Grandma's magic potions

Grandma's magic potions


My sweet granny was an enthusiastic lady.Married early, in the long gone days of Child marriages,she could study only up to the 5th grade but her zeal to acquire knowledge,be financially independent like a today’s woman and help others like her grandpa drove her to make ‘magic potions’As a young girl she often saw her grandpa make potions that healed many and quickly learnt how to recognize forest herbs and from then on till her last days she made remarkable curatives.Be it a medicine for a tummy ache or herbal oil to make your hair grow lustrous and long,she made them all.Granny had great memory and would often go to the nearby woods taking me along and got me acquainted to the world of herbs.



"Look!! that’s a brahmi..good for the hair and brain



That’s the neela herb!!…this is Naga bala and this is vidarikanda.for strength and skin glow"..she pointed them out to me.



She meticulously collected the exotic herbs and grew some in our garden too .Some she would buy from the local Herb store and then add,mix,boil,strain..she would make her magic potions and oils.These potions actually worked wonders and she soon had a good number of people buying her granny hair oil though it failed to grow hair on baldies
I remember once when a centipede bit me on my leg ‘ouch’in the middle of the night .With no docs available at that time,my granny came to the rescue.She mixed and boiled some ‘magic potion’ and uttered a few mantras into it.she then made me drink it.After that she brought a candle near the bite and made it feel the warmth of the candle…continuously uttering the divine mantras…and lo presto!!! I could see some liquid bubbling out of the bite…
That’s the poison..its come out and now you will be ok’,she said…and yes I was!!



Sometimes her remedies made me roll in laughter like the one in which a lady came to her complaining of her flat chest and she told granny that she wanted a bootylicious figure,



Well…granny never says NO to anyone..so she got to work peering through her ancient herbal books ,collecting herbs…mix,boil and then the ‘magic potion’ was ready…of course it didn’t work but atleast she tried!



Be it stories about the Bharadwaj bird that supposedly has the sanjeevani booti of youth in her nest or the leaves that help turn metal into gold..she told them with such conviction that I actually believed them..may be they really exist…