Ima Dhoni was born during the first bombing of Imphal during the Second World War. A frank, welcoming and soft-spoken woman, she still recalls her first experience with the supernatural at the age of ten. One evening, she was sweeping the courtyard of her home, when she suddenly saw a beautiful woman floating mid-air in the sky. Overcome by the vision, she stopped and sat down to stare at the woman. “The vision vanished when my elder sister came back from the river after fetching water and for days I was very angry with her, childishly crying to her to return me my goddess,” she says. After that, she says she had many more such “visions,” sometimes of this mysterious woman, and sometimes of snakes – the symbol of the god Pakhangba. Often the trances would leave her in a convulsionary fit, gasping for breath.

Frightened that their young daughter’s frequent trances and visions were a sign that she was losing her mind, her parents chained her feet to a wooden stake driven into the earth floor of their house and she was kept locked up in a room. Her father and his friends took turns guarding her day and night. One night however she found herself with inexplicable strength and she was able to break the chains and, as her father and his friends were fast asleep, she escaped and ran all the way to her Ima Guru, many miles from her house.

“I had never seen or heard of this maibi, I was hardly twelve years old then. But that night it was as if someone walking in front of me was guiding me to her; she was my chosen Ima Guru, the maibi who had been destined to be my teacher and mentor,” Ima Dhoni recalls. After the episode, her father let her learn the trade and ways of the maibis – it is now her profession and calling in life.

The life of a maibi is a difficult one. In most cases, when the initial signs of a maibi begin in a girl, the family consult a maiba – a powerful male shaman who, unlike maibis, acquires his knowledge from mystical texts and not through divine inclination – to “suppress” the awakening. At this point in time the woman’s education and social life become heavily curtailed because of her erratic behaviour which is similar to madness as she speaks gibberish and suffers from bouts of fits and trances.

Because of this behaviour, the awakened woman in the nascent stages of becoming a maibi is often stigmatised. Her family will keep her hidden from public view out of the fear that if her awakening becomes known then no one will marry her. Even though they’re revered, there are superstitions linked to maibis, for instance, one is that the husband of a maibi will not live long. The family’s fear is fuelled by the fact thatmaibis consider themselves married to the gods, and although many of them get married, or become awakened after marriage and having children, the call to serve their gods often supersedes their roles as wives and mothers. While some of them may continue to live with their husbands and children, many often leave them to live at the Sanakonung Maibi Loishang or at a temple.