Sambeet Dash
Pandit Nilakantha Das’s rendezvous with dreaded Cholera epidemics continued, for he would soon get bitten by the dreaded bug. Once after several bounds of dysentery he was too weak from dehydration even to get up. His bosom friends Gopandhu Das and Acharya Harihar would carry him out to let him relieve his bowel then cleanse him befitting a Brahmin. This continued half a dozen times, at which point they left all hopes on him.
The nature of the fatalities associated with the much feared disease broke their nerve. A lead doctor of Puri, Ananda Lal Mitra was immediately summoned (there was a clear Bengali dominance in almost all eminent high qualified professions in Odisha at that time). His vision became blurred and he started to sweat.
Sensing an impending death, Pandit Nilakantha requested his friends to chant his favorite SLOKA (hymn) from Geeta. Streams of tears rolled from the eyes of his friend duo as they cried like kids. They lifted him to a single room to take exclusive care of him. Fate had different things in store for Pandit Nilakhantha Das. He slowly started getting better and fully recovered in a week.
Das and his friends’ tryst with the lethal disease hardened their resolve to fight it. Encountering it from close quarters helped them overcome the fear of it. They did something unthinkable in that time; take the Cholera Bull by its horn. They took care of those infected with this marauding ailment, starting from administering them with medicines to doing the last rights of those who couldn’t make it – for no one would dare to touch a person cursed by BAADI THAKURANI (The Goddess of Cholera).
Sometimes the Cholera was so widespread that there was no time to nurse them, not even give a proper funeral as the dead bodies abound dime a dozen. Once in Cuttack at the peak of the epidemics, Nilakantha and his small army of friends put fire on the mouth of dead bodies as ritual before dumping them into river Mahanadi at spate – as Cholera would happen invariably during monsoon time.
In 1912, there was NABA KAKALEBARA (Change of Body of Lord Jagannath). Due to access to railways thousands thronged Puri, followed by one of the worst Cholera epidemics Pandit Das had seen. He took a tab of it – out of 118 patients he nursed, only 19 died. It was a grand success, considering it was always the other way around. It was mainly due to the indomitable spirit of Nilakantha Das and his friends, the relentless treatment and homeopathic medicine given following the instructions from the book “Salazar’s 3 lectures of Cholera”, which he grabbed during his stint in Calcutta.
Not all episodes and escapades during his stay in Cuttack were tragic. There were a few comic instances too. Those days there were a couple of gentlemen, Gopabandhu Das and Lokanath Patnaik, who were considered as connoisseurs of Odia literature. Their answer paper in the BA exams was evaluated by a person no other than the eminent Odia Poet Madhusudan Rao.
Lokanath Patnaik failed to pass the exam. Those days very few Odias cleared BA, so few eminent persons asked Mr. Rao – “Why did you do injustice to an Odia. It seems you reinforced the notion of the Bengalis calling us uncouth and worthless fellows by failing him”.
“Why not?” – responded the great Odia poet. “Loknath Patnaik had written some really ASHLEELA (indecent) stuff here, you expect me to make him pass?” Poor Loknath simply quoted a stanza from Krushna Singh’s MAHABHARAT:
SABHARE BASICHANTI KARPURAMALIA
GAN**TA TANKARA JESANE OLIA.
Roughly transliterated…
“Clad in camphor garlands
Assembled are those Extra-large asses;
Resemble they do
To Spectra wide rice sacks.”
Loknath Patnaik’s goose was cooked, in spite of having a stupendous answer paper. But the memory of this episode and the sarcasm associated with it was funny and worthy enough to get a mention in the autobiography of this legend of Odisha.
(This is the 3rd in series of recapitulation in the writer’s words portions of Pandit Nilakantha Das’s biography in Odia.)
