The evil eye

This last week before Chrismas in the clinic, both the other doctor, Sarah and I fell ridiculously ill one day. We were both having stomach trouble, trying to treat a million patients and generally hold it together. At lunch, the food sounded revolting though it's the same thing every day--Dal Baat, rice and lentils, so I layed up on the roof in the sun and fell asleep. The interpreters were all worried about us, and tried to think up reasons for being sick. Pradjil thought it was the chicken we had for dinner the night before, because apparently the butchers sometimes sell you 3 or 4 day old chickens (no refridgerators). Satya Mohan thought it might be that the walk we went on with him the afternoon before had been too long, though it was only maybe an hour and a half. Ramita called her mother, who said that while we were roaming the village someone had definately cast the evil eye on us, and we should be dewitched. She sprinkled some water on a bench, sat me down, and traced each side of me 3 times with different handfuls of uncooked rice. She then plucked a hair from my head, did the same to Sarah and threw it all off the roof.
I rolled around in pain for a while longer, but everything went away maybe faster than it should have and I'm now pretty convinced that the dewitching worked, but I don't think I'll have village chicken for a while.