For a claustrophobic, a lift ride feels a death ride.

For an agarophobic, a crowded place kills like a cyanide, sucking away lungs’ oxygen.

For a glossophobic, a social conversation is more of a choking spell, while being tongue-tied.

For a scopophobic, it is quite easy to die, just by a burp in a hushed office. Well, the grouped glares can slit throats.

How to die earliest?

Be a sufferer of all of ‘em. Like me.

I dodge lifts with its momentary occupants’ count of more than two. Simple. If they ascend up, you tell you go down, and vice versa.

Being a study-from-home student, sparse interactions and almost nil peer studies, kept me alive for a long period.

My residence is a part of apartments bundled together in name of a society, with lush amenities and decent security. Automatically puts me in many mob-prone situations. It is a mixed bag of emotions, my heart holds against crowds. A li’l bit of anxiety, a li’l bit of anger and li’l bit of hatred. I don’t hate people as such, but how it becomes an obligation to be an agreeable, ever-smiling, tactical conversationalist, feels forced. My intraversion, atheism, liberalism, misogamy and animal activism, label my forehead with ‘dry and dreary one’.

Weather has been disobediently cloudy during this last summer month. The pleasant dilemma of the humongous nimbuses with their rebellious juvenile droplets, allowed many enjoyable evening strolls and outdoor reads on my schedule. But a predictable breakout came about today, chonky raindrops wetting and crinkling words of the novel ‘yellowface’. A pleasing interruption, though.

I made a run towards the pair of lifts, to play the ‘avoid ‘em’ game.Two rounds passed by, felt it was going good.

There were a set of rules and some impromptu ones, that kept adding to this game. Rule one- less than two, take the elevator. More than two, skip. Second- avoid any ride with remotely familiar occupants, evading eye contact gives a bonus point. Third- a blast of music in your headset, especially commencing at beginning of the ride is needed. Fourth- though you are fond of kids and puppies, suppress your desires of pampering ‘em. And many more.

Third round came as an ambush.

An over-friendly, middle-aged female neighbour, from the opening elevator, waved towards me. Some people are gifted with this magnetic pull-like powers. Being a magnet isn’t exactly a charm, if taken in literary sense, magnet’s power is a ‘force’ by which metal pieces are ‘forced’ against their will to go towards the former, flying in a direction which they don’t like.

I had to enter the lift against my will.

I kept failing my rules. Conversations kept flowing in. Starting with “hi, aunty!” to many interview-level questions, interview deepening with each next query’s depth. I couldn’t start my music on the headset, there were two bubbly, smiling, chubby toddlers in the lift, and the lift stopping at every level.

The bars on my anxiometer kept going up, with some gasps of breath escaping between my words, some heads turning, some long gazes at me. The shabby lift-LED’s subtle flickering, the elevator’s coarse quivering, the adding up of head count and every other minute detail rocked my heart.

I lost it. My system broke down, my legs gave out, each blink felt longer and each breath louder in background of diminishing voices. A panic attack set in. My pleasant evenings cheated me enough to not carry my clonazepam with me.

What is the most underestimated, undercalculated and overshadowed human quality in this world? Empathy. That’s how we belittle our fellow beings. Or atleast I did. This attack dampened the cynical voices inside my head.

My sweat was brushed off with gentle, foreign touches. I was cuddled by motherly embraces, my ears were filled with words of reassurance, my lips damped with water, my head stroke by tiny hands, my floppy body was pulled erect and supported, some panicked and some shouted to created some space. That minute held a multitude of crowded reactions. That minute fed me with a novel perspective of 'crowds'.