said, "There is nothing to be afraid of this lightning stuff. Just understand this, the clouds are charged up before a storm and they have to discharge the electric charge somehow. If they have negative charge, they have to give out excess electrons to the ground earth and if they have positive charge, the earth will feed the required electrons back. For this, they use air as medium or sometimes, if they find something as a better route maybe a tree or a building it will use that. Thunder happens just because the air that gets heated up owing to the discharge and cooler air just pushes in. As for lightning, it is only a few kilo volts of electricity that is discharged each time and during that, it will build concentric rings of magnetic fields around it. Only if you are in that field and the potential difference between your two feet is few kilo volts, you will be electrocuted. See, it is that simple. So there is nothing to be actually scared off."

I was silent for a long time and when I came to my senses, Papa was already deeply engrossed in the morning paper.

So that's how Papa cured my fear of lightning and thunder. Now I am not scared but just get petrified and benumbed when the first of the grey clouds start gathering in the sky.