Mayong, Mother, and Mangaldai: Black Magic That Doesn’t Let Your Rice Boil
The magical, mystical land of Mayong
It was late evening, when my mother’s uncle arrived at Mayong in the then Nowgong District of Assam. Due to his being a Brahmin priest, who in those days did not usually eat food cooked by others, the host family provided him with the necessary provisions, so that he could cook his meal himself. After a quick bath, my grandfather started making his food. A girl from the neighbourhood dropped by, casually asked the hosts, “Is the guest busy cooking his meal?”, and after a little chitchat went her way. My grandfather continued to boil his rice for hours, but it never got cooked.
This happened, I guess, sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. During my childhood years, this story was oft-repeated by my mother, as an example of the black magic prowess of the inhabitants of Mayong. Since the time I remember him, the only image of him that comes to my mind is his permanently lying in a cot most of the time, leaving it only to drink a mega-bowl of tea and to return to his bed immediately thereafter. I never really got to ask him if this incident had ever really taken place. By that time, his oldest son, having failed in the basic Sanskrit examination (which would have qualified him to teach at the local traditional Sanskrit school that mainly trained perspective priests) obtained the moniker “Shastry”. Humiliating though it may sound, it was not as bad as in case of that other guy, who was fond of filing court cases against his neighbours (and legend has it that he lost most of those) and was, thus, popularly and universally (well, locally, actually) known as “Shanti Bhushan”, the eminent lawyer and Law Minister in the Morarji Desai ministry.
Majority of the exponents of black magic, who had learnt their craft from someone of Mayong, or who had, in turn, received their training at Mayong, could cause havoc, and always looked to harm others, often just for fun. And their activities extended from making a newly bought pair of water buffaloes go crazy and run around, to making the bride and groom have uncontrollable loose motion on their wedding night. Those who used their craft for the good of others were usually summoned to help identify the culprit after a theft or burglary had taken place. The good magician would usually initiate a bet-jaraa (enchanted rattan cane), a process in which a rattan cane will be empowered by chanting secret hymns to it, and which would then go and find the thief and beat him mercilessly. I spent all my childhood and half of my teenage years waiting to witness a cane flying through the air and going and hitting someone. It would be much later that I would come to know that the cane had to be held by a person who carried it and followed its “clues”, a fact which while proving that even enchanted canes must obey Newton’s laws of motion, nevertheless turned out to be rather anticlimactic (and a bit traumatic, if I may add) on my part.
The reputation of Mayong as a centre of sorcery and black magic extended to all the spinsters of the district, which was by now called Nagaon. It was said that any bachelor of marriageable age, who was offered a paan (betel leaf and areca nuts with a pinch of slacked lime, often offered in Assamese household as the first thing to welcome guests) by a Nagaon girl, can be mesmerised permanently, leading to the man marrying the girl in question.
Going by my mother’s statements, Mangaldai, where I grew up, too seemed to be clouded by the presence of various gods, spirits and expert practitioners of black magic. Many of our neighbours were actively plotting to harm us; thus, if one neighbourhood family released an uran-baan (“flying arrow”, literally speaking, but which meant casting a magic spell that affected the psyche of anyone inside the perimeters of our household), another buried a tube full of magical ingredients that affected us physically. Based on the suggestions of the many spiritual advisers who guided her, the counter actions ranged from sacrificing a wild goat at the Kali temple of the Sanyasi (ascetic), who by his own admission could smoke a hundred chillums (a clay pipe used for smoking) of ganja a day, to sending one of her assistants to a remote village at the foothills of Bhutan to bring a very powerful magician, who could detect any such spells, provide remedies and even retrieve buried articles of black magic, meant to harm us. It took my brother and I many years to realize that those magicians and advisers were quite poor, mostly jobless and perhaps their only way to earn a livelihood was to sponge the gullible.
A neighborhood household was (in)famous for their reputation that any bachelor renting a place in their household, eventually ended up marrying a girl from their extended family. The matriarch of the family was from Nagaon district, and it was speculated that black magic of Mayong played a role in it. However, ‘reliable’ sources later told us that their modus operandi was rather simple: it involved sending the girl to the guy’s room at night under some pretext, then closing the door, and making a lot of noise about the missing girl; the ‘disgraced’ girl, once found to be inside the guy’s room, had to be married by the guy, who spoiled the reputation of an innocent virgin, to begin with.
Just like I never asked my grandfather if he really failed to cook the rice, I never asked any member of the family if any of this really happened. But then both of these stories must be true, since my mother said so.
Pankaz Kumar Sharma was born and raised in the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam, North-East India. He is a science worker, and sporadically writes essays. He is not a bird trainer. He can be reached at pankaz.sharma@gmail.com