After watching the footage of a tragic incident on TV, I was horrified and shaken. For some moments, I was lost in thoughts. My eyes were fixed on the table in front of me. All kinds of ideas flashed through my mind.
I switched off the TV and then put out the lights in the room. I closed my eyes to experience how a person would feel in a completely dark environment.
My next move was to plug my ears with my fingers so as to gauge the feelings of a person who is not deaf, but is unable to hear anything.
To be precise, I wanted to recreate for myself the experiences of a person who is totally cut off from the outside world. With no light you are sitting in total darkness, no voices or sound of any kind coming anywhere near you.
You are stuck in a vertical shaft some 15 metres below ground level with little oxygen to sustain you. You find you are in a standing pose, your elbows rubbing against the muddy wall encasing you. You cannot stretch your arms or legs sideways because there is simply no space to move.
Imagine the thoughts that would come to anybody's mind in that situation.
You cannot be heard above the ground, even if you shout with the full force at your command. You are doomed if nobody saw you fall and you are not pulled out in time.
Hoping against hope, one would cry and pray to God for assistance. The images of those near and dear - family and friends, etc - would flash before one's eyes. And then the trapped person might faint.
Even as I was in the midst of such dreadful thoughts, I sort of woke up with a jolt. I discovered I was sweating. My body had turned cold. My pulse had gone up. I was breathing heavily.
How must four-year-old Anju, daughter of a poor labourer, have felt when she slipped and fell into a 60-metre deep borewell and landed on a flat patch of mud some 15 metres below ground level?
I was watching a report on TV about this very incident that took place in a village some 50 kilometres from the northern Indian city of Jaipur, recently.
Hundreds of anxious people had gathered at the spot. An excavator was used to dig a parallel tunnel in the same manner as was done elsewhere to rescue two other children of Anju's age in the recent past.
Braving scorching temperatures of about 45C, the rescuers and the villagers waited with bated breath to feel Anju's breath. To them, the 20-odd hours that the operation took must have seemed like 20 months.
If people above ground were roasting in the blazing sun in arid Rajasthan, how would the four-year-old girl survive 15 metres below? Some gave up hope and left.
Finally, rescuers were seen rushing to carry the child to safety. Oh! She was breathing.
Later, the doctors said the patient was conscious , stable and out of danger. Anju did not have a single scratch on her body despite her fall - she was only suffering from shock.
The incident led some of the bystanders to wonder how an adult would have reacted in a similar situation. Would he or she have come out of the well intact?
What was it that kept the child alive? Was it the prayers of her parents and all those who watched on TV? Or was it her willpower? Certainly, it must have been a heavenly force that pulled her out of mother earth's womb and handed her back to her natural mother.
Lalit Raizada is a journalist based in India.
