The recent news about a lift at the Kovalam lighthouse set me thinking. What’s a lift doing in a lighthouse? One associates a lighthouse with an awe-inspiring light at the top and innumerable winding, dizzying steps to reach it. A mechanical device would take the magic, and the breathlessness, out of scaling the imposing structure.
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Going up a lighthouse is an uplifting experience. I remember the trip we made with a couple of friends to Anchuthengu (Anjengo) lighthouse near Varkala and our exhilaration on successfully huffing and puffing our way via 199 steps to the top. It was drizzling when we stepped into the open space around the beacon, making the 360 degree view even more spectacular. My husband produced the ubiquitous Kerala umbrella from goodness knows where, but we wouldn’t let him open it. He sighed, propped it up against the wall and left it behind when he led the way down. But Sankar, our friend who was the last to descend, brought it discreetly along.
On reaching the bottom, he hid the umbrella behind his back and asked my husband about it. But the joke was on Sankar for, with a dismayed, ‘Oh, no!’, my husband made a lightning quick u-turn and began a two steps-at-a-time dash to recover it. He had already cleared two flights of steps before a nonplussed Sankar, brandishing the umbrella and panting after him, succeeded in gaining his attention.
No doubt a lift in a lighthouse is a boon for those who have a problem climbing steps, but I’d bet my last de-monetised 500-Rupee note that robust young people with osteoarthritis-free knees would be the first to make a beeline for it.
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In fact, it’s mostly youngsters that you find taking escalators or waiting outside lifts, pressing the button repeatedly while shifting their weight from one leg to the other. You wonder why they don’t just walk up the stairs on those healthy, under-used legs and charitably believe they might be heading for the top floors. But no. Once the door opens, they jostle everyone aside to heave themselves in only to get off almost immediately at the next floor.
Some lifts have minds of their own. They rattle, stop erratically or insist on taking you forever to the ground floor, urging you to ‘please close the door.’ They scare me, while my husband looks upon climbing steps as healthy; with the result we walk all the way even to top floors. A friend who lived on the eleventh floor once greeted us with an appalled, ‘Are you mad?’ when we used the stairs to reach her apartment.
Lifts have come a long way since a crude version was invented in the third century BCE by Archimedes. The passenger lift had an amorous beginning with the French king Louis XV using it in 1743 to facilitate clandestine meetings between him and his mistress at the Palace of Versailles . Considering its discreet, romantic origins, the humdrum activities at lifts these days appear tame, though there are occasional whispers about intriguing happenings inside them.
In hospital lifts, especially, one would expect people to be polite and concerned but, unfortunately, courtesy seems to have disappeared. People swoop in a body into the lift as if chased by a man-eating tiger and get it moving, trapping those who wished to alight there.
A former student who had been doing the rounds of hospitals lamented how she was forced to go up and down several times in a sweaty, jam-packed lift before she finally managed to get off at the right floor. Often she would disembark at the wrong floor and use the stairs. If the lift indicated extra load, no one was willing to get off, each looking accusingly at the other, willing them to confess to obesity and step out. Even patients in wheel chairs were shoved around, she said, leaving them sicker than when they had entered the lift’s confines.
One way in which this issue could be addressed is by adopting a variation of the diplomatic method used by a French minister in the eighteenth century. He decreed that only ladies above the age of thirty could drive their own carriages and by this master stroke solved the problem of traffic jams in the narrow streets of Paris.
People being most secretive about age, health and weight, if it is suggested that only sick people and those above a certain age and weight may use lifts, lift etiquette might make a comeback and people would actually begin to enjoy climbing up lighthouses.
A fortnightly column by the city-based writer, academician and author of the Butterfingers series. The author can be contacted at khyrubutter@yahoo.com