Sportspersons, they’re public figures, aren’t they? They embody this collective fascination with the human body and its capacities, and just like watching a good choreography gives you little twinges in your body, watching a beautiful run seems to release some lactic acid, free your joints.
The climbing fraternity is not a very big one. Everyone knows each other. You know little conferences, seminars, music shows, where the audience is mainly made up of performers? It’s not cricket. Climbing is a pocket, as opposed to say a brand-heavy uniform. In fact, I’ve never seen a climber in a uniform. It’s a fiercely individualistic enterprise, with, at the same time, a strong sense of community – which is not the same thing as uniformity, not at all.
Sometime back, we lost a climber. I say ‘we’ even though my climbing fever died years ago, even though I never kept in touch, imagining that all the people I knew were simply out-there, somewhere, hearing about everything secondhand. I guess you could say when I say we, I don’t necessarily mean ‘me’ at all, unless you believe that sportspersons are public figures, and that to some extent, they embody some of our most challenging desires.
What do you do when someone dies? The first thing: to reject the notion at all, to reminisce, because of course life is much more accessible to our consciousness.
This is my first memory of Kala: at 20, I began to go for climbing classes. I was ungainly, insecure, gangly, bulky, everything but… Our coach, Kamesh, threw us in with the ‘real climbers.’ They were, of course, the opposite of us. Lithe, fit, light. He tells us to walk a 50-metre distance, carrying each other on our backs, in alternation. I am partnered with Kala, who is half my height and half my size. Thus far, in my adult life, I have never been carried. I assume, naturally, that I am un-carry-able, that I am somehow rooted to the ground. So I squeak, no way, you’re half my height, half my size. She snorts and gestures to me to get on with it. Trying to reduce my weight (you know how you try this sometimes?) I go on her back. She carries me with easy grace and no noise. Carrying her on the return, I am shocked and disgusted to find that I am stumbling halfway. New pathways are being travelled in my brain.
For a little while, we collected memories, together. Many of them start with Aaaaeee Whattya or Aaaaeee Goya, Kala’s signature songs. Kala gets bored running the half-marathon and hitches a ride halfway. Kala scoffs at a bunch of school children on a trek screaming for the toilet, telling them to Gonature! And sends them off, three by three. Kala sniggers at us from the top of the wall while we’re struggling to make our way up. Kala makes her insouciant walk across twilit landscapes.
These are personal memories, gathered in a group. There are more public memories, of Kala being a national-level climbing champion, a medal-winner, a streak of lightning on a wall. But still, climbing communities are small, and even public memories somehow look personal.
There are the bits of secondhand information I got over the years, when I stopped visiting the wall: Kala is now a PE trainer at a school. She got married. She had a baby. She and her brother and husband are starting an adventure trail.
The last one, of course, last. Kala died. It’s an alleged suicide. Appears to be death by hanging. Post-mortem being conducted.
They say that climbers are one of the happiest communities in the world. As long as I was climbing, I felt I knew everyone there, even though I didn’t at all. And yet, in some direct, physical way, you do seem to know everyone.
You see, especially when you start from the ground, as a beginner with no prior physical activities to note at all, you remember this moment very precisely. The day you make it to the top half of the route. Voices below are muffled. Your hands are burning as the sun heats up the holds. The sky is hypnotically blue. You are climbing away from the world! And yet, nothing could be more real. Your head is full of sound, whatever goes on inside your body is incredibly loud, and yet you are almost inside silence, if it was a place to be entered.
From there, it was hard to consider that there might be another real world, one we didn’t enter. Of course, I learnt social skills much later, so take that also into account.
I wanted to write to mark Kala’s death. It’s not so much to register a personal loss – we haven’t been in touch for years – which is not to say there is no loss. It could be because of that blue moment at the top of the wall. Or because climbing mornings were so yellow, so bright. Or it could be because sportspersons are public figures, and to some extent they embody our most challenging desires.
