When We Believed a Biscuit Could Heal a Bone

The title makes it sound like a joke.
It wasn’t.

I was seven. Maybe eight. Studying in Class 4 or 5, the exact age when fear exists but logic hasn’t arrived yet.

There was a tree near our place. Not special to adults, but sacred to us. Long vines hung from its branches, wild and free, like something straight out of The Jungle Book. We didn’t jump from tree to tree. We just swung. Back and forth. Laughing. Weightless. Disobedient.

We had already been warned.

“Don’t play there.”

Warnings at that age are just background noise.

One day, we were all playing and swinging around that same tree. Then my brother slipped.

It happened fast. A foot missed. A hand failed. Gravity remembered its job. Suddenly the air changed.

No crying at first.
Just silence. The wrong kind.

He held his hand close to his chest. Not dramatically. Not loudly. Just differently. The way children do when pain is bigger than language.

Childhood paused.

Fear entered the scene like an uninvited guest. Not fear of pain, but fear of being discovered. Fear of adults. Fear of consequences we didn’t understand, only felt.

We knew about hospitals.
We knew about fractures.

But at that moment, we knew only one thing. Mataji, a spiritual mediator we believed in completely.

That morning, he had gone to Mataji with Dad. With compassion and kindness, she had given him a packet of white biscuits, Triptis, I think, and asked him to eat them.

The packet was still with him.

To us, it wasn’t just a biscuit.
It was medicine.
Authority.
Hope compressed into sugar and flour.

We did something only children would do.

We stuffed the biscuit into his mouth, hoping it would make him feel better. Then we chewed some ourselves, enjoying its sweetness, and applied it to his injured hand like a paste. Like a prayer.

No sarcasm.
No doubt.
Just pure, irrational faith.

We believed care could travel through touch.
That devotion could substitute knowledge.
That love, if applied directly, could fix broken bones.

Looking back now, it feels almost unreal how innocent trust once was.

There was no hierarchy between science and belief.
No difference between inside the mouth and outside the body.
No sense of this works and this doesn’t.

Only intention.

That day wasn’t about the injury.
It was about the moment we met fear and answered it with innocence instead of understanding.

Today, we know better.

We know bones need doctors, bandages, and medicine.
We know biscuits don’t heal fractures.

But sometimes I wonder, in all our knowing, what we lost.

Because back then, we truly believed that if we cared hard enough, the world would listen.

And maybe, in some quiet way, it did.