A man flying on the back of a crow is definitely the central character in Raj Kamal Jha’s 2003 novel If You Are Afraid of Heights, which binds three narratives together to lay before you a world where nothing is quite what it seems but everything is strangely familiar.
The author, a journalist by profession, uses a blend of fantasy and reality to present the landscape of a changing India — following neglected lives, trapped in despair as they embark on their private journey of hope.
Jha’s prose is crafted with finesse but it is written so obliquely that it is a tough to understand and derive meaning from the narrative at one go. The prologue and epilogue of the novel are identical — Look at the picture on the cover, there’s a child, a girl in a red dress; there’s a bird, a crow in a blue white sky. And then there are few things you cannot see.
The man on the crow’s back flies across the city, observing its characters from up above the sky and narrates to us his observations. The first story — Of Heights — is about two people Amir and Rima, whose names are mirror reflections of each other. They meet during a train accident and fall in love. She is rich and lives in a luxurious skyscraper apartment in the middle of the city while he works at the post office and lives in a two-room flat in a building that, from the street outside, looks like a crying face. They create their own world, play their make-believe games. And then there is the sound of a crying child that disquiets Rima. We are told it leads her to leave Amir as mysteriously as she came into his life.
The second story — You are Afraid — follows Mala, a news reporter who arrives in a small town to investigate the death of a girl, who, as Mala finds out, was raped and her body was thrown into a canal. While we read her story, she has flashbacks into her own childhood and we gather there is child abuse linked to her as well.
The last and final story — If — features a young girl about 11 or 12 years of age who stands in the balcony of the house which is described in exactly the same way as that of Amir’s. The girl in the red dress can see the crow and the narrator on its back.
The narrator, we are told, is Alam, again the mirror image of the name Mala. He is described as the friend of the girl, who has witnessed death, has become extremely afraid of her parent’s safety and imagines they will commit suicide.
What can be gathered is that at the heart of the novel, there is sexual abuse of a child and the author has presented three different stories that somehow are linked to one another, or could be characters from the same family.
This is not a linear story with a set plot and a straightforward ending. You will have to read it more than once at least to grasp the narrative and figure out the metaphors and allegories.
At the end of the story, the girl turns narrator and listens to her friend — the crow man who leaves with her pictures and pieces of paper that contain the stories of her parents — their dreams, the world they want to travel to.
Keep them carefully, whenever you are afraid, take them out, arrange them in whatever order you want and you will understand your parents’ stories, he tells her (she tells him?).
