The Rediff Special /Anwar Alikhan

What's wriggly, 4 inches long and cures asthma?

Chances are you have already heard about it somewhere along the years: some kind of miracle cure for asthma that involves going to Hyderabad on a particular day in the year, and swallowing a fish of some sort.

Yes, you've heard about it -- just like you've heard tales about haunted houses and reincarnation and UFO sightings, in slightly incredulous tones.The source is always somebody just tantalisingly out of reach, probably 'a friend of a friend of a friend'. And you've always wondered whether it's true or not.

Well, you can stop wondering now. It's true all right. And here, as they say, is Everything You Always Wanted To Know About It (but didn't know whom to ask).

It happens every year on Mrigasira Karti, the first day of monsoon (it usually falls on June 7). Approximately 50,000 people come from all over India to a little house in Doodh Bowli, near Hyderabad's Charminar area. It is the house of the Goud family, who have been in possession of a secret asthma cure for the past century-and-a-half. They make you swallow a live, wriggling maral fish, slightly longer than your finger, which contains a special ayurvedic medication. This rather bizarre cure was, legend holds, given to an ancestor of theirs by a sadhu under one condition: that he must never charge any money from his patients for it. And so, the cure is distributed free of cost to all comers.

Every year the crowds that gather grow a little larger; every year, out of sheer necessity, the entire event becomes a little more professionally organised, a little more institutionalised. People from all over the country (particularly from Assam and Kerala, for some reason) have been coming here for many years. In recent years the fame of the cure has spread so much that there are people who fly down from the USA, UK, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Middle East, Nigeria and Pakistan.

But the question is: Does the cure really work? It was to find this out for myself that I went to Hyderabad in June last year, along with a photographer friend.

Each year there is an auspicious time for starting the distribution of the cure. Last year, it was at 2.45 am. So just after midnight we set out for Doodh Bowli.

Hyderabad's normally congested streets were silent and deserted and stray neighbourhood dogs barked dutifully as our car sped past. The streets became progressively narrower. There was a smell of distant rain in the air.

Finally there was a police barricade across the road. No more cars beyond this point. We had arrived.

In the distance we could see the greenish flare of petromax lamps, and the long, patient lines of people who had been queuing up all day to receive the cure. They were more or less orderly lines, three, four, sometimes six abreast, and they stretched out for perhaps two hundred yards before turning a corner and disappearing into a warren of little lanes on the side. Their faces reflected exhaustion and hope.

Meanwhile,along the side of the street, a small bazaar had sprung up, selling the maral fish that the treatment hinges upon. The system is you buy a fish from one of these vendors, and take it along in a little clay pot of water. It is this fish which will be the carrier for the medicine.

We pushed our way through the crowds, past further barricades, past harassed-looking volunteers wearing cryptically worded badges saying Mrigasira Asthma Fish Trust. As we approached the Goud house, the crowds became thicker, more restless. Pleading some kind of journalistic privilege, we squeezed through the final, solid wall of human bodies just outside, and slipped into the house itself.

Here, in the tiny courtyard, Shivram Goud, the bearded patriarch of the family sat, freshly bathed, clad in a white cotton dhoti and saffron shawl, waiting for the auspicious time to arrive. There was still about half an hour to go.

I got talking to one of the people at the head of the queue as I waited. His name was V Simon, he told me, and he was an Indian banker from New York. He'd been suffering from severe asthma for several years -- so severe that at least a couple of times each year he had to be hospitalised and kept on a respirator.

The US doctors had put him on heavy medication, but it didn't get him very far. Then, three years ago, Simon heard about the Hyderabad fish cure, and decided to give it a try. He has been coming here every year since then (it's usually a three year treatment, by the way). Since he started, he hasn't had any asthma attack; nor has he had to take any of his old medications. This year, he told me with a smile of triumph, marked the end of his treatment; this would be his last visit here.

What, I asked, did his American doctors have to say about it all?

"Well, they just say it's a miracle," he shrugged, "In fact, they took some of the newspaper reports about the treatment that I gave them, and put them up on the hospital notice board!"

Photographs, kind courtesy: The Taj magazine

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