Of Pickpockets, Oil baths and Gundruk

This entry should have started with a nice big photo: the terraces and brick-makers’ yards on the path up to Sipadole, maybe, or the local polyculture of wheat and marijuana that I captured so nicely on film (well, silicon) the other day. For the last week I’ve been staying in Sipadole, a village on the Valley rim, a rural place despite its five-stones’-throw proximity to Bhaktapur’s moderate bustle. I’m there to do Panchakarma, the Ayurvedic cleansing regimen, and have only descended from my sequestration to restock reading material and attend a wedding on one of my designated ‘rest’ days. Rest means no massages or other intensely relaxing treatments. Rest, in this case, means plunging back into the grit and noise of the city and being pick-pocketed. It wasn’t my money this time: no, my mind’s eye was practically tucked into my pocket after having my wallet lifted in a crowd just a few weeks back at a Nepali New Year celebration. It was my digital camera, full of all the images I wanted to spread to the four winds. Gone from my backpack, whose outside pocket I found flapping open when I stepped off a micro ten minutes ago. I’d been busy with the shutter lately, and I was particularly excited about the images I’d taken of the puja to mark the beginning of my Panchakarma. Well, mark it up to the khuire (whitey) tax, the all-but-inevitable result of hundreds of pairs of eyes focusing on me and one or two probing hands seeing what I’m worth. I estimate I’ve been small-timed to the tune of 10% of my Fulbright stipend, counting the value of the camera. Of course, it’s not the money that bothers me the most—the thieves are probably justifying their actions with just this thought, that a few thousand rupees means little to me—but the blow to my respect for my fellow humans. I look back on this afternoon now through a glaze of mistrust: is that why the young couple on the microbus were laughing so hard, because they watched someone unzip my bag and lift out the compact piece of hardware? Was that part of what the little crowd that gathered as I kneeled on the street to have my palm read was up to? But it’s gone, along with my feeble but trusty headlamp. I hope they enjoy the photos of wild rose bushes and of Dr. Shrestha worshipping Dhanwantari and blessing my medicated ghee.

But I was going to write about Panchakarma. In Ayurveda all treatment can be divided into shamana and shodhana. Shamana is palliation, basically soothing the aggravated humors. Pacifying the yapping dog at the door. If you’ve got high Pitta, too much fire, ice cream might do the trick. Too much dryness as a result of Vata, wind, and grounding therapy like meditation or lying under weighted blankets can help. Heavy, damp kapha can be lightened up with vigorous exercise or spicy flavors. Ayurvedic thinking is quite literal. Shodhana, on the other hand, is about actually eliminating the doshas (humors) from the body--banishing them completely. Wind tends to collect in the colon first, as gas. To remove it, go to the source: do an oily enema. Pitta can take the form of hyperacidic gastric secretions, so purgation with laxatives dispels it. Kapha accumulates as phlegm in the chest region and stomach, and can be expelled by therapeutic vomiting. Panchakarma, which means ‘five actions,’ is a systematic combination of these three therapies, plus nasal administration and (in theory, at least) blood-letting.
But as Dr. Vasant Lad says, “you can’t squeeze the juice out of an unripe mango.” Before the elimination can begin, the body has to be properly prepared. In this preparatory stage, the doshas (vitiated humors; impurities) are coaxed from wherever they may be lodged in the tissues back into the mahasrotas (“great channel”), the digestive tract. This is accomplished largely by lubricating the body inside and out: the simple diet of khichari is augmented with lots of ghee (pure, clarified butterfat), and the daily regimen includes a full-body oil massage. This is the stage I have undergone recently, and after a few days of oiling people started to comment on my glow. Like an oil lamp, I thought. My tissues are softened and made supple, and I can picture the impurities slip-sliding their way back to the GI tract. They hardly know what’s coming. (Yesterday it came: kapha-annihilating vamana (vomiting) brought on by drinking a liter and half of salted sugarcane juice in about two minutes.)
In addition to the massage, there are two other oily therapies. One is netra basti, a sort of eyeball bath with ghee. A ring of wheat flour dough is formed around each eye-socket, and warm, melted ghee is spooned onto each eyelid. Then you start to blink, so that the eyeball itself is swimming in the golden ghee. It’s a strange but pleasant feeling, not at all uncomfortable. In theory, at least, the ghee is able to penetrate to the optic nerve and thus nourish the nervous system directly. The other therapy is shirodhara (“head stream”). Here a stream of warm sesame oil is directed at the forehead, in the region of the ‘third eye.’ You simply lie there under the stream, having the seat of your cosmic consciousness tickled with the nourishing oil. Twice during this procedure I’ve slipped into a sort of half-sleep, an almost hypnotic state. When it was over (after a totally indeterminate length of time) I found my arms tingling pleasantly and my face completely relaxed of its usual patterns of expression or stress. I’m sure shirodhara works wonders in insomnia cases, amongst other neuro/psychological disorders, and I can’t think of a more blissful treatment. As long as you don’t mind a head soaked with oil.

The way Panchakarma is practiced these days, it’s essentially a retreat from the world and into oneself. As such it’s an activity necessarily limited to those who have the means to opt out of the workaday world for weeks at a time and be cared for, cooked for, rubbed and riled and retched. Here in Nepal, virtually everyone receiving Panchakarma is a foreigner; in Kerala (the coastal Southwest Indian state), it’s the explicit purpose of much tourism. But despite its touristic incarnation, the treatments themselves go back some few thousand years to the time of Caraka, the legendary physician who lends his name to the oldest extant complete Ayurvedic treatise, the Caraka Samhita. It’s nice to know that hundreds of generations of guinea-pigs have gone before. Where do people get off talking about the need to test traditional methods for safety and efficacy . . .?

My experience so far is like a cross between a stay at a sanatorium and an artist colony. Besides my treatments, I do little other than eat, sleep, take short walks, and read and write. In the mornings I attend to my meditation and yoga practice, and when I need some company besides books I stop in at a local house, accept a glass of fresh milk or some newly-dug potatoes to take home, chat with an old Newari woman sitting on her step, slowly sorting baby mustard greens. Roots and stems for the goats, leafy bits for gundruk (a way of preserving greens involving first fermentation and then sun-drying). To augment my simple diet I might walk a little further, to a virgin patch of golden Himalayan raspberries where I can gorge myself in splendid isolation.
Sipadole is really a village, sleepy as they come, so anywhere I go I make more of splash than I’d like. But after the first week, now, the families along my wandering routes have gotten used to me. Some of the kids have worked up the nerve to approach and talk to me instead of shouting at me after I pass. Fed up with the manners of some of these I wrote these lines one day after returning to my room:

so what if I like the trees here
better than the children?
bands of tiny hooligans
versus gnarled, majestic sentinels
pipals sprouting leaflets pink and translucent
as grapeskins—no contest. The kids kick dust
shout ‘hallo’s and satirical ‘namashtay’s at your back
beg for rupees, chocolate, a pen.
trees ask for nothing but your exhalation
though they’ll suck up your minerals in the end
turn your bones into bark and root
for the kids to clamber on
worship with grubby feet.
later, grown, they’ll honor you
with rice grains and vermillion
deck you out with mirrors
make a temple of your trunk.
everything and nothing is sacred.
just ask the schoolboys at the burning ghat
watching porn on a cellphone screen
while their friends mother, a suicide,
incinerates atop her pyre
of silent wood.

That last image borrowed from Alden, who witnessed such a scene at a cremation.
From panchakarma to pickpockets—I’m amazed at humanity all over again. Maanche ta je pani garcha . . . people will do just about anything. Everything. Selah.