Shoo away the dogs!

Hmm…One more morning! After more than a hundred days into lockdown, I started knowing that I hate routine work. And bringing milk is one of them.
The swishhh indicator on my rubber sandals was at a high level, so I can make a perfect guess – It rained all through the night. Fair enough! It’s nice to know it rains in my place too! Only one complaint though...my spectacles should have had wipers, so I could wipe out the vapor! I moved on with my glasses off. The road was clear.

Birds chirping… I moved on… not with thoughts about everyone’s favorite subject of the day – COVID, but with how do I finish off my project work that day… until I heard two guys arguing with each other; their talks could be heard far away. No!! that’s not a skirmish I hoped. There laid a few broken red earthen pots and scrambled flowers and green mango leaves, a couple of bananas scattered over the place, and a lot of some-kind-of black seeds and a half-cut lemon in red, strewn over a small plantain leaf. What is it about?

There was this gentleman who was with his dog, arguing with a poor-looking not-found-before half-naked guy. From a little Telugu I can claim to know, I guessed the man with the dog was quite disturbed with what this guy did there. He claimed he caught him red-handed practicing black-magic. As I walked close by, I unsuspectingly trampled one of the lemons, and the gentleman started shouting and asked me to step away as those lemons could bring bad luck! Wow! Does that really happen I wondered? 

I have heard about such stories from many old people in my childhood. They discussed many times amongst themselves about how, during those days, an old woman performed black-magic on toddlers and lost their appetite and made them skinny!

It was rampant during my school days too! Those so-called illiterate folks often kept such weird things on a place where three roads meet to form a dead-end; geometrically, one road meeting perpendicularly with the other. Guess that’s the super-auspicious place they chose based on advice from a tantric, who performs some ugly-rituals at midnight on a new moon day! And someone added…that too in the middle of a graveyard, according to some Bollywood, Sandalwood (and many other woody) movies, and the unresting souls there help the tantric achieve all he wished for! What can one expect from the dead people while the live ones don’t care to even feed a hungry dog on the road! Give me a break!

Perhaps, I would recommend my obese friends to pay a visit to that old woman once, and not that stupid tantric. Hope she has handed over the essential skills of black-magic to her younger ones! Why spend hard times and waste sweat in gyms while one can stop eating with a simple black-magic… just pay peanuts for a lemon. Ugly but funny!

Who cares! I took a step away and moved on. But why did that guy put it! What did he want! Ten minutes later, I was back in the same spot with my cotton bag with milk packets inside. There was this security guard of a housing society nearby, cleaning up the mess, and feeding those bananas and leaves to a couple of deserted calves!

I could not stop asking him what happened. The guard, sweeping and shooing away some puppies, casually told that a village man came to put all this stuff because someone advised him to do so in order to avoid the scare of coronavirus from his place! “But…” as I tried to enquire more, he added that the gentleman gave him some money and chased him away and warned him not to do that or come back again.

The next morning…the same routine…the same milk bag…the same spot…damn similar weird stuff…Shoo away the dogs!