Eight Sisters of the Guru Died in Infancy - Verendra Dixit

Quote

.The eight sisters had died for reasons which could not be explained. Some said the Brahmin household was cursed, others called it destiny. The story of the eight deaths in infancy in the Dixit household, in the sleepy hamlet of Ahmadganj in Farrukhabad, is now over 80 years old.

Around 12 years later, in the winter of 1942, some old villagers still remember how a heavily pregnant Leelavati Dixit read the entire Ramayana every day for nine days, asking the gods to spare her unborn child the fate of those eight dead girls of the family. In February, she gave birth to a boy who, unlike his cousins, survived. His parents named him Virender Dev Dixit.

The straw and mud house where Dixit was born has long collapsed, but everything else in Ahmadganj seems stuck in time — it has no street lights, no mobile phones, not even a television set. Yet, among the 150-odd Brahmin and Teli families here, the news has spread. That Dixit — the purohit’s son who used to read the Ramayana and race his buffaloes in the fields — is wanted as an alleged rapist, a fake godman who built ashrams across India where he kept women confined, and a land grabber who duped devotees to build the Adhyatmik Vishwavidyalaya.