Short fiction: A young village healer has to find a way to cure painful boils on a man’s posterior

Rebo’s state of mind at the moment could be likened to one of his concoctions: three spoons of powdered excitement, two pinches of optimism and a sprig of fear, diluted with distilled nervousness. While he waited for his patient, he rechecked whether anything was amiss from his repertoire: a scalpel, a piece of thin cotton gauge smeared in a paste of eleven herbs, a hair-like, wiry brass string, disinfected cloth, hot water and finally, the analgesic – two goat pelletsised balls of opium or kanee.

As a practitioner of medicine, Rebo firmly believed in the pursuit of peculiarities, of infirmities as well as cures. In his opinion, this was essential not only for progress in the profession but for the progress of man. Quite unlike his ancestors who kept their practice within the stale limits of simple colds, coughs, fevers, cuts, lashes and sometimes diarrhoea, Rebo pushed his knowledge of medicinal plants and potions much beyond his legacy. At 25 years of age, he was a highly accomplished bez credited with curing ailments of the liver, kidneys, eyes as also non-organ disorders of speech and complicated curses such as infertility.

However, like his ancestors, he, too, believed that the spirits that could not find passage to the otherworld chose to inflict suffering on the bodies of those that remained on earth. There were common errors that humans made with such “left-behind” spirits. For instance, urinating on trees inhabited by such spirits or leaving one’s hair untied at noon in the middle of a paddy field. There were also some ailments that were caused upon fiddling with nature’s laws, like eating cooked food during a solar eclipse, which most definitely eclipsed a woman’s womb for life. Rebo felt privileged about having access to all kinds of mantras, which when combined with specific herbs and potions, could take on the malefic effects of a spirit’s wrath as well as that of nature herself.

Despite knowing these realities, he wasn’t able to silence his curious mind, which kept asking him to look for causes beyond the habitual inflictions by evil spirits and remedies that could rely on things beyond esoteric chants. For a while now, he had been doing all kinds of experiments with kanee. In fact, the decision to deploy kanee in his practice served as a catalyst for many developments, especially in the treatment of extremely high fevers and extremely loose stomachs. Once he began administering studied doses to his patients, he realised that it was kanee’s ineffable way of invading sensations of pain that helped push the boundaries of his practice. Sometimes, a bit too much. Like on this day, when he was about to enter an uncharted territory – the anus.

For a long time, he had come across complaints among his village folk, men and women alike (although he would never fancy any plans of treating women with such an unholy affliction!), of extremely painful, pus-filled boils near the anus. After a short period of being inert (although painful), the boil would erupt to discharge its contents in intervals. Soon after, the same contents would start oozing out of the anus as well. No cure was known for the condition and those cursed with the pain and foul discharge simply had to learn to live with it. Although rare, the few incidents of death linked to this disease impelled Rebo to pursue the infamous anomaly.

Rebo’s subject for the day was the middle-aged village astrologer, Horideb. The painful abomination growing on his posterior made it extremely difficult for him to sit for hours and perform the laborious task of ascertaining the effect of celestial bodies on his clients’ lives. He had tried several remedies, including treatment from the American missionary doctor of Sibsagar town. But the river of pus and blood continued flowing out of him unabated, like the river Disang. Until the very end though, he steadfastly avoided what soon appeared to be the only option left for him: Rebo, the eccentric bez from his village. He was aware of the bez’s unorthodox experiments with opium in his treatments and because of that, he was extremely paranoid. But with his anal calamity spanning almost a year, something had to be done. The suspension of his business was finally beginning to pinch his pockets. Although more than the income loss, it was his wife’s recent refusal to touch his manhood even over his dhoti, let alone perform her permuted fellatio, that finally pushed him towards Rebo.

“Probhuuuuuu-aaaaaa-oooooo…” sang Horideb in pain and pleasure, as he lay on the bed, legs pulled apart by the two jute ropes that tied his ankles to the posts of the bed. It was another one of Rebo’s creative ideas to prop his patient’s legs up at a desired angle so as to maximise the exposure of the afflicted buttock area while minimising untoward interferences from the patient. Anyway, it was highly unlikely that Horideb could create any trouble for the bez. He was, at the time of the procedure, fully engaged with the apparition of a celestial fairy from Venus, who had begun stroking his hair and whispering titillating words into his ears moments after he had chewed a full opium ball. His patient’s distraction helped Rebo in making a small but deep incision at the site of the discharge with the heated tip of the scalpel. At this, the bulbous mound instantly opened up, its contents flowing out with desperate velocity.

The sheer horror of what he was about to do next would have been unthinkable had his patient not reached his current state of kanee-induced delirium. Before proceeding, Rebo took a few seconds to stare directly at the face before him, which at that moment was breaking into spurts of giggles and soft moans, far from the hubristic expressions it was usually known to carry. Never one to want to be associated with the tag of a kanee-khowa or opium-eater, as those with the habit were called, Horideb’s disdain for the substance was common knowledge throughout the village. After all, how could an irreducible Brahmin such as himself give in to sensory dictation by a substance easily accessible to and used by lowlifes? Horideb saw in kanee use a conspiracy by the low-born to undermine the privilege of the high-born to enter spiritual realms, accorded solely to them by the Gods. Any claim of reaching such states was therefore a crime against the natural order of things, a moral corruption

Excerpted with permission from ‘Bellows of a Wilted Poppy’ in Colour My Grave Purple and Other Stories, Shehnab Sahin, Niyogi Books.