THE TINGLING WAND
One evening, my landline phone rang. The caller was the District Judge. He informed me that a particular healing man with some holy credentials was in town. “He had some miraculous powers with which he heals ailments just by a mere look”, he narrated in a tone of noticeable faith and hope.
He wished that I too accompany him as he was visiting this man along with a Lawyer who volunteered to drive us down to his place where he was staying. I said it suits me fine and he came to pick me up at the appointed hour from my house.
The miracle man was staying as a guest in the apartment of a person who was a devotee of a more popular living Baba at that time. We crossed the railway track to reach the place at the other end of the town. We found many waiting in the corridors for the audience of the holy man. Someone ushered us inside bypassing the waiting crowd, into a side room. We were called inside by the holy man. He was in his late fifties wearing a loose attire, something like saffron in colour. The Judge had some health issues and was desperate to meet or believe anyone to get some relief.
In suffering times human logic fails and one easily falls to the promise of succour by any dubious character. As long as the result is seemingly beneficial we don’t bother about the method.
When we went inside, the holy healer talked to the Judge asking me and another to turn to the other side facing the wall in the small room. I felt like an offender in a police cell at that moment in that awkward position. After a few minutes the “treatment” was finished and the Judge was asked to leave. At this point someone who seemed to be an aide of the holy man asked me also to leave with my companion the Judge. The wand man was reluctant to spare his precious time in repeating the exercise over me again. He relented only after I tersely told his over-acting aide within the miracle man’s hearing, saying that I had not come for nothing just to watch from a distance and depart when the wand was claimed to have the power to remove any known or unknown ailments.
Then it was my turn to witness the miraculous act of the holy man. By this time no one was present in the room save the two of us. He made me stand before him and with an air of a mystic he waved the wand from my head to feet from a little distance and asked me how I felt. I felt a tingling sensation in my body the way the wand moved. He repeated both vertically and horizontally the wand therapy and out I came from his presence to the waiting car outside the building.
Later the Judge got a transfer from this place and I didn’t have much contact with him after. Not much significance was given to the patently fake, spiritually fraudulent and medically unscientific session with the healing man.
There has always been a controversy, a rift, between faith and reality. We tend to consciously ignore reality for the unconscious faith, lest we lose our mental comfort !
The faith is not just in religious context, it is in every aspect as well. We are more faithful to fallacy than to informed faith.
Man creates designed God images and idols. Religious doves believe and worship as if they are the real divine Gods. We fight over images and imaginations. So many copies are made while the original is either missing or mistaken.
The fragile mind is never satisfied nor rational. A godman is worshiped while alive and after his death his tomb. We need support for our faith to rest and a tomb, to put our flowers to test ! The paranormal happenings and the many superstitious beliefs we hold, are as a result of the indoctrination and brainwashing from childhood, inevitable in the society we live in, wrote Dr. Abraham Kovoor in his book. When the mind is in confusion it makes us more vulnerable to external trickery. It is the hope that makes one hopeless.
“Mana eva manushyanam karanam bandha mokshayoho.”
As the mind, so the man; bondage or liberation are in one’s own mind.
So as fortitude. Mind plays many tricks. It can be both a friend and a foe.
Months passed by and one day I was casually watching the evening news on the television. The news that some fake divine healer was arrested in some distant town when he was pretending to perform his healing session in a hospital caught my attention. I could recognise him as the same person who hoodwinked many in our town earlier.
Some people believe that chanting of hymns or whatever thousands of times gives one miraculous powers as the one narrated above. I don’t know the truth of it but falling for such claims will certainly make us loose all sense of proportion.
I had no further information whether the fake healer in saffron guise vanished with his magic wand forever after the arrest and exposure or resurrected himself elsewhere in search of new victims.
ESKAYEN
