A supernatural drama in the building


I won’t claim to have seen all possible events that are disturbing for mankind but I think I considered myself a little stronger than most when it came to feathers of the supernatural kind. The idea could have been ‘seeing is believing.’ Have I been a witness to an incident of the supernatural kind recently?
I don’t know. I have been witness to a disturbing incident but would ponder over it for a long time to come before I would term it ‘from outside the world’ or otherwise.
A young neighbour’s wife eight months knocked up has been trying to run away from home at odd times – in the middle of the night, in the dead of the afternoon and so on. Her husband and her father in law tried to restrain her but she objected with such frenzy that according to me, an average human is incapable of. She pulled herself and her two supporters down the set of stairs screaming her lungs out, flailing her arms, kicking her feet back and forth, hitting her engorged tummy with her hands and banging herself on the walls. She managed to get her mouth bleeding somehow- whether she bit herself or if it was the result of some impact on the walls, is still unknown.
Somehow she was pinned down on the floor in the middle of the staircase. ‘Holy water’ from a durgah was brought (they had a stock of it at home) and poured into her mouth and sprinkled over her head. The frenzy ceased. I put it off as rehydration, she was possibly thirsty from all the effort she had put into screaming. But her arms and feet were still alive and kicking, literally.
Incidentally, a family on the floor where this person now lay believe in the miraculous powers of the Son of God. They swiftly brought out the Hindi translation of the Holy Bible and placed it gently under the moaner’s head. Surprise, she was quiet but still moaned and muttered.
Considering that she was now fine, her relatives tried to pull her back to her feet but the power was back again. They let her lie there making way for people to pass by over her legs.
The head of the believing family meanwhile propounded the theory that this phenomenon was nothing but ‘hawa’. The ‘patient’ had recently got back from her native village and surely might have gone to a nearby water body where the ‘evil hawa’ had gotten into her. (It seems, it’s inadvisable for pregnant women to venture anywhere near water bodies even when remotely pregnant.) And according to him, the only way to field this hawa was to call ‘Uncle and Aunty’.
I wondered if this pair was Bunty & Bubli. Uncle and Aunty soon arrived. Uncle looked like a darker version of Alan Tudyk and Aunty looked like the caretaker of a rural church in Kerala. Everyone stood up in reverence of the holy couple. They themselves stood looking at the patient, probably trying to judge her symptoms. They let out a disclaimer that they have been doing this for the past 10-12 years and that they only pray for the interference of the Son into matters of evil activities.
Uncle and Aunty soon began to call upon their deities with such fervor that I couldn’t help but record a part of it. The patient who by had found some peace lying on a mat in the believer’s flat, suddenly found it impossible to lie in such noisy surroundings and sprang up. Everyone gasped. The evil spirit is trying to get out because of the power of the prayers! A few curses and spits later, the patient lay down again to be fed a little more of the water- this time from some other place.
She slept again, giving in to exhaustion (or exorcism as many others would like to believe). Now it was time to talk about why the Son of God was more powerful than the others and how he had miraculous powers. The others in the room were requested not to feel offended, for Aunty was talking from experience. They asked the patient to be brought to their place the next day, where a powerful pastor was coming to preach and assured that he would surely relieve the patient of all her qualms.
What brought relief to the half dozen people in the small flat was that the patient was now responding to whoever talked to her instead of the curdling swears and gibberish that she spewed earlier.
What is wrong with her? I don’t know. What I gather is that she is a patient suffering of severe depression and might also be delusional. She has attempted suicide a few times including one recently when her family found her on top of the building’s water tank considering a leap a 100 feet downwards. I also understand that things like this happen to people when being pregnant.
Why am I writing this? I seem to think this will help me get rid of the habit of re-enacting the violent scenes in my head. I don’t know what to make of this. I don’t know yet if prayers help achieve anything. I don’t know…