Page:Between the twilights being studies of Indian women by one of themselves (IA betweentwilights00soraiala).pdf/84

64 “ ‘What!’ he said, startled, for his sins I think were not few, ‘must I bear penalty in this life, when I am willing to carry my burden in the next.’ ‘Oh! a small matter,’ I suggested; ‘something easy of expiation. Think—a wrong perhaps to some private or Temple servant.’ But he remembered nothing. So I, pretending I had seen the thing in a dream, told him, and instantly the threader of garlands was sent for and honoured with gifts and feastings. When the holy man heard of this he took the nail from the rich man’s knee and he recovered immediately. … Yes, I believe in curses. But they are not good, they belong to the things of the body.”

“Sitting dharna” is the Curse Coercive. I thought the practice extinct, till last year I found a half-mad thing mechanically telling his beads in a Raj courtyard of my acquaintance, as he sat beside the image of Ganesh the luck-bringer, under the pipal tree where lay the offerings of red and yellow flowers and sacred grass-tufts. It was midday and he sat bareheaded in the sun, unkempt, unshaven, blear-eyed.

So had he sat a fortnight, touching neither