A medicine man in Malabar

 (Published in the Indian Express, 22 April 1993)


It’s a beautiful June morning in Kerala and it’s pleasant to be out driving in the country. We’re going thirty kilometres from Palakkad to Kollengode to see a bone setter who, I’m told, might have a cure for my troubled knee. I'd damaged it in a cricketing accident and the doctors in the city have suggested surgery. We're going to try an alternative.


My companion is a surgeon retired from government service, and as superintendent of hospitals in this district, has traveled these little known roads before. It was his driver who first told us about the bone setter. The driver said the bone setter came from a long line of medicine men -- healers who have tended the Kalari warriors of Malabar since the days of kings, kingdoms, and the detritus of war. This bone setter is said to come from Pollachi across the Tamil Nadu border and it is said that all his medicine comes from the extract of a single herb. There are the usual far fetched stories of his prowess, similar to innumerable tales you hear in the countryside of magic doctors and miracle cures.

We have left the congested roads of Palakkad and have come off the highway going to Thrissur. As roads go, this one is indifferent -- it is narrow, jagged at the edges, and occasionally potholed. But it stretches between green fields rippling and winking in the morning sun and the only other traffic is the occasional mofussil bus. In front of us is the Western Ghats -- blue, imposing, and crowned with gray clouds. It’s monsoon weather and there is a suggestion of rain in the distance.

As the morning brightens, the sun burns the clouds off the mountaintops and you can see weaving lines of mountain streams glinting like silver down the rock face. We seem to be driving straight into the base of the wall of the Blue Mountain, tiny creatures audaciously cruising in the amphitheatre of ancient gods.

It’s an elderly car and it really shouldn’t be doing these out of town journeys. But the surgeon is touchy about his old Ambassador and scoffs at all intimations of its mortality. He tells me that the car only misbehaves when his wife travels in it. “Behaves like a lamb at all other times,” he says. We stop thrice after that to fix a choked filter, an overheated distributor, and a broken electrical connection.

Still, it is pleasant to stretch our limbs in the sun and feel the grass underfoot during these halts. The delay does cause one upset in our plans. There is an old palace at Kollengode that I’m curious to see. We know someone there who will show us the place. But the day is getting on and we have to meet the medicine man. The palace will have to wait.

The medicine man runs his clinic from a cottage no different from a hundred others in the area. If you are not looking for his nondescript signboard, you could easily miss the little tiled house amidst the coconut palms and trees. We stoop and go in. The room is empty save for a single bench, a few bottles of oil, a stove, and the medicine man.

He is a brisk man neatly dressed in white with efficient movements and cool probing fingers. He only speaks Tamil and mine is not too fluent. But his eyes under his white hair are patient. The surgeon and he strike empathy. Their nomenclature is different and their training poles apart -- one has operated under lights in England and Kerala and the other probably hasn’t travelled five hundred miles from these green hills. But both treat the sick and heal the maimed.

The medicine man doesn't prescribe any magic cure. He rubs some oil on my knee and shows me how to bunch a nerve with my thumb and massage it to loosen the joint. It pains like hell. I am to do this for ten minutes daily in the evenings and swab the area with a cloth wrung in hot water. Normal physiotherapy you might say, but the difference is in the oil. The medicine is mixed in the oil -- and yes, it is made from the extract of a single herb. He has no other medicine to give me.

I rest awhile on his bench and flex my knee gingerly. The skin is still sore and tender but the joint is a touch more free. The medicine man pours out a measure of oil and gives it to me in a bottle. He warns me to massage the knee regularly for a fortnight. Will I be fully fit after that? He shrugs and points upwards. He can only try what he knows, he says, and that is only part of the cure.

The gods must do the rest.

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