Count your blessings

I hear that a new kind of fakir is emerging in Punjab: the foul-mouthed fakir.

These fakirs are treated like any other sufi murshid, or a holy man. The curious thing is that the only blessing they give their devotees is abuse!!

Yes, I said, abuse. The maa-ki, behen-ki kind of abuse.

The devotees calmly accept this abuse as 'prasad', or a blessing. There's a system at work here, whereby swear-words get entangled with numerology, so that the grateful, abused devotee will count furiously on his fingers, attaching a number to the abuse, and try to guess at predictions or divine omens from this number.

There have even been reports wherein, a certain fakir called out 'Saala Behenchod!' by way of blessing.
The confused devotee said, "Baba, I have two sisters... which one was this abuse directed at?"

(And I totally swear that I am not making this up.)