A little after he was rescued after being trapped in a lift for 42 hours, Ravindran Nair heard about Joy, a sanitation worker who was found dead after he went missing in a canal in Thiruvananthapuram for two days. Ravindran’s fate could have been the same, trapped in a defunct lift in the city’s Medical College on the same weekend that Joy went missing. Nearly a week after his lucky escape, Ravindran tells TNM that whatever had helped him survive did not help Joy. Ravindran was stuck in the lift from noon of Saturday, July 13 to the early hours of Monday, July 15.
In a payward at the Medical College, recuperating from the physical and mental trauma that he went through after getting stuck in a lift, Ravindran recounts the ordeal and the aftermath, at times turning philosophical about the vulnerability of human beings. “Joy and I were trapped in different situations around the same time. Elsewhere, another Malayali (Arjun, whose truck was pinned down by a massive landslide in Karnataka on July 16) has been trapped under a mudslide for days. All three of us came face-to-face with death,” says Ravindran, adding he wished Arjun would also be rescued like him.
Ravindran, a 59-year-old Communist Party of India leader from Thirumala, had gone to the Medical College on July 13 to consult an orthopaedist for his back pain from a fall a few months ago. Sreelekha, his wife who works as a cashier at the hospital, had accompanied him. But when the doctor needed to see his blood test reports, Ravindran decided to take a rickshaw home alone to bring the reports since Sreelekha was on duty.
It sounds like one of those butterfly effect stories when you hear the ‘almost’ parts of his ordeal – Sreelekha had ‘almost’ been with him; Usha, her colleague, had ‘almost’ accompanied him to the lift. If only either of them had been with him, they could have directed him away from the lift which did not have any board announcing that it was defunct.
“When I came back with the results, I met Usha who said she would take me to the doctor. Before she could come along, I had entered the faulty lift and it jammed with a jolt mid-air. No one saw this happen, no one saw where I went,” Ravindran explains.
He followed all the routine steps – banged on the lift door, yelled out for help, made frantic calls. Unfortunately, his phone seemed to be out of coverage. No calls went through, not even to the emergency numbers listed inside the lift. He resumed his cries for help every so often, and in the remaining time, withdrew to the lift’s corners. He discovered that there was a steady supply of air, so he knew he would not suffocate. One corner of the lift was cool too, perhaps from the air conditioning of the floor above, he guessed. “Occasionally, I would also see strands of light and think help is on the way. Now I think I might have imagined it,” he says.
He didn’t sleep a wink, he says. He did not know night from day. Hunger was not a problem, he says, for as a party worker he had gone on fasts, for days on end sometimes. But he did have other human needs, such as wanting to use the toilet. He had to make use of yet another corner of the lift for this.
In his thoughts were his family, and perhaps because he was prepared for the worst, faces of the dear people who had passed before him – his parents, his brother, friends, party colleagues. It seemed like a miracle when finally a sound came from the other side of the lift door. Ravindran’s bangs were finally heard on Monday morning when a man working at the hospital came over to check.
“On Monday morning at around 6, I finally heard a voice outside the lift telling me to push the door hard as he too joined in to help. He asked me to jump down (the lift was stuck between two floors) and when I did, he did not stop to answer who he was, only smiled and walked away. I found out later that my saviour was a staff member called Jayanandan. The next person I talked to was the security guard outside, to find out what date it was, for I had no idea how much time had passed. But he looked disgusted by my appearance – my clothes were soiled as I had to use the lift as a toilet, without any other option. He must have thought me strange,” Ravindran says, without the slightest hint of offence.
It comes as a surprise, this calmness with which he narrates what must have been a truly traumatic experience. Or perhaps he had come to terms with it in the days that passed, for he assures us that his mental health is fine. Among the many doctors who have been attending to him since, there have been no mental health practitioners. There wasn’t a need for it, he says.
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One can only imagine his frame of mind when he grappled with the utter darkness of the lift, dug out a pen and a piece of paper from his bag to write a note for his family – his wife Sreelekha and their two sons – when he thought he would not make it.
Priyapetta Sreelekha, kannukal kaanunilla, kaathukal kelkunilla, kaalidarunnu, kanmaniye kaanan pateela, Ravindran wrote. “Dearest Sreelekha, The eyes don’t see / the ears don’t hear / the legs are slipping / Darling, I’m unable to see you.”
He wrote about each of his sons, urging them to reach bigger heights in life, convinced that he would not get to meet them again. He asks Sreelekha to publish her poems. The pen and paper were there in his bag, he says, because his wife is also a poet and sometimes he’d scribble ideas for her. “She has blood pressure, she must have been really tense when I was missing,” he says with concern.
For a day, though, Sreelekha waited because Ravindran had told her that he might have work at the MLA Hostel – where he is an employee – and not to call him. The next day when there was still no news of him, she contacted the police. They tried tracing him using the last known location of his phone but that did not work.
Ravindran can’t thank his saviours enough – Jayanandan, another staff member called Mohandas who led him to safety, and a couple he met outside. “After the security guard did not respond, I told a couple about my plight and asked if I could have some water and make a phone call. They allowed both and I could finally let Sreelekha know what happened.” She phoned for help and Mohandas appeared, asking if he wanted a stretcher, but Ravindran preferred to walk.
The last thing he had to eat was on Saturday noon – a cold tea at home when he went to get the blood test reports. But immediately after getting out of the lift, he just wanted to drink lots and lots of water and then some tea. His family joined him soon, relieved and shocked in equal measure to hear his tale.
“Soon the Medical College circle inspector came, and then Binoy Viswam, the state secretary of the CPI. Several people’s representatives came to visit. Health Minister Veena George also came to see me. I told her about the need for a control room to handle such emergencies. This should not happen to anyone else,” he says.
Unfortunately, a doctor and a patient were trapped inside another lift in the same hospital just a day after Ravindran was rescued. Their plight lasted for only 10 minutes. “Even then the doctor had broken down in tears. It can affect people badly,” Ravindran says.
A cautionary message in red block letters is now seen outside the faulty lift: Maintenance in progress, please do not use this lift. If only the board had been placed there sooner.