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| The healer | | |
HE had tried everything for his knees, massages, acupressure, acupuncture, physiotherapy, and homeopathy, nothing worked. Then he heard of the healer in Chail. Much against my judgment I took him there. We reached in the late afternoon.
“I see patients only on Sunday morning.”
“My friend has come from England.”
“Did he come by sea or air?” It was obvious that he still lived in the early days of aviation. “By Air” .
Babaji was impressed and agreed to see Norman. After the examination he daubed Norman’s knees with an evil smelling paste, and while he worked he mumbled:
“Jal tu Jalal tu, aayi balla ko tal tu. Jai Maa Kali, Kalkatewali.” I was convinced that he was a charlatan. But there was no going back now.
The paste had seemed harmless enough but soon Norman’s breath became laboured, his head fell back and his eyes rolled over. Panic seized me. I didn’t know his children’s addresses or e-mail IDs. If this proved to be a crisis, I would not be able to inform them.
“Give him water, plenty of water.” So we propped Norman up and poured glass after glass down his throat. But there was no improvement in his condition. The knot in my stomach tightened, the Baba remained unperturbed.
After an hour of unbearable anxiety Norman’s breath came easier — so did mine! We carried him out into fresh air and removed his jacket and tie and all the time we poured more and more water down his throat. After a seeming eternity he brought up all the water and regained an incoherent consciousness and the Baba said we could take him home.
While he made up the herbal concoction for Norman’s treatment, he looked at me, his eyes bright with merriment.
“If Ramji had not been with us today and your friend had gone, what answer would you have given to his next-of-kin?”
“I would have given no answer Baba. I would have brought them here and let you do all the answering.” He chuckled at this.
“If after three weeks the pain remains, come back. Though very few return.”
On the drive back, Raju our guide, told us how his uncle had not been as lucky as Norman and had died a few minutes after the application of the paste and they had had a difficult time carrying the body up to the road.
“You could have told us this before we came and saved us the trauma of this trip,” I chided him.
In the following weeks I realised why few people returned to the Baba. The skin on Norman’s knees broke into painful, suppurating wounds which took months and months to heal.
Six months later my daughter came on a visit.
“Norman is not constantly popping painkillers the way he was doing on my last visit,” she observed after meeting Norman. This was true. Norman’s knees did seem better — perhaps the Baba’s treatment had increased Norman’s threshold of pain
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