Tovil for Soma
Tovil for Soma.By Chandrika Gadiewasam One evening a few weeks after their father’s death, Soma was lighting a lamp to a God in their garden, when she felt her wrist twist, like in a cramp. It was six thirty, that moment between dusk and night and the pain made her almost faint, and then both her wrists began to twist backwards, as well as the fingers on her hands, as though some invisible bully was trying to make her cry. And cry out she did since the pain was so intense, in the next fifteen minutes as she fell writing to the ground in front of the lamp, helpless in the grip of her own body which was spasming against her control, the extremities stretching unnaturally in impossible directions. The pain was intolerable. This was the beginning of Soma’s possession, and it did not cease though she was taken by her mother to a neurosurgeon , since they thought it was some kind of nerve disease. The free government clinic of course gave a date for a next appointment three months later, b...