magic

Vodoo

There has always been something creepy about voodoo. Does it or doesn’t it exist? All the mumbo jumbo. Even reading about it gives me goose bumps. Does a person get psyched into doing the things the black magic wants him to do, does he fall ill out of fear  or is it a coincidence?

We had shifted into a new house in Madras ( what is now Chennai) as my father had a new job. He had been brought in from another company as managing director. He was appointed over several others who were already (apparently inefficiently and dishonestly ) working in the company. There was no love lost and they tried their best to oust him. They were not very successful, and he consolidated his position.

Then one day he developed fever. Due to his position a gamut of senior doctors came to attend on him. He was admitted into one of the most prestigious hospitals at that time.

No one could make a diagnosis. Antibiotics were frequently changed

. “It is typhoid, it is not typhoid.”

Opinions varied but the temperature continued to spike at 102-103`F.

I got fed up. I was a medical student  at the time and though  I could not make a diagnosis, I felt that my professors at the college could. For one, their approach was very professional and systematic. They were not swayed by the VIP status of the patient or by his poverty. They did not believe in flashes of brilliance but in a  proper history and a thorough head to toe examination.  If you proceed systematically and logically you will eventually slowly and pedantically make the correct diagnosis.

My father called it torture. First there was the lowly intern. He wrote reams of notes and insisted on examining everything from head to foot (every orifice as well). This included a rectal examination, which my father objected to with every ounce of strength he had.  It was to no avail. The intern was more scared of the senior registrar than of the ranting of a vulnerable patient.

As soon as I reached the room, my father vociferously protested.

“Consider yourself lucky,” I told my parents, “it could have been a female intern!”

My mother left for Chennai as there were some problems with the renovations to the house. I was in charge.

The intern felt that he had  pain over a particular spot in his abdomen the size of a fifty paisa coin.  The registrar concurred and so did the professor. A differential diagnosis of “liver abscess” was made and confirmatory tests were started.

My mother called.” Some one did voodoo on your father.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, “Why would they want to do that?”

“They want him to get sick and die. Maybe because he found out about the large scale fraud and theft that was going on!”

It transpired that she found a rag doll, a copper plate with some hieroglyphics and a lemon.

I was not too convinced, perhaps it had been left there by the previous owner.

“What are you doing with it?”

“ I pored kerosene on it, set it on fire and now I have collected the ashes put them in a plastic bag  and left it in the Catholic church.”

I pondered over this for a minute.

“Why the Catholic church?”

“They are experts in exorcism.” I had no answer for that one.

Meanwhile my father had been started on appropriate treatment. The temperature crashed and he went home two days later.

I still don’t know if the voodoo made diagnosis for the earlier medical professionals difficult so that they were, as my mother put it, “blinded to the truth.”

Years later, my parents aged, my husband retired and we shifted to a village in Tamil Nadu.

One day, while going for a run in the morning, I saw a black sack cloth on the road with some puffed rice and 3 vegetable dolls with grinning faces. There was also a headless chicken my dog wanted to eat. (I restrained him with difficulty.)

There was another old man  who walked in the morning. “Don’t walk this way, “ he told me “this is voodoo.”

“Why have they done this?”

“There is obviously a three member family. Some one wants them to either die or vacate their house.”

I felt sorry for whoever was involved. A hoaxer had obviously extracted a great of money from some one promising success with voodoo!

A couple of months later (obviously the original black magic did not work) a similar  set of figures was found at the entrance of the village.

The village headman was a DK . That group  staunchly believed in “no God.” He found out where the chicken had come from. He soundly thrashed the family involved and filed a police complaint against the voodoo priest! The man packed up his belongings and left in the dead of the night before the police reached.

Dr. Gita Mathai

The writer is a paediatrician with a family practice at Vellore.

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