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Dusty Trails
'I might go missing some day' The man who is apparently fearless acknowledges death as a constant companion
special kind of human being to lay it all on the line, and push the meaning of life and death, in the manner he did. For that reason, he is special. “I’ll climb as long as I live,” he said with a smile, even as he was laid out in hospital.
He is Chitradurga’s most famous contemporary name but he didn’t exist for a long time. Questions of identity forever haunted Jyothi Raj, the ‘Monkey King’ of several hit YouTube videos and probably India’s only free solo climber. He could not prove he existed, even though he was flesh-and-blood and seen by audiences worldwide. He didn’t have a valid ID, the kind that the Indian state demands: PAN, ration card, passport. It’s only in recent times that he managed to get one legitimate ID: an election card. Come to think of it, who is Jyothi Raj? Daredevil? Soloist? Showman? Or, more importantly, one of many million young Indians struggling to escape the dreary circumstances of birth and childhood? These questions won’t go away, even though he might not articulate them. They define who he is. In a sense, that’s why
April 2013
he talks about death too, dispassionately, for it dissolves all questions – and he has flirted with death before. That was a one-off dalliance. These days the relationship is more serious. “I might go missing one day,” he says emotionlessly. “It’s a matter of time.” Death is a constant companion – either in his bloodcurdling stunts in front of a cheering audience at the Chitradurga fort, or while retrieving dead bodies of people at Jog Falls. He’s retrieved three dead bodies without charging the relatives any fee, for he doesn’t want to disturb them in their hour of grief. “It was cold,” he says, of one corpse. “Like it had been kept in an AC room.” Death might come suddenly, unannounced and when he’s climbing by himself away from public sight, and he knows it probably will. “When I climb, I’m always looking for something, like a tree, to cushion my fall,” he says. “So I probably won’t hurt myself on the smaller falls. But if it’s a major fall, it will be death.” He did have a bad fall a year ago at the fort – he was halfway through the climb when it started raining. The fall broke his left leg. A local swami, Murugarajendra Swamy, paid for his treatment. Jyothi Raj’s story begins as a runaway