It had to happen sooner or later--the dreaded, violent pangs of my digestive tract turning itself inside out. It hit my last night, after a beautiful afternoon of walking up to a Buddhist nunnery high in the hills that ring the city. My enthusiastic friend Dinesh had suggested the walk, me not realizing we were talking about a half-day excursion up a steep and winding dirt road. In lieu of sufficient water I was reduced to greedily slurping at the mealy apples and bland oranges we had bought down below in Budhanilkantha; at the top, tired and sweaty, I added to this churning brew some salty Tibetan tea, potatoes and flattened rice. I can't blame the water here for this intestinal insurrection, though I did drink it untreated from the taps on this pristine hillside; no, this ailment was a result of prajaparadha, the Sanskrit Ayurvedic term for "crime against wisdom." I ate when not hungry, just to be polite to our gracious host nuns, and mixed the verboten combination of fruit, dairy, and starch in an already struggling stomach. I made it back down the mountain fine in the dusk light, but barely survived the close, smoggy microbus rides back to my shared apartment without giving my guts their due. I'll spare the gentle reader my analysis of the physics of projectile vomiting.
I'm convincend it's good to have thorough purge once in a while--it breaks the routines that life can so easily slip into, gives a sense of perspective through its feverish lens of squirming self-pity. The real payoff, if I may be permitted a moment of masochism, is the following day, today, the day of shaky convalescence that closely resembles a mid-strength hangover. I did little but sit in the apartment and sweat, and read The Grapes of Wrath. Good timing, too: today there was a bandh, a sort of citywide strike that can be described either as popular protest against the latest governmental outrage or as blackmail--as in 'we'll shut down this city until you pay (up) for what you've done'. I'm certainly in no position to judge. So as always happens on these days, the city ground to a halt, tires burning in the street, and instead of fighting through it make some hoped-for appointment with a some contact who is probably staying home anyway, I too put my feet up. Around 4 PM I decided to give wings to a rather curious craving, for sweet black coffee. Being an inveterate meddler, I added some American Ginseng powder and some bitter liver tonic herbs along with the cardamom and sugar, and indeed the concoction perked me up, without the nervous twinge that coffee usually delivers to this Vata-Pitta constitution. I even found the appetite to eat some naan; I'm a new man.
Being sick oneself is a fine opportunity to take a look at folk medical beliefs. The operative one in this case seems to say that one should eat, not fast, when one's stomach is upset. I tend to think it depends on a number of factors, like just how nauseous and feverish one is, and am glad there was no Nepali aama around to force feed me in the night. As with many such beliefs in this part of the word, however, there may be an Ayurvedic basis for it (or, conversely, these tidbits of folk wisdom may have preceded the formal codification of Ayurveda a few thousand years ago). The concept of agni, digestive fire, is central to Ayurveda, and a certain logic argues that when the fire is weak it's necessary to feed it so it can grow strong. This has to be done carefully, so simple foods are appropriate, like plain bread, or the quintessential Ayurvedic convalescent food kichari, a stew of split mung beans (mung daal) and rice. Even now I can feel the dull flames in my beat-up belly lapping with renewed vigor at the starchy fuel I've just laid on top of the coals.
Another area where Ayurvedic concepts run together with everyday, popular conception is in the realm of heating and cooling foods: black (urad) daal, most meats, and sesame seeds are examples of hot or heating foods that are best consumed during winter. Similarly, when one has a cold (a Kapha disorder, Ayurvedically speaking), one should avoid cold drinks, yogurt, cucumbers, and other cold or cooling items. This seemingly simple (if unfamiliar) notion is not as straightforward as it seems, though, since Nepalis have no qualms about eating blazingly hot/spicy food in any weather. A lapse, a blindspot in the system? Perhaps not; it is well-documented that all the major chilli-eating cultures are distributed in tropical and subtropical latitudes, and that chilies have a cooling effect in the long run since they promote sweating. Thus hot peppers are hot in the short run, with their digestion and metabolism-stimulating effects, but ultimately cooling. (Fellow students of Ayurved, what do you say to this potentially blasphemous piece of thinking? Are chillies hot in taste, hot in virya and sweet in vipak!? They certainly don't seem to promote constipation, as they should if they had a pungent post-digestive effect.)
I should use the occasion of this otherwise rather trivial and self-centered entry (sorry, Beth, not to continue along yesterday's lofty train of thought) to relate another vignette or two about life in Nepal. In addition to the bandh, the water ran out today. I don't know how widespread the outage is, but the flow from our tap dwindled to a trickle this afternoon before drying up completely. This annoying cloud has a definite silver lining in that we're no forced out to the dhunge dhaaraa, the neighborhood water tap, to fill jugs for domestic use. Everyone is doing the same, so it becomes quite the social event. A quintessential Nepali experience, as bathing at said tap will be if the water doesn't start flowing soon.
I'm convincend it's good to have thorough purge once in a while--it breaks the routines that life can so easily slip into, gives a sense of perspective through its feverish lens of squirming self-pity. The real payoff, if I may be permitted a moment of masochism, is the following day, today, the day of shaky convalescence that closely resembles a mid-strength hangover. I did little but sit in the apartment and sweat, and read The Grapes of Wrath. Good timing, too: today there was a bandh, a sort of citywide strike that can be described either as popular protest against the latest governmental outrage or as blackmail--as in 'we'll shut down this city until you pay (up) for what you've done'. I'm certainly in no position to judge. So as always happens on these days, the city ground to a halt, tires burning in the street, and instead of fighting through it make some hoped-for appointment with a some contact who is probably staying home anyway, I too put my feet up. Around 4 PM I decided to give wings to a rather curious craving, for sweet black coffee. Being an inveterate meddler, I added some American Ginseng powder and some bitter liver tonic herbs along with the cardamom and sugar, and indeed the concoction perked me up, without the nervous twinge that coffee usually delivers to this Vata-Pitta constitution. I even found the appetite to eat some naan; I'm a new man.
Being sick oneself is a fine opportunity to take a look at folk medical beliefs. The operative one in this case seems to say that one should eat, not fast, when one's stomach is upset. I tend to think it depends on a number of factors, like just how nauseous and feverish one is, and am glad there was no Nepali aama around to force feed me in the night. As with many such beliefs in this part of the word, however, there may be an Ayurvedic basis for it (or, conversely, these tidbits of folk wisdom may have preceded the formal codification of Ayurveda a few thousand years ago). The concept of agni, digestive fire, is central to Ayurveda, and a certain logic argues that when the fire is weak it's necessary to feed it so it can grow strong. This has to be done carefully, so simple foods are appropriate, like plain bread, or the quintessential Ayurvedic convalescent food kichari, a stew of split mung beans (mung daal) and rice. Even now I can feel the dull flames in my beat-up belly lapping with renewed vigor at the starchy fuel I've just laid on top of the coals.
Another area where Ayurvedic concepts run together with everyday, popular conception is in the realm of heating and cooling foods: black (urad) daal, most meats, and sesame seeds are examples of hot or heating foods that are best consumed during winter. Similarly, when one has a cold (a Kapha disorder, Ayurvedically speaking), one should avoid cold drinks, yogurt, cucumbers, and other cold or cooling items. This seemingly simple (if unfamiliar) notion is not as straightforward as it seems, though, since Nepalis have no qualms about eating blazingly hot/spicy food in any weather. A lapse, a blindspot in the system? Perhaps not; it is well-documented that all the major chilli-eating cultures are distributed in tropical and subtropical latitudes, and that chilies have a cooling effect in the long run since they promote sweating. Thus hot peppers are hot in the short run, with their digestion and metabolism-stimulating effects, but ultimately cooling. (Fellow students of Ayurved, what do you say to this potentially blasphemous piece of thinking? Are chillies hot in taste, hot in virya and sweet in vipak!? They certainly don't seem to promote constipation, as they should if they had a pungent post-digestive effect.)
I should use the occasion of this otherwise rather trivial and self-centered entry (sorry, Beth, not to continue along yesterday's lofty train of thought) to relate another vignette or two about life in Nepal. In addition to the bandh, the water ran out today. I don't know how widespread the outage is, but the flow from our tap dwindled to a trickle this afternoon before drying up completely. This annoying cloud has a definite silver lining in that we're no forced out to the dhunge dhaaraa, the neighborhood water tap, to fill jugs for domestic use. Everyone is doing the same, so it becomes quite the social event. A quintessential Nepali experience, as bathing at said tap will be if the water doesn't start flowing soon.
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