Sting

Don't believe in miracles? Believe this.

On a visit to a small town in Western UP called Amroha, my sister and I decided to re-visit the dargah of Shah Sharafuddin (also called Saheb Vilayat Saheb for reasons that I can't remember). Anyway, the place is famous for its 'ahimsa' scorpions: they don't sting people within the premises of the dargah.

Naturally, I was skeptical of the whole thing and wanted to try it out for myself. The pictures are proof! (The hand coming out of nowhere in the badly lit picture, yup, that's me). I held a big scorpion on my hand for about half a minute, and it just crawled a bit over my hand.

The story goes that two brothers got into a fight, and one brother put a curse on the other which held that scorpions and snakes would infest his home (now the site of the dargah, I assume). The cursed brother then apparently went to a holy person for reprieve, who then 'undid' the curse by saying that though scorpions and snakes would infest the place, they wouldn't bite.