I fell sick with the flu a few days back (the ordinary un-swine-like variety that no one seems to care much about these days), and my granddad passed away recently, and so as I was sitting around sick, I thought back to a little health incident that happened a couple years ago when I went to India. You may or may not know this, but seasoned veterans of trips to India always keep their first couple of days after landing empty, you know, just "to adjust to India". With good reason.
In 2007, I went home to welcoming and loving grandparents after four years of uninterrupted gastrointestinal softening in the US/Europe. You already know I love them, but there's a good reason that my dad left home at the age of 16. That good reason would be my grand mum's cooking. Now, I'm not saying that Bigamma, as we call her (with more than just a little dash of awe and fear), was willfully harming my dads health, but I have heard him say that the food he ate at boot camp was the best he'd ever tasted up until then. Again, it's not that Bigamma purposely destroys every dish she lends her culinary skills to, but it's just that cooking is pretty low on the priority list for a subset of women in this world, and Bigamma happens to be honorary secretary of that club. So she tends to get distracted by other things on her to-do list, say, oh, I don't know, gardening or calling relatives while the okra fry goes from green to brown to a very carbonized black. I can say with some confidence that my granddad's acute sense of smell prevented our house from going up in flames on more than one occasion. But then again, as she says, "it's all the same once you swallow it", and my granddad lived a healthful life until the age of 87, so maybe she's right. (Though I'm pretty sure my prostrate has grown a couple millimeters with all that okra fry)
But in addition to this, my grandparents have mango trees that give us hundreds of really delicious mangoes the size of your head every summer. The reason that this, along with with my grand mums cooking, counts as a health hazard is two fold -
1. eating more than three mangoes a day gives you the shits. Trust me, I know this from personal experience.
2. Flies and other tropical bugs love to sit out on mangoes that sit out in the open.
Now, the only reason that there would be mangoes out in the open is that my grandparents tend to hoard the best mangoes. This is a problem because all the mangoes plucked are the best mangoes, and our refrigerator can fit only about a
hundred. This means that every summer, there lie about four hundred mangoes in various stages of decay around in the kitchen, which attract anywhere between ten and a thousand variously shaped and sized members of the insect kingdom at any given time, all of which somehow find their way into Bigamma's accommodating menu. It's almost as good as pitching a "
To Let – no rent for three weeks!" sign for pathogenic microorganisms in that little space between my stomach and duodenum.
So it was with some trepidation that I went home to Bigamma's kitchen in the late summer of 2007 (my parents were in the US, where they could only pray for my survival from afar). Sure enough, there was my grandmum beaming over a hearty lunch comprising cut mango, mango curry, mango pulisheri and mango avial - these are two South Indian dishes that also taste great, but are never made, without mangoes in my house - to go with rice. And mango juice to wash the lot down. Now I have been extremely critical of my "America returned" relatives, especially when they kick up a row about eating home food, so I was keen not to be just like them. I remember trying not to count the flies (dead, alive or somewhere in between) that adorned the various dishes, and instead trying to give them a quick wave-off as I pretended to reach across the table for the mango juice. They eyeballed me warily but didn't move. I stole a quick glance at Bigamma, but she was still beaming at me, so I took a deep breath, said a quick prayer to the mango (and duodenal) gods, and dug in.
To tell you the truth, I didn't feel a thing until late in the evening. The food actually tasted great, and so, throwing caution to the winds (I actually had the gall to think I had gotten the better of those bugs), I also wolfed down a couple of mangoes after dinner, and went into a jet-lagged, overripe-mango induced stupor...
...
The first sign of food poisoning is a cramping feeling somewhere near your ribs. It starts off mildly, like someone's gently kneading your spleen. It's the kind of thing that you roll over, stretch, and it goes away. This is dutifully does. And then it returns after about ten minutes, except this time, it feels like someone has thrust a pair of hot tongs deep in your midriff while squeezing all the contents out of your gut with an iron vice. The automatic (and only physically possible) reaction to this is doubling up in pain, but while lying paralyzed in the fetal position while screaming in pain and sweating might evoke pity in the most hardened of professional torturers, it does nothing to pathogenic microbes. Plus the bacterial strain that my grandmum lovingly cultured in her fruit incubators were especially nasty critters with absolutely no compassion. They do what they're supposed to do, which is colonize and spread.
And now that they had successfully colonized by insides, how did they spread, you ask?
Ah, well, there's a reason the transmission of these bacteria occurs by what's called the "fecal oral route". Oral is how they go in, and well, fecal is how they get out. The cramps, as my uncle who's a successful doctor, but somewhat unsympathetic relative told me with a wise shake of the head, were a sign of hyperperistalytic spasms, which basically meant that the bugs wanted to head out the exit pronto. I had no problems with bugs exiting my body; what I did have problems is with the frequency and urgency with which they did it (very frequent, and very
very urgent). When you have a rash on the back of either thigh from too much contact with the toilet seat, you know you have the shits pretty bad. When you actually get sphincter cramps, you know you're in deep, deep, deep, uh, shit. The irony is that I was writing a paper on superantigen induced food poisoning, so I knew exactly what was going on throughout. So I guess it was a learning experience, but of all the things I need not have learned first hand, this ranked pretty high. I guess I should be glad I wasn't doing research on flesh-eating necrotizing bacteria of the rectum.
So anyways, that was the summer of 2007, when I was in deep, deep, deep shit for a good ten days. As I sat alone this past week, sick and in pain with the flu, thinking about this sordid episode, I remembered being struck by two things. First, it was the ignominy of having to explain to the multitude of relatives - there were hundreds - who had come to visit you that you had to take a shit every eight minutes. And then there was the deeper discomfiting realization that I had become the very Indian I used to deride when I was a kid. The coconut. Brown on the outside, and unmistakably white on the inside...
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