This is the 3rd in series of recapitulation in my own words portions of Pandit Nilakantha Das's Biography in Odia....
Pandit Nilakantha Das's rendezvous with dreaded Cholera epidemics continued, for he would soon get bitten by the dreaded bug. After several bounds of dysentery, when he was too dehydrated even to get up, his bosom buddies Gopandhu Das and Acharya Harihar would carry him out to let him relieve, then cleanse him befitting a Brahmin. This continued half a dozen times, at which point they left all hopes on him.
The nature of the fatality associated with the much feared disease broke their nerve. A lead doctor of Puri, Ananda Lal Mitra was immediately summoned (there was a clear Bengali dominance in almost all eminent high qualified professions in Odisha at that time). His vision became blurred and he started to sweat. Sensing an impending death, Pandit Nilakantha requested his friends to chant his favorite SLOKA (hymn) from Geeta. Streams of tears rolled from the eyes of the friend duo as they cried like kids. They lifted him to a single room to take exclusive care of him. Fate had different things in store for Pandit Nilakhantha Das. He slowly started getting better and fully recovered in a week.
Das and his friends' tryst with the lethal disease hardened their resolve to fight it. Encountering it from close quarters helped them overcome the its fear. They did something unthinkable of that time, to take the Cholera Bull by its horn - Getting close and taking care those infected with this marauding ailment, from administering them medicines to doing their last rights - for no one would dare to touch a person cursed by BAADI THAKURANI (The Goddess of Cholera).
Sometimes the Cholera was so widespread that there was no time to give them to nurse, not even give them a proper funeral as the dead bodies abound dime a dozen. Once in Cuttack at the peak of the epidemics, Nilakantha and his small army of friends put fire on the mouth of dead bodies before dumping them into river Mahanadi at spate - as Cholera would happen invariably during monsoon time.
In 1912, there was NABA KAKALEBARA (Change of Body by Lord Jagannath). Due to access to rail thousands thronged Puri, followed by one of the worst Cholera epidemics Pandit Das had seen. He took a tab of it - out of 118 patients he nursed, only 19 died. It was a grand success, considering the reverse happened. It was mainly due to the indomitable spirit of Nilakantha Das and his friends, the relentless treatment and homeopathic medicine administered following the instructions from "Salazar's 3 lectures of Cholera", a book he grabbed from Calcutta.
Not all episodes and escapes during his stay in Cuttack were tragic, there were a few comic instances as well. Those days couple of gentlemen, Gopabandhu Das and Lokanath Patnaik, both considered as connoisseurs of Odia literature. Their answer paper in the BA exams was evaluated by a person no other than the eminent Odia Poet Madhusudan Rao.
Lokanath Patnaik failed to pass the exam. Those days very few Odias cleared BA, so few eminent persons asked Mr. Rao - "Why did you do injustice to an Odia. As if you reinforced the notion of the Bengalis calling us uncouth and worthless fellows".
"Why not ?" - responsed the great Odia poet. "Loknath Patnaik had written some really ASHEELA (indecent) stuff here, you expect me to make his pass? " Poor Loknath simply quoted a stanza from Krushna Singh's MAHABHARAT :
SABHARE BASICHANTI KARPURAMALIA
GAN**TA TANKARA JESANE OLIA.
Roughly transliterated...
"Clad in camphor garlands
Assembed are the Extra large asses;
Resemble they to Spectra wide rice sacks."
Loknath Patnaik's goose was cooked, in spite of having a stupendous answer paper. But the memory of this episode and the sarcasm associated with it was funny and worthy enough to get a mention in the autobiography of this legend of Odisha.
TO BE CONTINUED, AS I READ 📖 FURTHER
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