Lice cure.

This was town where people were proud of their personal hygiene and cleanliness and always boasting to their neighbours about this virtue of theirs. People from other surroundings, towns and villages slowly became sick of hearing this again and again and wanted to do something about it so as not to be humiliated on account of their deficiency in things of personal prestige.

Women institute of a certain town invited women from that town as to come and see themselves that their town was as good as theirs but did not disclose that some of their children were affected with lice. A dirty trick was being played on the visiting women. There was an evening of entertainment, which the host put out in a lavish manner, with provisions of tasty food served at the evening banquet.

The entertainment put on went up went up to the late evening and women could not return to their village on account of fear of darkness and so they were kindly invited to spend the night their with their hosts. Each was assigned to a household but some of the women were to share the beds with others and women saw no harm in it, as most of the people sharing were small children. Now it happened that most of the children were infected with lice and the intention was that they would pass it to the women from the town boasting of their personal hygiene.

After about a week after their return, the women began to suffer from itching and which they attributed to hot weather. They took baths and washed their hair repeatedly but the itching did not subside. One day a woman was combing her long dark hair and when she removed the loose hair from the comb, she noticed some tiny white creature sticking to the hair and which she, to her horror, found to be lice. Other women who visited the previous village were in the same position. It was great shame and shock but did not want to disclose to their friends as it might bring shame on their households.

Secretly and in silence, they tried to find a cure for their afflictions. They visited all the chemists and pharmacies in order to buy anti lice preparations and repeatedly shampooed their hair but not with much success. Each woman was agitated in her own way but did not want to disclose the trouble to other They were being afraid of disclosing such
degrading secrets to strangers such as ‘having lice on one’s body.’ To these respectable ladies it was like being accused of having committed an adultery or stealing something from their neighbours. One could die of shame! So all were suffering in silence and from extreme agony.

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Arvind was a man without any work. Not through laziness or lack of trying for a job. He had applied for numerious jobs in the town and the surrounding districts but always the same story- too many applicants for very few jobs. He had taken various pre-employment tests and passed all of them but still was rejected at final hurdle. In a corrupted society one’s intellectual abilities were not enough. One must have good connections to the people on the selection board or with plenty of money to bribe people and he had neither of those. He was well educated with Bachelor of Arts degree. When he entered the college for his degree, everything seemed so rosy about his future prospects. His family was not rich and they had to make sacrifices to get their son study for a degree. Everybody assumed that once he is qualified, there would not be dearth of jobs waiting for him but it did not turn out so. There were plenty of bachelors of arts people around but very few jobs.

Without anything to do whole day, idleness set in and with it he drifted into a sort of hopelessness, which induced inertia both of body and mind. He started to spend more and more time in bed and this to the annoyance of his father who called him lazy—so and so. When you were driven into a corner and if you had any pride left, you would devise a plan to banish that pitiable situation and this Arvind tried to do that. He saw around him plenty of people without any modern education doing well both socially and financially, like the astrologers, psychic readers and he could not see why he should not try his luck in that direction.

He got himself apprenticed to a an old sorcerer cum spell caster, studied few manuals on occult and other hidden knowledge, runes, the art of prophecy, alphabets of magical scripts and hieroglyphics symbols and these were enough to impress the humanity as an occultist and a cast speller. He dressed in a learned scholar’s garb like a long achkin, silvery trousers and a neatly tied turban. He had to grow his beard in order to look more impressive in appearance. He put up a board outside his establishment, pasted flyers on the walls across the town and advertised his expertise in the local press.

One of the victims of the lice epidemic was Sundri and who was keenly desperate to find a secret cure for her afflictions and so she was on look out for a lice cure, however bizarre it might had been. Soon she came across the name of Arvind Bhadur, the occultist and made an appointment with him. When she saw him she was impressed but anxious and sought his help at any cost. They talked about her affliction in strict confidence and she was impressed with his learning. He promised to call back on her when he had consulted the stars and cast out a chart as to treat her in a secret manner.

After three days he called upon her and showed some charts and various zodiacal calculations he had done for her. She did not have a clue about what he was talking about but seemed to take interest in all the technicalities of that ’ mumbo jumbo’. He stated that he had meditated on that problem and contacted some celestial spirits and they would help him to trap all the lice crawling on the lady’s body. It would be a long and laborious process lasting up to six weeks.

Sundri had to buy some pure white silken saris and each time she had to dress herself in one of those and take showers without removing her sari. While she was bathing, she had to recite a secret mantra given to her by Arvind. After the showers she would remove the wet sari, fold it and put into a plastic bag and which then would be taken to Arvind’s establishment secretly. Under the power of the mantra, the lice would rush to seek sheltering pure white cloth of the wet sari and thus gradually over the period of six weeks all the lice would be trapped and killed by a spell cast on those wet saris by him.

As the weeks went, Arvind encouraged by his first triumph somehow managed to find all the ladies of the town infected by the lice disease and contacted them one by one. He became adept in conning all of them with his tricks and lures of white wet saris with an additional one hundred rupees per week as the fees for his services rendered. He was happy with his first enterprise and started planning his next phase. He had accumulated plenty of expensive silken saris together with a tidy sum of money. It was time to move out to, to some other district for a fresh adventure. One night he gathered all his learned books, his occult primers, hired a motor vehicle big enough to carry bundles of silken saris and drove away into wilderness for the start of next enterprise.

The ladies were full of hope and looked forward to the day when they would be lice free but weeks passed and there was no contact from the occultist. Each one tried to find him at his premises but all of them found it to be empty without any trace of either Arvind or their saris. They were so embarrassed by the whole process that they were ashamed to disclose it either to their men folks or to each other.

Soon Mr.Bhadur was in a new town and looked around for his next moneymaking scheme. He found that there were plenty of poor people around and few could not afford even a proper and it was simply beyond their means to buy even a decent sari for their woman folks. He invited all the town dignitaries and impressed them with his charitable intentions and with his compassion for all the poor folks of the town. The town committee gave him free premises to run his charity. He called a meeting of all the poor folks and told them that he felt sorry for all their woman folks who were in tattered dresses and which were against his morals to see the female dignity coming to such a bad end

He was going to buy some expensive saris costing about five hundred rupees each, for all the women folks. He was going to pay the initial sum from his own pocket and distribute them among the poor, charging them nominal fees of only fifty rupees. There was a great demand for this product and all the saris were gone within one day. He was so proud of making himself a tidy sum of few thousand rupees and winning the prestige of all the people of the town. All of them now worshipped him as a ‘ grand human being’.

Durlabh Singh© 2008.