We humans, animals cursed with metacognition, are in constant need of stories, without whose ordering power existence is a senseless (if occasionally sublime) series of events. These stories are of all kinds. Some are handed down to us as myth, but also as what we call history; even the great god Science consists of the gluten of fact stretched and leavened by the yeasty air of interpretation: like bread, knowledge is mostly useful fiction. In the areas of our lives where the great library of culture fails to supply stories, we’re left to construct our own. This is no mean feat, though, since the stories by which we order our lives had better be believable. Our job is to tell a story so good we convince ourselves it’s true.
Part of the work of growing up in modernity is finding the words in which to tell your own story. (In postmodernity, prose, being linear, may fail altogether; so then you have to write your own poem?) Young people are frequently forced to assess how well the stories we tell fit us: whether they bind and constrain, straightjacket-like; comfort and thwart ambition like a bathrobe; stoke the ego like a tailored suit. Often they’re second-hand stories (though all stories are second-hand in one sense), or patchworks scrapped together from TV and Hollywood, and fit like you’d expect someone else’s clothes to. Who hasn’t in all earnestness tried on layers that look ridiculous in retrospect? Dressing oneself in a story that fits is no easy task, especially with pop culture bombarding us with ready-made articles, one-size-fits-all pieces of glimmering one-dimensional pulp that can’t serve our individual purposes for long. How many people, wearing a plastic tiara or superhero jockstrap, talk in snippets of Hollywood drama for want of something that fits any better?

Just because I’m the storyteller here doesn’t make me immune to the need for narrative, and I’m as excited as the next twenty-something (a phrase I submit myself to voluntarily because at 25 it’s nice to feel I’m in the same boat as all my story-hungry peers, and there is a particular flavor (quiet urgency?) to the years before 30, as we search out our paths) when I stumble across good material for my own plot. I had such a moment recently, when I suddenly found myself playing the role of Ayurvedic doctor to a fifty-year-old Nepali woman. This was during a trip to the Terai a month ago (cf the Nepali Time entry below). My friend Pusparaj and I had stopped by the woman’s house to pay a social call, and over the inevitable irrefutable methamphetamine-like tea it came up that the woman suffers from pain in her right hand. My friend, who is in the middle of his five-and-a-half year Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medical Science program in Kathmandu, beckoned me over so I could examine her. I wasn’t totally comfortable, both because my own Ayurvedic training is very limited in scope and because there was a small crowd of her family members, neighbors, and interested birds watching. But with a little encouragement from Pusparaj I asked her a few questions, compared her hands, took her pulse. Ayurveda’s basic diagnostic strategies: darshana, sparshana, prashna (looking, touching, questioning). She was constipated, it turned out, suffered from lower back pain as well as the pain in the back of her hand, and her pulse and tongue showed the presence of aam (metabolic waste, generally from improper or incomplete digestion) in her system. Her appetite was poor. Her pain was worst in the morning. I found myself blurting out a diagnosis before my conscious mind had reached its conclusions, but Pusparaj nodded: ama-vata, or rheumatism. Treatment would have to involve first cleansing her system of the aam, and under the circumstances of a quick and informal chat about her health, that was all I could hope to undertake. I told the woman to take triphala, the famous Ayurvedic bowel-cleansing, digestion-regulating formula. I’ve given triphala (“three fruits”) many times in my capacity as an Ayurvedic lifestyle consultant in the States, but this was different: here the remedy I prescribed was not some funky, esoteric and exotic powder, but a traditional formula that the villagers knew of. The three ingredients—amalaki (Emblica officinalis), bibhitaki (Terminalia belerica) and haritaki (Terminalia chebula) all grew in the vicinity. The medicine would be fresh, it would be free, and it would be all the more potent for it.
The clarity with which Ayurveda explained (with its own narratives, in turn; much of Ayurveda’s power is in its metaphors) the woman’s condition and pointed to a simple treatment; the beauty of feeling that the remedy lay not only in physical but in cultural proximity—a small but successful union of nature and culture; the mounting roar of disease everywhere; my own struggle for good health in a broad sense; these factors align to illuminate the thread of my own tale.
My own tale: I’ve couched it before as based on a recognition of the fundamental unity between the health of people, society, and the planet; my work then must be somehow to serve as doctor, helping in some small ways to restore the health of the interconnected parts and of the whole. Medicine is anything that enhances health at all these levels, or at least one level without disrupting it elsewhere. Planting a tree can be medicine for the earth; that tree’s nutrient-rich fruit can be medicine for a sick person; even cutting that tree down for its fragrant heartwood can be compatible with medicine if you leave many such trees for every tree you take. Love is good medicine, since it is always more than the sum of its parts.

The premise of my plot, then, is to practice medicine as best I can, using my own peculiar skills and proclivities to do some good, try and avoid harm. (Sounds deceptively simple, I know. Stay tuned for complications.) As this story comes into focus I find myself believing it as though my writing were merely the tracing of letters already written. Don’t we all have to convince ourselves that what we find ourselves drawn to is what we are destined to do? Destiny, that grand narrative, (or as master storyteller Neil Gaiman has it) a dusty tome always being written. An endless book of stories, a story of an endless book of stories: basta. I surrender to that vision, knowing Borges would approve.