The past couple of days I've had this crippling pain in the hip. It, suspectedly, is a collective result of the past 40 days of unrestrained adventure (and subsequent load lifting).
Volini and Voveran have come to my rescue, or so I thought, until I met Hira Didi, the shaman-next-door. I didn't know she was a shaman, until today. Whenever we vacation out here in Gethia, she visits my family as a regular villager, and thrills us with narrations of village oddities and encounters with the wild (living at the periphery of the jungle her animal sightings are frequent, to our envy), as is the conversational fashion.
But the mention of my condition made her investigative. Then she asked for some salt. Then a leaf, which she went out to fetch herself. Then I was called into the picture, and made to stand facing away from her, at the kitchen door. I had assumed she would be making a paste from Indian herbs - some local remedial recipe - that'd be thereafter wrapped in a leaf and applied to my bum as a fomentation.
What I next felt was the brush of her sickle along my back, with some murmur chants. She stood behind me, holding the leaf with a fistful of salt in her left hand, with the sickle - like a magic wand - in her right. "The handle of this Daranti (sickle) is made of Pahiya," she explained. 'Pahiya' is a tree of this region (with a characteristic flaky bark), whose wood is considered an apotropaic i.e. warding off evil spirits. After the chants got over, she left with the leaf (and the salt in it), with instructions that I don't cross the kitchen line for an hour and a half. Only if she had bones and a skull would it have seemed more transcendental. But shamanistic rituals, I like.
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