In Amma's Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India

3. Patient Narratives in the Healing Room

106 3 patient narratives in the healing room They come crying; they go away laughing. Individual patients come to the healing table with unique circumstances and present their problems to Amma in narratives that give depth, character , and variation to the “same” diagnoses. Many patients say that they chose Amma over other healers because of her patience in listening to these narratives, and Amma herself says that “understanding” is what is most important, not the mathematical diagnosis. We can begin to explicate what this understanding might mean by examining a range of individual cases and patients who have come to Amma’s healing table.1 Most of these cases involve what readers might identify as psychological problems rather than purely physical illnesses, and these illnesses generate narratives . Illnesses such as children’s high fevers do not generally generate extended narratives in the healing room beyond those that tell of a patient ’s resort to multiple healing systems or healers within a single system. Long-Term Chronic Problems and Health Maintenance Some patients come to Amma regularly to maintain good health or for treatment of long-term chronic problems. One such patient is Mary, Patient Narratives in the Healing Room 107 a middle-aged Christian woman, who nonetheless wears the big red bot fit fiu that is often associated with Hindu women. She works at a “convent” school and has been coming to Amma regularly for eight years. Her head shakes uncontrollably with what from my lay perspective looks like Parkinson ’s disease, but I agree with her assertion that the shaking has lessened considerably over the months and years I have known her. She comes every two weeks for a new supply of fālitā. The fālitā Amma prepares for her are different than the little ones stacked on Amma’s desk. Mary is given large fālitā made from full sheets of paper (8.5 by 14 inches), rolled with cotton and bound with thread; Abba says each of these is equivalent to lighting ten regular-sized smaller fālitā. Mary brings with her incense sticks, rock salt, and bottles of water over which Amma blows duā and which Mary uses daily in her home; on several occasions she also brought a plastic bag of soil for Amma to bless before she sprinkled it both in her home and at the school where she works. Sometimes she brings saucers on which Amma writes and from which she drinks. These are treatments for Mary’s chronic head-shaking, but with each visit she usually has speci fic acute requests, too—such as asking for Abdul Jinn fālitā with specific co-workers’ names written on them to stop their argumentation with her. She is an old friend of Amma’s and often sits with her for up to two hours at a time, even after she has received her prescriptions, which themselves take a long time for Amma to write out. Another regular patient is also a Christian woman, a schoolteacher with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. She was anxious to tell me her story: she has been coming to Amma periodically with chronic chest pain since her mother had first brought her with another (unnamed) serious problem when she was a girl. The patient’s heart problem seems to have begun when, she reported, her maternal aunt sent the Hindu goddess Kali to possess her, hoping this would disrupt her marriage arrangements to a man that the aunt had wanted her own daughter to marry. The patient said that she had been admitted to the hospital ten or more times in the last three years for chest pain. She went to specialist after specialist, but the EKGs showed nothing, although the pain remained . The patient also regularly visited a Hyderabadi Christian Pentecostal female healer and, more recently, had attended a large Pentecostal rally led by a German evangelist. The evangelist had told audience mem- IN AMMA’S HEALING ROOM 108 bers to put their hands on the part of their body they wanted to be healed, and the patient thought her chest pain had eased somewhat. But still, she said, “a little remains.” I asked the patient, “So why are you coming now to Amma if the Pentecostal healer and German evangelist’s prayer treatments have been effective?” She responded that Amma’s treatment was faster and sometimes people just did not...