Thunderstorms have a weird effect in my house. Each major thunderstorm, the kinds which make your window panes go wild, the thunders are too loud and the lightning shines up your house more than all the CFLs turned on together, turns our house into a literal physics and chemistry lecture session. It does. It almost always starts with my mom’s grave fears of Lightning which keeps on rising with each thunder she hears, and my deep urge to calm her down.
My mom gets terrified when she sees a lightning and today unfortunate for her we had some close encounters with one of those freak shows. We stay on the 7th floor but with no buildings that high for at least a 1 km stretch ahead of us, every major rains and their complimentary winds have a direct hit at our windows. With the whistling sound in the bathroom, the rattle of windows and oh yes, sounds of sparks with the flashes, her astraphobia was on peak.
She came to sit with me in my bed room, some thing which makes me feel very uncomfortable when I am working. But anyways I had to make her feel okay, and so I continued working. What? What else should I do? If I was to sit close to her and talk to her, that will be like the apocalypse is near. So that leaves me with two more options – Panic or continue what I was doing.
It was all good, she was sitting there silent, full of goose bumps, occasionally looking at my room all over because of the obvious boredom along with the phobia, and then she said something, “Thunders were never this bad in Mumbai some 10 years back.”
That was it. My work had to stop. From there on I remember myself talking about how lightning should possibly be even more worse back then, how chances of getting hit by one of those has reduced over time, and I also remember talking about gravity, inertia, atmosphere, also lightning and thunder, with full fledged diagrams.
She obviously did not let the session complete, as the thunders had stopped half an hour ago and she probably thought I should save some topics for the next time she comes for some assuring and soothing conversation.
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