When the goddess descends into you.

Every few months, we get some outside gardening help to clear up the front garden and the
thin strip of greenery that borders our apartment complex. This thin strip of earth (rest of
the apartment grounds are concreted) has mainly big Ashoka trees and a couple of coconut
trees, apart from some flowering shrubs.

Since the resident's cars are parked along this strip, it sometimes becomes difficult for the gardeners to trim these shrubs, in which case we ask the resident to move his car a bit.
We ran into a similar situation last Saturday morning, with a Ford Escort making it difficult
for the gardeners to access the shrub behind it.

So, I ask our apartment watchman to tell the owner of the car to move his car a bit so that
the shrub can be trimmed. Our conversation went as below :

Me : Could you please inform Mr.X to move his car a bit ? Or if he is not at home, get the car keys from his wife so that we can move it.
Him : He is at home, but he wont be able to come and move the car.

Me : If he is there, why can't he come and do this ?
Him : Because Maari-aatha has descended into him.
The exact words in Tamil were "Avarukkulle Maari-aatha erangi-irukku".
Note : Maari-aatha in Tamil means "Goddess Maari".

Me : What ???

Luckily I had with me a friend, who explained to me that this is localese for someone infected with chicken-pox. :-)

Hmm. So, we are still blaming the Gods for something which is essentially the doing of a virus.