they will kill you with kindness

Yes, many wonderful things happened in India, and eventually I will get to those things. The April blog challenge is about learning new things, and there are so many things to be learned from experiencing other cultures.  For now, though, I will continue with my theme: a hundred ways to die in India.  If I learned nothing else at all, I learned this, indelibly: if you travel to India or Africa, take antibiotics with you.  In Africa, it's because you simply can't avoid dust and dirt even if you avoid drinking the water.  In India, it's because you can't avoid the kindness of strangers.  Let me explain.

Having experienced traveler's diarrhea (and vomiting) on a ten day climb of Kilimanjaro, which nearly derailed my whole trip, I was going to be extremely careful in India to not 1) drink the water 2) eat raw foods 3) eat fruits which could not be peeled.  In Africa, I was saved because my partner was prepared with a course of antibiotics, and wonderful person that he was, he gave them to me, and I recovered.  This trip, I was determined to not only be careful, but to be prepared for all outcomes.

Thank goodness.  Because we met the kindest people in India, all over the place.  They sincerely want you to experience their culture. They want you to feel at home.  They want you to be part of their rituals. When I visited a tiny Hindu shrine in the middle of a public park, the priest and his slightly-more-English-speaking friend, who were sitting off to the side somewhere, rushed over to have me remove my shoes, and then to give me a tour of the shrine and a somewhat broken story of several Hindu gods.  I'm sure I impressed them greatly by knowing that Ganesh is the Hindu elephant god, Hunaman is the Hindu monkey god, and a thing or two about Shiva. At the end of the ten minute lesson, the priest presented me with a bowl of what looked to be chunks of salt and some sort of dried up weed seeds and pods--the kind you would pick off your socks after a hike in the woods. I smiled.  He smiled.  He pinched some of this mixture up and indicated that I should eat it. I balked. He basically said I had to partake or he would have failed in his duty to Shiva and Ganesh and Hunaman et. al..  I'm not Hindu, but I don't like to go around offending anyone's beliefs in their own house of worship after I’ve voluntarily gone in. I talked him down to allowing me to choose one pod of unknown origin, figuring it was dried up and probably couldn't harbor too many strange bacteria.  I thought I'd done ok.  And then, friends, he brought out a bowl of water and a small spoon, all of which (water included) looked to be quite aged. I was not going to be allowed to flee with my sense of what was right, or my shoes, without putting some of this water in my mouth.  I poured the smallest amount possible--a couple of drops--and put it as convincingly near my mouth as possible.  Some of the water did cross my lips, and I saw my doom spelled out as neatly as if it were prophesied in the Rig Veda.

A couple of days went by and I still seemed to be fine.  Extremely spicy Indian foods for all three meals every day, but still, fine.  Then comes the second day of the wedding festivities we were attending. The scene: a lunch right before we are all to be wrapped in turbans and parade the groom (on an elephant) from the village gates to the palace steps to meet his bride.  Several of us Americans were sitting, chatting, trying to lay our hands on a cold Coke or a Sprite, when two guys with the large, behind-the-scenes wedding crew came to the table.  One of them carried a very large bowl that was filled with some kind of milky-looking liquid and floating, yellow spongeballs about the size of ping-pong balls.  The other one approached me, stuck his fingers into the liquid, grabbed a yellow ball (something edible, supposedly, but basically sponge-like), squeezed out some of the bong-water-like liquid, and indicated that I should open my mouth.  Again, explaining that if I didn't do this, the marriage of my friend would likely be null and void or at least extremely unhappy.  It would bring the family so much pleasure if I kindly eat this spongeball. Or words to that effect. I opened, and he popped the ball into my mouth.  He went around the table doing the same to all of his other victims--two into this mouth, one into that mouth, THREE balls into the last guy's mouth.  We all sat there, trying to figure out what to do with this thing that seemed to grow as we chewed.  I likened the taste of the liquid to "dirty dish water with a hint of honey."  We chewed and chewed and eventually choked down the spongeballs, wondering if this really was an important Indian wedding tradition or if we'd been duped and some of the uncles were going to watch the video later and laugh their asses off.  In any case, the communal bowl of god-knows-what liquid, the fingers in the bowl, the fingers in everyone's mouths--again, I saw my fate written on the wall.

Fortunately, I survived the next few days in India and had a mind-blowing visit to the Taj Mahal, a lifelong dream. Maybe I wouldn't need that sixty-eight cent bottle of antibiotics after all.  It was not until we arrived at the Delhi airport to go home that we found out it would be an 11 hour flight instead of 8 to avoid Pakistani airspace (and presumably Pakistani anti-aircraft missles), and, also, that I would not avoid the bug afterall.  Two hours in the airport, eleven hours on a plane, I spent on a toilet, holding an airsick bag, praying to any god who would listen that I would either die or that the plane would have to make an emergency landing and we would all decamp to a nice hotel. Neither of those things happened.  Getting back to my point, however, I did start the antibiotics which halted the worst of it and killed the bug which tried to kill me.  Two weeks later I am almost back to normal, stomach-wise.  So friends, truly, heed this advice.

postscript: My friend Pallavi writes, "Yeah I would not have put that sponge thing in my mouth and I am from India.. Its okay to offend some people to avoid dying "