148 chapter
relief for his suff ering at Beemapalli mosque. Satish was around 18 years old
and training to be a welder when his problem started. His father explained to
me that a loss of bōdham was the defi ning characteristic of his son’s problem:
Murphy: What all are the boy’s problems?Father: Th e problem is that one day when he was returning home after going
to the road [where stores and services are found in the neighborhood] he had a
feeling that hundreds of people were chasing him. He came and fell unconscious
[bōdham kettu] at the doorstep. Th at’s all there is to the illness. Th ere is nothing
other than that.Lakshmi, the Hindu woman introduced in Chapter 3 who had been
attending Chottanikkara temple to seek the goddess’ help with her problems
described her experience of possession in terms of several interior and exterior
levels of bōdham:
Biju: Do you have consciousness [bōdham] during possession [tullāl]?
Consciousness [bōdham]?Lakshmi: No.Biju: Do you have consciousness inside [ullil bōdham kānumō]?Lakshmi: Inside the inside, there will be consciousness [ullinte ullil bōdham
kānum]. Th e reason is... but there is no outside. Th ere is a feeling that some-
thing is inside.Biju: No consciousness [bōdham] on the outside, right?Lakshmi: No consciousness [bōdhamilla].Lakshmi is referring to a level of interiority where there is awareness of
what is occurring during possession although her normal state of bōdham is
not active or is not perceiving what is going on around and within her.
A woman who was receiving outpatient psychiatric treatment, in her fi rst
attempt to describe her problem, resorts to the idiom bōdham, but also uses a
term, ōrmma, which has a meaning similar to “consciousness” but can also refer
to “memory:” “I lost memory/consciousness [Ōrmmayillāteyāyi]. Yesterday
night, I became unconscious [bōdhamillāteyāyi].”
An unemployed Hindu woman whose husband works as a manual laborer
for the railways and who was a psychiatric inpatient at Trivandrum Medical