Holy Summer: A Field Story

Abstract

This essay is a storied account of a series of events that occurred in the field in New Delhi, India, in summer 2002. The author's mother, a devout Hindu, found herself besieged under the spell of the "resident spirit" of their old home, an entity that has yet to be defined or deciphered. The author takes readers into one urban north Indian family's struggle to understand and contain this "other" force that seemed to hold the author's mother hostage. The author uses mostly real and some composite characters and the short story form to narrate the situation in the then and the now. The story illustrates the continuing tensions between so-called rational scientific medical explanatory models and longstanding cultural practices to understand human illness in many postindustrialized societies. This is an account of how the family came to experience these tensions and indeed lived with them.