Tryst with New England

The fakir began his investigations at the very spot where everything had supposedly started.

The mango grove, the earthen pitcher, and the bucket were all there. But the young man who tended the fruit trees said that there wasn't an old man of my description in the place. However, on the fakir's prodding, he informed us that a pir, who had died a hundred years before, had his grave in the middle of the orchard. He took us to the spot I recognized to be the place where I had been offered the restorative touch and water. He also told us that the dead pir's unusual powers had, during his lifetime, enabled him to transfer ailments of children to his own body and heal them within himself through suffering and prayer. It was also believed that his ethereal presence still worked miracles for children, and thousands brought their offspring during his annual urs, held in that mango grove every autumn, to be rid of sickness and disease.

I have this jack-in-the-box quality, a capability to pull myself with my own hair out of the mire, which enables me to hold out in strange, and particularly intangible, situations. It surely helped me then to abide by a somewhat drastic resolution: to never touch a sick baby or child again until I was old enough to take an adult decision in the matter. But the knowledge that a level of experience beyond the normal human perception existed, and influenced our lives in a way that defied rational explanation, has never ceased to interest me profoundly.

And abide I did. At least until a day five years ago when my gardener's little daughter had malaria and I touched the child's head almost involuntarily. But although the sequence of my childhood memories came rushing back like a film rewind at high speed, and the child recovered by the next morning, nothing happened to me on this occasion, at least not immediately. Not even the usual dream.

I left for Boston a month later on an academic quest by the river Charles. And it was in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the globe and thousands of miles from home, that I dreamt the self-same dream again. Next day found me in the MIT hospital. The diagnosis wasn't easy because malaria is unknown in the New England area, and I was initially treated for virus infection and which, the doctors told me, would have been fatal if the tropical disease experts of the Harvard Medical School had not intervened timely. In any case, and as I see it now, some suffering was mandatory in my case. And whether I recovered because of the treatment, or despite it, no body would ever know.