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| By Ganesh SahSudi CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94020477 |
There was a great mystery to be solved. At the core was something that once we all believed. Though we wanted it to be true with time, discussions around the topic had faded. Now, a new finding aroused renewed interest in Naag Manis.
Naag Mani used to be of great interest to us. Movies,
stories, legends, and rumors made us believe in its existence. We had detailed
knowledge about manis. Naag mani is wielded by naags (Indian
Cobra), who complete a hundred years of their lives. Such a naag can
be identified by a natural Aum symbol on their hood. As the snake nears
its hundredth year, the symbol slowly appears. There would be rumors and tales
about some naag killed a few days ago or the last month or year had
nearly complete Aum formed on its hood. But from the beginning of
everything until today, no one has ever seen a dead cobra with total Aum.
Cobra gets its mani on a full moon night of the hundredth year of its
life. All the naags old enough gather, and then from beams of the moon
descends the magic stone. After getting manis, they all go back to their
native places. Whether those naags become ichchhadhaari (capable
of human-snake transformation at will) or not was controversial. But it was
widely believed that even if ichchhadhari powers are not merely fiction,
only naagins (female cobras) have such powers. There were enough movies
and stories to be a reference in support of naagins but none in support
of their male counterparts having those powers.
So, what happens once a naag gets it mani. It
was believed that mani had many supernatural powers. Mani has its own
luminescence and glows and glitters at night, a property that snake uses to
hunt insects on pitch-dark nights. It can do miracles and get you whatever you
want. Proponents of the snake-human transformability powers of the stone held that
some of the most influential and powerful people around are actually mani-wielding
cobras living as humans. Not all of us believed it.
Nevertheless, it was only logical to conclude that all rich
people, in some way, got help from mani. We had testimonies of many
adults or at least testimonies of our friends about having testimonies of
adults on seeing a mani someday. But much to their misfortune, the owner
reptile swallowed it before they could attempt to get it. No wonder they didn't
become any king or rich men. The powers of the stone are immense and the responsibilities are none. One can disappear, transform into a snake (probably), get gold out of it (for sure), control other people (darn sure), and much much more.
Sometimes we planned to get a naag mani for
ourselves. But in this case, even planning was complicated, unlike the case of
petting a wild parrot planning which was only moderately challenging. In case
of planning to catch a parrot, some passing adult would hear us and tell us a
story of how some boys were trying to do the same and put their hands in a tree
hole to find parrot chickens. They ended up being bitten by a snake and died.
So, planning to get the stone, in which snakes were directly involved, was impossible.
Even people from our friend circle were scared of snakes and unwilling to
partake in planning.
All these obsessions with miraculous stones would usually
peak in summer vacations and die down when schools began. But this year, it was
a bit different, for what we saw was possible evidence of manis.
Our class had 14 students-all boys. There were two rival
groups of 4-5 members each. Shubham and his teammates had been behaving oddly
for the last few days. Also, Shubham had shortened his group to only 3 people.
In breaks, they would often be seen sitting at far corners of the playground
under some tree and discussing something seriously and visibly secretively.
Their activities were bound to arouse the interest of core members of the rival
group. We tried to guess the matter for some days but never reached any
plausible conclusion.
Changing our strategy, we became friendlier to Shubham and Nitendra to know what was happening. They would take advantage of our irresistible curiosity and not tell us the secret. We kept oscillating between 'leave it, it's just a sham' and 'what if they really have some secret.' Slowly from their hints and some guesses, we hypothesized that they held a mani. Some days later, it was revealed by Shubham that they really had it. There was a reasonable possibility of this being a hoax. But then a few days later, there was Children's Day celebrated in the school. A fair was organized. At that fair, we saw that Shubham and his team bought lots of stuff. Also, they offered us some coupons from which we could purchase things. This was the most unusual thing that could happen. On other days Shubham would never spend money like this. He always looked for ways so he could get stuff from other people without the need to spend money.
Now, we were convinced those people somehow had help from
the stone and getting coupons out of it. That evening they returned from the fair
with too much and too expensive pieces of stuff.
For too many days, we pursued the theory and tried to
confirm it and find out where exactly they had hidden it. As the year passed, we
probably grew up. Later it was found that they had gotten their hands on
something, which was not mani. Each year after the fare, all the used
coupons were thrown in a dingy storeroom of the school. One day Shubham ended
up in that storeroom to retrieve a ball that went there and discovered these
coupons worth thousands of rupees. On the fare days, they used it extensively
to buy stuff without purchasing coupons. At the fair next year, he shared more
coupons with us. Later, coupon colors were changed, and we could not use the
ones from our stock.
Now we don't discuss naag manis. I don't hear kids
discussing it, either. They have games and videos available to save them from
getting bored and leave no time imagining and talking about the kinds of stuff
we discussed. Times have changed.
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