What’s made Delhi’s hair stand on end?

When the police reached Asha Devi’s rented accommodation, right across the railway line near the Gurugram station, they had to force their way through an excitable crowd to enter. It was a one-room shanty, like the many others in the area teeming with migrant workers, in which she lived with her husband, father-in-law and children.

The air was thick with incense smoke. Inspector Naveen Kumar, from the nearby Ashok Nagar police station, found her cowering in a corner as her father-in-law brandished a potato stuffed with one too many incense sticks and screamed at her, “ Bataa tu kaun hai (Who are you)?” An “exorcism” was seemingly in progress and, without batting an eyelid, the inspector and his team dispersed the crowd.

In a statement to the police, Asha Devi had claimed that when she stepped outside at night to visit the toilet, a woman dressed in black and carrying several knives had beckoned her threateningly.

Not just Devi, all of Bhimgarh Khedi is now running scared of this ‘ choti wali daayan (hair-snipping witch)’, after several women claimed to have had a nasty encounter with this mysterious apparition in black.

It’s Raksha Bandhan the day I visit the locality, but no one is in a mood to celebrate — the women scurry past, heads buried in ghoonghat, whispering to each other; most of the men remain confined indoors. There are palm prints of mehendi on the front wall of every house, and they stand out starkly against the cheery light-pink paint.

“My nephew ill-advised me to make the prints upside down, instead of upright, the very day this incident happened to me,” rues Sunita Devi. She pushes aside her veil and pokes her head out of her groceries store to show me the jagged cuts of hair that now frame her face, in place of the long, mehendi-dyed thick braid she had before. “You may not want to believe me, but I can understand that,” she says in a tired voice. “I myself didn’t believe in it until it happened to me.”

TV cameras are now roving everywhere in Bhimgarh Khedi and other affected areas, after reports of the mysterious hair-snipping incidents made it to prime-time news.

Since June, close to 100 incidents have been reported from Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi. In the Capital alone, over the past week, 14 cases were registered — Mangolpuri, Mundka, Aman Vihar, Prashant Vihar and Rohini are among the places mentioned in the reports. In Prashant Vihar and Rohini, the women said they were unaware their hair had been snipped off until someone had pointed it out to them. The police has registered FIRs and conducted enquiries.

What is common in all these cases is the absence of eyewitnesses, prompting the police to suspect the veracity of the claims. Comparisons are being made to the ‘monkey man’ hysteria that gripped Delhi in 2001 — from initial reports of alleged sightings of a very large kala bandar (black monkey) the story has quickly morphed into accounts of a “cyborg that was scared of nothing except water, as that could damage his intricate electrical circuit”.

In Bhimgarh Khedi, the stories flow. My guide to Sunita Devi’s house, Bhola talks about the woman who escaped narrowly the day Sunita Devi was attacked. “She was standing at the naala when she saw a human approaching her. Before she knew it, it had turned into a cat and bit her before running away.” He confesses that he is glad to be a man, as only women seem to be the target of the malevolent creature.

Sunita Devi has a version of her own for the naala incident. “My daughter-in-law came in to tell me that there had been an incident, but I laughed it off. After closing the shop at night, I finished cooking, warmed some milk for my grandchild and went to the bathroom next door. That’s when I saw a figure that looked like a man. There was a flash of light, and I could see a pair of cat-like eyes, and that’s the last thing I remember.”

She was found unconscious by her husband later in the night, her beloved thick braid cut and flung by her side. She breaks into tears at the memory of it. “My daughter-in-law was upstairs when the incident took place. She and my son had shifted upstairs the day before, and their stuff was lying all around. She says that when she came down to check on me, the lights were off. But I clearly remember all the lights had been on, and the house was bathed in white light.”

According to a report in The Hindu , BS Sandhu, the Haryana director general of police, had issued a statement in which he claimed there had been no breakthrough in the case and questioned how it was possible for anyone to cut off the women’s braids inside their homes. Additionally, the Gurugram police said in a press release that most of the women making these complaints were from lower income and rural areas, and were largely homemakers.

Psychiatrists have suggested that the episode is likely to be a case of mass hysteria, a phenomenon where cultural beliefs and superstitions reinforce belief in unexplained incidents, leading to the manifestation of pre-existing psychological conditions.

Even as fears of an evil supernatural power at work reigned, miscreants took advantage of the situation: two brothers in Ambedkar Nagar have confessed to cutting their sister’s hair while she was sleeping. In Agra, 60-year-old Mala Devi was lynched by a mob, which suspected her to be the woman behind the hair-snipping incidents after she lost her way and ended up in an upper-caste neighbourhood. Yet another woman nearly met the same fate at the hands of a mob in Khair, Aligarh, but was rescued by the police in time. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath has directed district magistrates and senior superintendents of police to investigate the matter, but everyone realises this could prove a Herculean task. As inspector Kumar says, “Further investigations are futile, as our witnesses have contradicting statements. I feel these are separate cases, and not one consolidated situation... so they have to be dealt with individually.”

Meanwhile, Sunita Devi’s husband is impatient for some results. “Are we going to get justice? TV people from the neighbouring States have been coming and asking us how we feel about this whole thing,” he says, clearly looking displeased.

Sunita Devi adds, “If you ask me, this is all tantra (black magic). Do you think it is possible to solve the case any other way? Go ahead, look for as many scientific solutions as you want, but this can’t be explained away.” Denying any enmity with her neighbours, she however adds, “It is common to have misunderstandings between people when you live together. Does that mean you start blaming them? Now, it doesn’t mean that a daughter-in-law will cut her mother-in-law’s braid, or a mother-in-law would do this to her daughter-in-law, does it?”