Don’t talk while you’re eating!

The soil on the farmland surrounding us, and here in the gardens, is dark and crumbly - the finest soft loam. What I would give for soil like this!... I could weep when I think of the solid clay in our garden in Italy. Local farmers in Kerala produce superb vegetables and one can understand how the diet has evolved without any need for animal products. But of course, it’s more than that and is linked to the recognition of a special relationship between people, their nourishment and their environment.

The attitude to food in the Ayurvedic lifestyle reminds me of the time when I – as a 19 year-old student – had to give a talk at a monastery about the voluntary work I’d been doing in Africa. The meal was almost a ritual, eaten in humility and gratitude and in total silence. Here in the dining room at the Centre, the Northern Europeans congregate together over meals, laughing, joking, gossiping and totally ignoring the carefully worded laminated card that the AYV team have thoughtfully placed on each table. This card explains that mealtimes are an important element of the treatment programme and that the food has been carefully chosen to balance the precise bodily requirements over the period of each week. It also suggests that one “should not talk or laugh when consuming food,” which is hardly the sort of proposition that is likely to be taken up by people away from home and taking a vacation. It goes further with the idea that one should: “consider eating like a vedic fire ritual and that you are making offerings to the internal fire who is god.” Not a familiar concept to people used to grazing, fast-food and snacks. Most people here treat meals with other guests as an opportunity to catch up on the latest news from emails back home. Consequently most people ignore everything on the card and eat as they would do at home, refusing unfamiliar flavours, and far more interested in conversation than in nourishment. As the doctor said to me at my morning consultation “All we can do is explain things to people, we cannot force them to do things our way.”Ayurveda teaches that the food, and the way it is consumed are just as important as the medicines, treatments, therapies and yoga sessions that are all elements of the programme.

Having run restaurants for 15 years, I know the annoyance I have felt on occasions when people just gobble down food without really tasting or appreciating the work that has gone into creating each dish. Without wishing to turn mealtimes into a total ritual, I still think the monks were onto something with their tradition of a silent refectory.

My lunch last Thursday (- that's a teaspoon!)

For 6 days of the week I have very little opportunity to sample the food as the weight management menu is stripped to the absolute minimum. Consider my lunch on Thursday:

•         1 Chapati
•          1 heaped tablespoon of onion and cucumber Raita (in yoghurt/buttermilk)
•          1 heaped tablespoon chopped vegetables with grated fresh coconut
•          1 heaped tablespoon chopped carrot, onion and green pepper dressed with a squeeze of lime
•          1 cup of warm herbal tea

The ridiculous thing about this dietary regime is that I have never yet felt hungry, and have on occasions felt almost bloated.

And then there’s Sunday. They make Sunday lunch special so that guests (those who are not on the introductory diet of plain rice) can enjoy a traditional Kerala meal. This is partly to give guests a treat, and partly to wake up the digestive system. The meal is served in the traditional way on a big banana leaf and eaten with the fingers, though spoons are available for those of a nervous disposition. The doctor explained that the fare on offer is not a random selection of dishes that taste nice, but is carefully chosen to constitute a complete, balanced meal that provides nourishment for all the senses, hot, cold, sweet, spicy, salty, mild, etc. The doctor played music to my ears when he advised me to: “...eat as much as you want from all the vegetable dishes, just don’t overdo the rice.”

Sunday lunch - Kerala style

But of course, my stomach has shrunk significantly, so there was no way I could gorge myself even had I wanted to. It was delicious, and full of subtle flavours and totally healthy. Today, of course, I’m back on my minimal rations, and the results are continuing to show almost daily.

In less than three weeks on this regime my weight decreased by 11.6kg. (not a typo....eleven point six kilos!)

Four legs good : Two legs bad

For centuries children have played with kites; diamond-shaped, paper-covered frames with long tails, tossed into the air and flown ever higher at the tug of a string. Just one string. You couldn’t steer or direct such kites but they were inexpensive and great fun; kite-flying was, and is exhilarating.

It all changed in the 1970s, when an Englishman called Peter Powell replaced the single string with two strings and a kite became instantly controllable. It could be commanded to twist and turn; it would even skim across the hedge-tops horizontally, parallel to the ground. Amazingly, Powell was granted a patent for his invention, because in all the thousands of years that kites had been flown on fields and sea-shores around the world, nobody had ever come up with the idea of two strings. Today almost every kite you can buy in the toyshop has two strings and two little handles that make the kite totally controllable and so much more fun to fly.

There are many aspects of life in which two are better than one. Like walking sticks – or to be more precise, alpine stocks. The Alpenstock was as essential as the digital camera is today for every serious tourist back in the 19^th century, when intrepid Brits started to conquer the Swiss Alps, (that the locals had more or less ignored their entire lives, according to Zurich’s Museum of Tourism.) This was a sturdy walking stick with a spike for slippery surfaces and a shaft of seasoned ash onto which little medals could be nailed, commemorating the peaks and villages that the well-travelled tourist had conquered. And then, no more than a generation ago, one keen walker realised the advantages to speed and stability that would ensue if a person held something like Alpenstock in each hand. And hiking poles were born.

The point about walking in open country is that it’s partly about stamina and partly about balance. While one foot is in the air, the body is unstable because there is only one point of anchorage. Add a pair of hiking poles and there are always 3 feet on the ground. Which is why mountain goats don’t fall over. And similarly, with my German-engineered hiking poles, neither do I. As George Orwell says in Animal Farm: Four legs good : Two legs bad.

When we discussed exercise in my first consultation, the doctor had a wry smile on his face. “We want you to exercise and build up your muscles, but we don’t want you to put unnecessary strain on that worn hip-joint.” A bit of a Catch 22, really, and then he added: “It’s important that you walk on smooth paths and not on rocky roads, because if you are walking on uneven surfaces then you will be struggling to keep your balance and that will put additional strain on your hip.” But there are few smooth roads around here; it’s all farmland and forest.

My hiking poles lying on a typical farm track

With a smile and a flourish, I produced my hiking poles, which would both limit the strain on my hip joint and improve my ability to keep my balance on the rough roads.

But this has not been an immediate solution, as I had forgotten the doctor’s words at the outset, namely that with Ayurvedic treatments, the condition will worsen before it improves. One of this week’s newly arrived patients is giving up and going home, the treatments simply too severe and distressing for her to handle. That’s not wimpish cowardice; it’s a fact that the initial reactions are very difficult to handle. After a few days I found the stairs in the main building almost impossible to climb and was hauling myself up on the hand-rail. Some mornings my walk down the road was no more than a shuffle, handicapped by a sense of complete exhaustion.

It’s taken the best part of three weeks to get back to some semblance of myself in terms of mental and physical energy, but the price has been well worth paying, and yesterday my exercise was – in both senses – just “a stroll in the park.”

Now each morning and afternoon, I pull on my sandals, grab my hiking poles and stride out confidently and securely as I head through the forest to the amused shouts of a group of local children. What I interpret as cheerful friendly greetings are probably derisory cries of something like “Oy Mister!- where’s your skis?”

Tomorrow, a new course of treatment starts and continues for the next 5 days. You’d never guess....

Exquisite torture

The peace and calm of the Ganesha shrine and the river down below

After the Powder Massage, my next 5-day course of treatment was to be one that had been my absolute favourite on previous trips to Kerala: lying on the massage table while a thin stream of liquid flows gently to and fro across my forehead. I should have known that Ayurveda-Yoga-Villas would be more meticulous with this treatment – as they are with all – and that my body’s reaction might be different.

To begin with, the doctor had talked me through the objectives of the various treatments. The first treatments had been to clean me out, then the powder massage worked on breaking down the fat around my middle and back. This had all been very successful and had reduced my weight by 9kg in just 13 days...! But treating obesity is not about eliminating the symptoms; it’s about attacking the causes. Why did I overeat? One effect of my excesses had been to push up my blood pressure, which had been worryingly high at 190/110 when I had arrived. This meant that the circulatory system needed attention and, more importantly, the emotions that stimulate it, to try and establish where the problem lay. I was credulous that using a particular massage treatment could identify the emotional factors that had pushed up my blood pressure but, as I said, this was my all-time favourite treatment, so I had no fears when I stretched out on the massage table while the assistants put the equipment in place.

The apparatus used is a tall wooden gallows structure that serves to suspend a large bowl over the patient’s forehead. There’s a hole in the bowl which is partly blocked by a thick wick, so that the liquid in the bowl can flow out slowly and steadily. That much I was familiar with; the new variation for me was the 10cm-wide cylinder of something resembling Play-Dough that the assistant was moulding in his hands. Once I lay down, he positioned this cylinder on my left chest, over my heart, as if he were marking me up for target practice. While I unwound and relaxed, wondering what this was all about, he warmed some oil and then dribbled this into this Play-Dough ring on my chest, so that the oil warmed the skin above my heart, gently massaging the oil in as he did so.

Next he fixed a cloth across my eyebrows so that no liquid would run into my eyes, put cotton pads on my eyes and plugged my ears with more cotton wool. Then he massaged liquid into my scalp as if it was a shampoo. The liquid in this treatment varies from patient to patient, as does the temperature of the liquid and the decoction that they mix in with it. The liquid I am being treated with is buttermilk, sometimes icy cold, and sometimes hot and turned an unappetising grey colour from the medications that have been added to it.

So now, my hair wrung out by the muscular hands of my handsome young man, I lay and waited for the main treatment to begin. Then I felt the liquid hit the spot the gurus call the third eye, in the centre of the forehead, midway between the eyes. The assistant gently swung the bowl to and fro, from left to right, so that there was a constant sensation of the liquid caressing the brow. And so it continued for the best part of half an hour.

How marvellous! -you might think; how relaxing that must be! Indeed, I have tended to drift in and out of consciousness when I have had this treatment elsewhere in Kerala, but the consequences on this occasion were more sinister. The effect of the process as it is carried out here is to open up all sorts of emotions that have been buried over the years. Every night, my neighbour in the adjacent villa next-door has been dreaming a constant newsreel of incidents and relationships from years back; another guest here spent the afternoon after this treatment shut in the room and in floods of tears. My reaction was to walk out of the treatment room as if I was stoned out of my mind: dizzy, disoriented, confused and having difficulty standing straight or thinking straight.

Fortunately I went straight from the treatment to my daily doctor’s appointment. The doctor explained that the medication used in this treatment brings up issues from the past that patients have buried at the back of their minds, and he emphasised the importance of now taking time to sit quietly by the river and re-examine things that troubled me, and to write it all down so I could keep coming back and progressing my thinking.  We are so often encouraged to forget about the past and bury it, but I found that with my mind focused after the treatment, I was put in a position to re-evaluate certain things in my life, quietly and dispassionately, and to come to terms with issues that I had been unable to resolve.

It wasn’t easy – and this particular process is a 5-day journey – but with the support of the simple diet, the natural beauty of the environment and the daily yoga there is a natural sense of balance being restored. 

Yeah....? A bucket of milk over your head....?Yes... it’s crazy, isn’t it? But it works for me and it seems to work for others here too, and as far as I’m concerned that, and the concise academic reasoning of all three doctors, is enough for me. The scientifically-minded junior doctor was writing out my medication instructions for me the other day, and across the top of the paper she wrote the phrase that they write on all such notes. Roughly translated it means something along the lines of:

“This treatment in the name of the goddess of Ayurveda, all praise and honour be unto her.”

 Yeah.... superstitious bunch of cranks...?

Of course, or, well.....

.... meanwhile my blood pressure dropped to 130/68. 

Just doing what I said I would do.

Big Cheery Bloke replaces Fat Miserable Bloke

After two weeks Fat Miserable Bloke is looking a bit more like Big Cheery Bloke. It's been hard work and it's not going to stop being hard work for quite some time. I'm grateful for some of the things I've learnt in recent years that have helped with the challenge.

Ten years ago I took a number of self-development courses. My earnings were high at the time, and I could write off all these activities against tax (- well, that’s what I did, and they never checked!) I attended several advanced courses and I helped to run courses in South Africa, California, Scotland, and Tennessee as well as all over England, and it was a rich and fulfilling experience. The courses had a common element which centred on being true to yourself, of doing what you said you were going to do just because you owed that much to yourself. After all, if you couldn’t trust yourself, who could you trust? The basic course used an exercise that involved accepting and committing to a set of personal disciplines. Some were obviously appropriate – not talking during sessions, others helpful – raising your hand if you couldn’t hear, some seemingly petty – an absolute adherence to timings. The point was that these were not rules laid down by another authority; they were personal disciplines that you accepted and took on as your own.

It’s a concept that has held me in good stead on many occasions, and it is highly appropriate at this time in Kerala, where the programme is not imposed nor even strictly enforced, it relies on guests exercising their own personal discipline. Nobody checks if you rise at six in the morning – there are no alarm calls, and nobody checks if you do actually take that brisk early-morning walk. Nobody challenges you if you insist on getting the kitchen to bring you different food from the menu that the doctors have prescribed for you, and nobody checks if you take your medicines. Well, why would they? We’re all adults aren’t we?

But that’s not the way some people seem to see things. I don’t believe in cherry-picking an experience like this. I want to get the most out of it, so I’ll follow the doctors’ instructions as near to the letter as I can. Variations like going to the village for a sticky cake, or getting the kitchen to make me coffee seem to defeat the purpose of entering into this sort of rigorous regime in the first place. But the whingeing and whining goes on every mealtime, people who can’t eat this or don’t like that, and who choose to customise their days to suit their own preferences rather than accept what has been meticulously constructed to deliver a balanced and – above all – effective programme.

As the days go by I find that I accept and even enjoy some of the physical exertion, the early mornings and early nights, the daily rituals, the simple diet. I am confident that some of this will create new habits, and will be absorbed into my lifestyle when I go home. The whole purpose of Panchakarma is to change one’s lifestyle, not in terms of going home to sit cross-legged on the floor eating curried vegetables with my fingers, but in terms of living my Italian life in a different way. There is a deep sense of peace and acceptance, and I don’t think I could have achieved this if I had chosen to fight the system, ignored the activities and demanded different food.

I paid a fair sum of money and, even more significantly, I committed a substantial period of time and I want to get the best possible return on my investment. I just don’t understand people who do all that and then try to wheedle a way around the system. If you do that, then the only promise you break is the one you made to yourself.

All of this sounds very self-righteous, but there’s a big piece missing in my jig-saw. If I can be so smart about disciplines that other people find so easy to break, why do I have such a problem with disciplines that other people find perfectly acceptable? Why have I eaten too much and drunk too much for so long, and why do I find it so difficult to break that pattern? This is where my new course of treatment takes over – working on the mind and getting through to the emotions.

It gets to the point when life and all the emotions look and feel like an impenetrable jungle

I thought I would love the next therapy in my programme, as I have on previous visits to Kerala, but this time it’s proving a major struggle. More of that tomorrow.

Something my Grandmother taught me

The main building with first floor dining room

My maternal grandmother was a dead ringer for fairy-tale witch. She lived in a little terraced cottage with a coal fire in the kitchen. The fire was in a grate that incorporated an oven built to the side for baking and had an arm that swung round to carry a big, old-fashioned kettle. Behind the kitchen was the scullery with a wash-tub, and a frightening mangle that had huge wooden rollers to squeeze the water out of the hand-washed laundry. Her white hair was wound into a bun on the back of her head and she always – it seemed – wore long, black, shapeless shifts. Her eyes constantly twinkled, deep-set in a face that was as weathered and wrinkled as a new-season’s walnut.

My parents used to send me to stay with her sometimes in the school holidays. It was long before I was a teenager but my father, with his forceful expectations of me, picked me up at the end of term and put me on the Yorkshire Pullman on platform 8 at King’s Cross with a note of the number of the bus I had to catch from Hull Paragon Station, and the name of the stop from which I could walk to Granny’s house.

Those holidays in Granny’s house were my first exposure to seeds in cookery, because Granny King’s neighbour used to bake the most delicious Seed Cake, for which I must find – or reinvent – the recipe. Nowadays we take for granted the use of seeds and spices in cooking, but in those post-war years of the mid-fifties, spices were a mystery and appeared only in small cellophane packets to be added to the vinegar for pickling onions or making green tomato chutney. Here in Kerala pepper grows in vines along the roadside and a wide variety of different seeds and spices are used in the kitchen every day. And it’s not just in food, of course, because all the medicines here are made from herbs and spices, and many are produced right here on site.

In western medicine we have come to expect our potions to be bland and tasteless, but that’s a recent innovation since synthetic flavours have become available and affordable. The first medicine I remember as a child – probably for a cough or cold – had the strong and bitter flavour of liquorice, and since sweet-rationing was still in force, the flavour was unfamiliar. This medicine was a mysterious dark colour and I decided it tasted horrid. My mother encouraged me with the phrase that Granny King had always recited to her: “If it doesn’t taste bad it’s not going to do you any good!” And that is how it was for many years: medicines tasted truly disgusting until those dark-brown liquorice-flavoured liquids were replaced with bright pink medicines flavoured with a synthetic strawberry taste and then, in time, most bottles were replaced with pills and tablets.

In Ayurvedic medicine, medicines are still the real thing: disgusting colours, gritty, grainy textures, and flavours that surprise, shock and repel the senses. The doctors hand out little poly-bags filled with fine powders in varying shades of brown. Some are to be mixed into a paste with honey, some are to be taken in warm water and others in buttermilk. But these are not soluble powders. When I collect my early morning mug of buttermilk from the kitchen, I spoon in my brown powder and it floats on top. I stir, I whisk and beat until gradually little clumps of paste form and then they in turn can be broken down, so that the mixture achieves a slightly lumpy consistency rather like wallpaper-paste. It is so thick that I don’t know whether I drink it or eat it, but fortunately this early morning medicine is not totally repugnant. You just need to like the flavour of sugar, salt, chilli, pepper, garlic and something vaguely chocolatey.

I have 6 medicines to take. One of my little tablets has to be washed down with an infusion made of roasted cumin seeds and hot water. Such infusions are commonplace, and almost every guest here can be seen walking around with a thermos of herbal tea. No “tea” of course: just hot water that is tainted faintly green by the soggy, slimy leaves that are floating in it.

But Granny knew best, because these strange potions are having a remarkable restorative and curative effect on my whole system despite the range of unfamiliar flavours and unappealing tastes. And then there was a welcome surprise when my most recent medicine  was prescribed. Not a liquid, not a powder, but a shiny blister-pack of tiny pills, one to be taken daily, at bedtime. Just when I thought the assault on my taste-buds was over, I read the small print: “Not to be swallowed.” So the treatment was clear, just let the pill dissolve in the mouth and fall asleep with the flavour on the tongue, thinking of Granny King’s wise words: “If it doesn’t taste bad it’s not going to do you any good!”

Just stand still for a moment...

Dressing the shrine with petals

Of course, we’re all fit and healthy and lively and active, and I never thought that I wasn't until I started the yoga sessions. At home I move around the house and work in the garden, and although my hip plays up and I have a bit of a limp, I never considered myself handicapped until....

Yoga isn’t all about tying yourself in knots. Yes, we have people here who can go from a squatting position to balancing on their head in one smooth move, but I’ve now learned that basic yoga is very, very simple... until you try to do it. I mean, what could possibly be physically challenging about breathing?

So, stand still, raise the arms straight above the head with palms together and breathe deeply. The first couple of breaths are easy, but by the time I got to six I found my mind saying “Well, this is a waste of time, isn’t it?” or “This won’t bring my blood pressure down, will it?” My shoulders ached, my arms started to sag and my legs ached from standing still. I came to the realisation that Simple isn’t always Easy.

Then the yoga master told the class to lie down, and I faced the terrifying revelation that it’s been a long time since I went from up here to down there. The master glides smoothly from vertical to horizontal while I’m standing there wondering where to start. Thank heavens for Ali, whose solid Omani Arab frame encourages me with the evidence that I am not alone – though he is 20 years younger than me and relatively agile. The yoga master waits patiently while I catch up with the rest of the class and lie down. Then a simple instruction: Put your legs together and raise them slowly to 45 degrees, hold it, and lower. It wasn’t long before I realised that I was seriously out of shape and that it would take time to awaken some of those sleeping muscles. Then, in one of my regular, daily consultations, the doctor told me that because of my hip and back, I shouldn’t be doing the morning class, but ought to have a private session with the yoga master to work out some basic exercises I could do in my room. Then I could still join the evening class which was more meditative, and avoid anything that might strain my hip or back.

We probably all remember PE teachers who bullied the class into all achieving a common standard. I remember it well from my schooldays, the shame of doing fewer pull-ups or executing a clumsy vault in class, and always feeling not good enough, - and this was not uncommon as a teaching style for both academic and physical lessons in the 50s and 60s. There was an attempt to shame under-performers into achieving the standard. In stark contrast, the yoga master is a lovely man who knows that every student is seeking to improve, and is yearning to achieve a degree of competence. I sat quietly with him in the yoga hall and he worked out half-a-dozen exercises that were all basically focused on conscious breathing.

So each morning I work through my session of breathing exercises in my room. I breathe deeply standing, sitting, twisting to the left, turning to the right, breathing and stretching, breathing and contracting, arms outstretched, arms to the ground and... definitely the most challenging... standing balanced on one leg.

Hold your breath long enough and you go blue in the face

The close connection between Ayurveda and yoga comes from the common theme of balance. Ayurveda is all about creating a balance in life, and so much of yoga – especially as it becomes more advanced – is about a physical balance in posture and movement in conjunction with steady, controlled conscious breathing. The body learns fast and rapidly becomes more supple and coordinated. Positions that were impossible yesterday are surprisingly comfortable today. It’s encouraging and each day brings a little more effort and a little more achievement.

I can even stand on one leg now.

The morning after

A walk in the estate grounds

The morning after V-therapy I woke up looking forward to some rather more humane treatment, to be preceded by the prospect of breakfast – my first real food for a week. Most of the meals here are served “thali-style” which means that they are served on a brass tray about 25cm in diameter with a number of small brass bowls each containing a different dish to accompany, or follow, the starchy part of the meal, which could be chapatis, or rice or one of the special Kerala breads or a kind of couscous. Being on the “Weight Management” menu I had a slightly different menu with minuscule portions, but by this time my stomach had shrunk so much that I never once felt hungry.

Breakfast starts with a large glass of freshly squeezed or blended fruit juice – orange, water-melon, grape, coconut, mango, pineapple – different every day. Sometimes my breakfast differs and could be a small bowl of lentils, or oatmeal porridge, at other times it’s a smaller version of the rice with vegetables and dhal that the other guests are having. Of course I’ve had plenty of time to work up something of an appetite since I’ll have been up 3 hours already for my morning exercise and yoga routine. At 10 every day now I have my prescribed treatment, which generally includes some element of massage from the two handsome young men who attend to my naked body on the massage table.

Consulting rooms and treatment block

For this 5-day phase my treatment is head massage and powder massage. For the head massage I sit on a low stool while one of the boys vigorously massages oil into my scalp and then starts generally knocking my head around quite roughly, finishing off with a firm massage of my neck and shoulders. Then I climb up onto the massage table while the other boy finishes preparing the “powder,” which has the texture of fine sawdust, being the ground-up roots of a particular blend of herbs. This compound is warmed over the hob and then massaged all over my body. While the massage starts off gently, it builds into very hard rubbing to and fro across my stomach and has an immediate exfoliating effect so that after a couple of days my skin is very soft and supple. After 20 minutes or so I am covered from head to toe with brown sawdust, and they brush me off so I can clamber into the steam-box. Finally, when I am well-cooked, there’s the medication, which at this phase is nose-drops (in addition to the 5 herbal pills and medicines I am currently prescribed.)

I cannot over-emphasise the professionalism of the establishment. There is a consultant, a senior doctor and a junior doctor, and each day every guest has a consultation with one of the three, on a daily rotation, for about 15-20 minutes. These doctors have an initial training that lasts five and a half years, at all times being taught both Western and Ayurvedic disciplines. This is followed by a one-year internship before they are qualified to call themselves doctors and practise as such. Subsequently they can go on to specialise: our consultant here is doing his Master’s in Pharmacology. To have so much specialist attention is a real bonus. All three of them demonstrate meticulous conscientiousness in their approach as well as a thorough investigation of all aspects of the physical, medical and emotional state of all the guests. It’s very   impressive.

All guests are encouraged to keep a daily journal to record their physical and emotional feelings on a daily basis. This helps the doctors to be aware of initial issues and the way that these develop over the duration of the treatment. Even looking back just a few days, I am aware of the constant change in my mental state; there is much more calmness in addition to the physical changes. At this half-way stage (as I write this instalment) I am curious to know what further changes are in store.

Sick of it

Part of the traditional Kerala mural in the main resort building

You may have stumbled across this blog thinking it was just another travelogue, so I should explain that it is a record of my stay at a specialist resort in Kerala – ayurvedayogavilla.com. Panchakarma is the name of the 28-day programme that I have embarked on. In essence it involves a serious of treatments linked to diet, medication, treatments such as massage, yoga and what is loosely called “lifestyle.” The first stage – as I’ve described – involved the ghee, then there was a respite for 3 days of oil-massage but all of this was a mere prelude to the crucial process of vomit therapy.

Here I will respond to the requests that some of you have already made and spare you the most gruesome details. So, in a much sanitised summary, this is what happened after I arrived, bleary-eyed, at the treatment centre at 5 am. It started with a gentle stomach massage, alternating with having a pipe of warm steam played across my middle to relax and soften the skin. Then I was taken through to an adjacent room, sat on a low stool and encouraged to drink a huge quantity of full-cream, warm milk, - several litres – followed by some herbal medicine and finally glass after glass of strong brine. What followed needs no explanation.

The whole process lasted a good hour, and was a slow and steady build-up of self-inflicted discomfort. Remember that my only food for the previous 3 days had been 9 small bowls of rice in milk, and you can appreciate that it is no exaggeration to say that when the process was complete I felt very light and very empty. I staggered back to my room; luxuriated under a hot shower until the memory was washed away. Then I went to bed and slept till past noon.

When I woke I was surprisingly alert and energetic, but I took it fairly easy and didn’t take any exercise. Some colleagues had experienced bad reactions to the therapy and spent the day in bed, but I amused myself with flower arrangements and photography, feeling some real improvement in my whole sense of well-being. At dinner I toyed with some rice but gave up after a couple of mouthfuls, retired early and slept the sleep of the dead.

There’s been a new arrival here, a very interesting Arab from the Gulf, who is involved with the entire water, drainage and sanitation programme for Oman. It is exciting to be able to discuss the political news with him and see his reaction as the whole Arab world struggles with the process of change and democratisation. He is a lovely, charming man and a great conversationalist. I also feel a sense of comradeship as he is a big man and, like me, finds some of the yoga a real physical challenge. There is a steady flow of new guests as others finish their Panchakarma and return home. A furniture designer from Belgium, a research scientist from Marseilles, a girl who lives just behind Clapham Common and works for an adoption agency, and an interesting German guy in a wheelchair. They are all new arrivals and all with interesting stories to tell (and an opportunity to practice my languages.)

Definitely not IKEA

I was at a loss to know what picture to use for this posting, but then I remembered the mural in the main building… and then the maids came and changed the bed-linen. What can I say? - another kind of bad taste....?

Flowers

The gardens are not laid out; they’re not tidy, and they’re certainly not trimmed and manicured. The gardens are a random planting of trees, shrubs, climbers and crawlers. All the plants looked plonked in the ground, unplanned and liberally dowsed with a hosepipe from time to time. Any pruning is probably accidental and some of the placements are an affront to the eye, with small shrubs hiding behind bushes, and ramblers clinging to training wires that lead nowhere. Hedges are unkempt and grass lawns are criss-crossed with paths worn by anarchic feet that choose the easiest route. But there is growth and there is colour. Brilliant white, vivid scarlet and lush verdant green all screaming for the camera’s attention.

Birthday flowers

I was tidying my room (!) the other morning when I found a little vase full of dead flowers. I was inspired and strolled around the garden with my penknife choosing a selection of blooms and some sprigs of greenery. The little vase now sits on the verandah, but by the time I post this blog, the flowers will all need replacing – for my birthday on Monday. There is a different attitude to flowers as decoration here.

Every morning one of the girls of the staff walks around the gardens with a brass tray, picking flowers – but not the stems and leaves the way we would because people here don’t make flower arrangements as we know them: they strip of the individual petals and either make them into patterns, using the petals like mosaic tiles, or else they scatter them randomly around the shrines.

I think it’s their allegory of life. The flowers grow and bloom then wilt and die. These beautiful patterns of petals fade in hours and in a day or two there is just a mess to clear up and throw away. The Hindu attitude to life is that once the body has experienced this lifetime,  it’s discarded and burned. The important thing is to make time to enjoy the blooms and blossoms.

Reflections

The lily-pond at the end of the lane

When I left Italy a couple of weeks ago I was depressed, angry and confused – and for many, many reasons, not least because I was upset about my general physical condition and overall health.  In addition to this, our life had been in someone else’s hands for the best part of three years. The progress from my apartment in Tunbridge Wells to our new Italian home in the Marches, between the Adriatic Sea and the Sibillini mountains had proceeded with almost no positive impetus or interception from either of us. It seemed that we were in the hands of the vendor, or the banks, or the Americans, or Italian bureaucracy – always our destiny was being manipulated by others and it was never our own straightforward decision. It was very unsettling – but we survived.

The gift of being in Kerala now is the opportunity to take stock, and acknowledge the incredible good fortune of all that has happened over the past three years and the exciting challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. If you are the kind of person that likes to be in control of every detail (as I certainly am) then this sort of deluge of events is disorienting, and it’s not a comfortable place to be. But now things are far more orderly in my mind, and though my bones and muscles are aching, my energy is depleted and my whole body is lethargic, there is a sense that this 4-week process has bottomed out and a great deal of rubbish has been cleared away. Now I can rebuild.

So what of all the other people here? Several of you have asked, and I can imagine the ideas you might have of old crones in wheelchairs, or Google executives on sabbaticals, or professional hypochondriacs experimenting with a new course of treatment. I will, at a later post, deal with the complexities of what Ayurveda is and isn’t, but let’s for the moment consider this motley mix of inmates.

The owner and founder, Anjit, is a tall, dark-skinned, black-bearded native of Kerala with long black curling hair that hangs down to the middle of his back. Surprisingly, he lives most of his life in Finland with his sylph-like blonde Finnish wife and their family. Through this Scandinavian connection the project attracts a disproportionate representation of Scandinavian nationals. Of course, they nearly all speak fluent English so there’s no language barrier. Then there are Germans (they get everywhere, don’t they?) two French couples and the largest ethnic group here are the NRI’s – non-resident Indians.

 In the past 60 years Indians have settled all over the world with their innate ability to become totally integrated without losing any of their cultural independence. One retired couple flew back to London earlier in the week; he’d worked in shipping in Pakistan then transferred to London, then moved to air cargo and ended up as a station manager for a small airline, based in Frankfurt. Impeccable Indian boarding-school English, - a character straight out of a Seera Mayal film or television series. Speaking of whom (and forgive me if I’ve mis-spelt her name) someone very like her or her characters is also here; she’s another NRI, married to a Brit and living in Henley-on-Thames. There’s an extended family of NRIs from Canada; the youngest is a student daughter then there’s mother, uncle, and a couple of aunts (presumably all here to keep an eye on her.)

Just when you were convinced that this is the sort of average mix that you might have bumped into in Tesco’s in Braintree, you walk into the yoga class and see the housewife from Mannheim tied in a knot, or the suave Parisian balanced on one leg in a classic, statuesque pose. Like any good Hercule Poirot scenario, one is continually trying to work out the plot, but it’s not so much a “Who-done-it?” as “What-brought-him-here?” There are many tantalisingly complex characters.

What do we all have in common? What is true is that there are certain sub-groups, like the people who have done many years of yoga and relish the opportunity to be coached by a true yoga master. Then there are the people – a small minority – who don’t read the small print, or maybe just don’t buy into the concept, and look on it as a holiday, modifying the rules and recommendations to suit themselves. But the one thing that unites most guests is the appreciation of the opportunity to go through a mental, physical and spiritual detox, and then start life afresh. I think that most of us would like to go home with the sense of breaking bad habits, of adopting a healthier life-style, with the intention of approaching the madness of 21^st century Western life with a little more cynicism. It’s like the river down below us in the valley: I’d like to think about slowing down and flowing deeper, rather than just babbling over the shallows, which is, perhaps, the way many of us lead our everyday lives.

On reflection, I am pretty ashamed of the person I had become before I came out here. I was unforgivably bad-tempered and had lost all sense of joy in my life. If I have now found that, it will be a far greater benefit than the lost inches and kilos, the loss of which will, I trust, support the new persona..

“That’s to Stop the Elephants at Night.”

After a while, even an idyllic hideaway engenders a certain sense of claustrophobia. I always used to say that the only difference between exile (Napoleon exiled to Elba) and escapism (escaping to your own estate on Elba) was the ability to purchase a ticket to get away and travel on to somewhere else. So while this feels somewhat like being exiled from civilisation (civilisation as we know it, Scotty) it is the luxury of sheer escapism. I sit here on my verandah with my laptop, listening to the birds in the trees and the river splashing in the valley below and it is truly idyllic; but after a while I want a bit of noise and bustle, or simply a change of scenery. So most guests here head off occasionally to the nearest large village or small town to buy a bar of soap or a bottle of shampoo.

My neighbours (the gentlemen from Holland and Iceland – an intriguing combination of national characteristics) and I all have shirts to collect from the tailor in Unpronouncable, so we piled in after lunch and headed off on the short 5km ride to town.

In essence, Kartikullam (I think that’s right) is a street stretching over a couple of hundred metres, with shops each side opening onto a dusty road. Most of the shops fall into one of three basic categories: fabrics and tailoring, food and kitchen, and hardware, house and garden. The latter is – of course – not net curtains and patio furniture but more shower heads, spades and hoes, and these shops advertise their presence with mountains of multicoloured plastic buckets and bowls spilling over the pavement. I had hoped that somewhere on the main drag I would find some fabric for shirts and lounging trousers but I faced an immediate problem.

Typical shop in the High Street

While all the haberdashers were well-stocked with “shirt lengths” of 2 metre pieces of fabric, there is a serious discrepancy between a shirt length to make a short-sleeved shirt for a small Indian and a shirt length to make a long-sleeved shirt for a large Englishman. The answer, of course, would be to buy 2 lengths of the same fabric, but in their search for maximum stock range, nearly all the shops had only one piece of each pattern or colour. In the end I found 2 lengths of the same fabric – sadly, a rather bland pattern, and a 4-metre length of genuine hand-loom, vegetable-dyed fabric that was guaranteed to fade over the years (don’t we all!)

As I write this now on the verandah, 4 days after my first trip to town, and having made 2 further trips to collect my goods, (sorry, sir, seamstress will finish tomorrow,) I am now waiting for a salesman to arrive in the capacity of delivery boy, with my two new shirts. They probably won’t have been a great bargain at the end of the day, by the time I’ve taken 2 taxi fares into account, but they will carry a story and a host of memories. Where else would I have purchased hand-made gardening tools, a hand-printed hessian shopping bag and bars of medicated Ayurvedic soap?

Kerala jungle - elephants, tigers, the works!

The road there and back goes through the nearest thing I’ve ever experienced to real jungle. Clumps of giant bamboo fallen in clusters then overgrown with creepers and populated with monkeys. Then plantations of coffee interspersed with pepper vines. Then there’s the wildlife, with elephants roaming at night towards the town so that the end of the main road is closed off with a barrier pole. Hence the title of today’s blog – the response to my question when I asked why the end of the main road was blocked off.

Coffee bushes in blossom

Putting the treat into treatment

Well, that’s the end of the intensive part of the 28-day process (so I thought, but not so sure after asking around...) Today I have sweet milky rice porridge for breakfast, lunch and dinner; and tomorrow, and the next day. Then I have vomiting therapy, followed by rice-water porridge. 

The next day I have Tournedos Rossini [cuisson bleu-saignant] and a bottle of Vosne-Romanée 1985, followed by a glass of Sauternes to accompany my Îles Flottants . I wish... I wish...

But surprisingly I am not missing anything. My stomach has shrunk – at least internally – and I don’t feel at all hungry. The climate is superb: cool to the point of a slight chill at six when I go for my early morning walk, then warm and warmer to comfortably hot in the afternoon. I decided to celebrate the successful completion of Phase One with a trip to town, and arranged a taxi for the afternoon, but first I had my first treatment session: oil massage followed by steam box.

Shoes outside the front door

One thing you soon get used to in India is the shoes. They’re everywhere because nobody wears shoes indoors. I remember being in Mumbai/Bombay for an important business meeting and having to deal with the indignity of kneeling down to tackle my shoelaces, because I was wearing my smart black lace-up business shoes. In India, most men wear loafers for the (now) obvious reason. At a place like this, the area outside the main building or the consulting rooms is scattered with shoes. Of course, you have to remember where you left them, which is something of a problem when there are four different entrances to the main building.

So I took my shoes off and waited patiently outside the consulting rooms. You’d think that if you told someone it was an Oil Massage, they’d have some idea of what they would be in for. Of course, the sexes are separated for treatment, with female masseuses treating female patients, but this failed to reassure one particularly puritanical Canadian woman who confessed to complete shock with the realisation that treatment involved disrobing in front of strangers. We laughed at her story over dinner that evening, and, like all of us here, she recovered from another of the daily surprises of learning what Ayurveda entails, as she described her plunge into a new experience.

Shoes outside the consulting room

I kept my appointment in the men’s treatment room. I stripped off, climbed onto the wide, solid wooden massage table and stretched out while two handsome, winsome and charming young men massaged me gently with perfumed oils. Were I differently inclined in life, this could have been a dream come true..... As it was, it was both relaxing and invigorating, with the massages on subsequent days gradually becoming increasingly vigorous.

If you remember the steam-boxes in “Goldfinger” then you have an idea of what was next in store for me. You sit naked on a stool inside a wooden box, with a cut-out hole that’s just the right size for your neck, so that your head sticks out above the box, cushioned by a judiciously positioned towel. Health & Safety would love this contraption. Inside the box there is a tiny stool on which you perch - dripping with oil. If you slide off the stool – assuming you don’t break your neck in the lid of the contraption – you could finish up wedged inside the box with the steam jets pointing just where you really wouldn’t want them to point. Adjacent to the steam-box was a cooking hob on which a pressure cooker was bubbling away, producing steam. The safety valve had been removed and replaced by a plastic tube that piped the steam into the box. But when all is said and done, the apparatus worked very well and the effect was heavenly. This really is more treat than treatment, - and the prospect of more of this every day certainly compensates for the lack of alcohol and whatever.

My afternoon trip to town was fun and I ordered two shirts. I’ll write about the town and the shops after I’ve been to collect them.

Homes and Gardens

Day Four of Ghee. 

Day One it had been 30ml; by Day Three it was a full 100ml tumbler; Day Four was more than one and a half tumblers. I retched but managed to control myself and quickly washed the taste down as best I could with tumblers of warm water, then slowly chewed my ration of sultanas, savouring the taste as intensely as I could to counteract the slippery greasiness of the ghee. I muttered a grateful prayer that this was the last treatment of this stage of Panchakarma. Tomorrow – and for two subsequent days – I would be on a diet of rice porridge with milk and sugar instead of rice porridge with salt and water, and tomorrow there would be an oil massage followed by half an hour sweating in the steam box. Plenty to look forward to.

To celebrate the changes, I decided to take a different walk and explore new areas. A few hundred yards down the road there’s a turning up to the left. Usually I go straight on, towards the farmland, but before reaching the agricultural land there’s “Pepper Green Resort.” I was intrigued by this stockade estate which seemed to contain a collection of hotel rooms built up on stilts and into the trees, in the style of the Treetops Hotel in Kenya, but without the Elephants. I asked around and managed to unearth some if its history. Apparently, it is open mainly at weekends and caters for the yuppies of Bangalore (India’s Internet Capital) who want to get away for a weekend to drink, crash out and party. The hotel never really promoted itself and never developed much in the way of facilities apart from those that this particular market demands, namely bars and beds. Sadly, it’s currently closed, as I would have loved to explore... maybe next weekend. Such an eclectic and original location might make an amazing film-set.

Today I didn’t go as far as Pepper Green, but instead turned up the hill beside a coffee plantation which had irrigation sprays sprinkling the bushes. This part of Kerala is poor, but far from destitute. 

The women at the well

 Some people have to use standpipes for their water supply, some, like the ladies in the photo, prefer to draw their supply from the well even though the standpipe is only a hundred yards away. Many homes have piped water, tiled roofs and even satellite dishes. I was fascinated by the neatness and tidiness of many homes, and the brilliant colours some owners have chosen.

I walked up the road, and after a hundred yards the rocks and dust were superseded by smooth tarmac that was a joy to walk along. After a mile or so I came to the local school, opposite which was a row of small shops. These are the equivalent of the corner shop in UK in the way that these are the shops people rely on for basic essentials and bits and pieces. There’s never just one shop, because of the basic rule of retailing – customers, anywhere in the world, don’t trust a lack of competition. I remember being taught this on the Bata Marketing Course in Canada and the U.S. back in 1969. We were taken to what was then one of the largest shopping malls in America, just outside Chicago, and it was pointed out that there was Sears  department store at one end of the mall and Macys at the other, because malls with only one major store simply did not pull in the customers.

Here in rural Kerala there were two little shops, each selling basic foodstuffs in small quantities, together with spools of cotton, tubes of superglue, plastic combs and hairbrushes and single-use sachets of shampoo (for less than 2 UK pence each) So there it is – American shopping mall, two competing outlets; Indian country lane, two competing outlets.

I needed soap and washing powder, and picked up a couple of other novel items before my eye was caught by a group of men squatting together on the ground. They were quite animated and rolling two rectangular pieces of wood instead of the dice. Each length of wood was marked on its four faces with 1, 2, 3 or no stripes. By rolling the pieces and counting the stripes (to total between zero and 12) you achieved the same effect as rolling 2 dice.

Playing for money

 The players had chosen different counters from what was lying around; one played with cigarette ends, another with scraps of foil, and another with slips of paper.  As they made a score, the players moved their markers in a mysterious route on the board, and from time to time a winner was declared and received stake money from each of the other players. I would have loved to understand it, and watching it took me back to watching men playing similar games in the African bush. In the part of Kenya I visited it was called Kiothi, and I have seen versions in UK toy shops. This gambling game in Kerala was clearly addictive and I wonder if some bright spark will mass-produce it in bright plastic colours and persuade Toys ‘R Us to stock it. You never know!

Simple Agriculture

Today I swallowed a full tumbler (100ml) of warm medicated ghee and felt positively ill. I drank warm medicated herbal water to try and rinse away the taste, but it lingers on – and on. I decided I needed to take my mind off things and took my camera with me on my compulsory 1-hour march. 

 I followed the valley, which is intensively irrigated by the local farmers and it was fascinating to see the different activities and landscapes.The path cuts across farmland that is not very high above the river and the land is both terraced and intensively irrigated.Some terraces are flooded as paddy fields; other areas are irrigated for other crops. Another area is divided by shallow dykes to create raised beds for growing certain types of vegetables, while other areas are soggy and muddy for growing varieties of squash.

Vegetable patches divided by deep dykes

I watched the land-owning farmers sitting at the side ordering the workers as they dug the ditches, - but mainly just sitting and watching. In some places you got the feeling that the farmer himself was working the land with the help of a colleague – as in the yam farming – but plenty of times on the larger plots, I got the distinct impression that there were workers and there were land-owners –a familiar pattern around the world.

The seamstress called in the evening with wonderful pantaloons she has made for me to do yoga, and a huge wrap-around gown to relax in. She didn’t really understand what a dressing-gown looks like, so it goes almost twice round me. The total bill for the two garments was about £7, so I am not worried – and I know Fi will either discard it as being not my colour (or the wrong colour for wearing in the sitting room) or remake it into a proper dressing gown (with enough fabric left over to make boxer shorts – or something!)

Tomorrow I will explore the road that leads up the hill away from the river.

Marching orders

Out through the front entrance of the estate

That first day, walking was really tough. The doctor had taken me off any medication, so no anti-inflammatory pills any longer, and even my glucosamine sulphate tablets were banned. Consequently, my hip joint was aching at night and was not comfortable for a walk in the country. It’s not the walking itself that is the challenge, it’s keeping the balance. On a rough track through the woods the path is rocky with alternating pools of dust, rocky outcrops and grassy tufts; the challenge is to keep balance which is easy if your hips are fully functional. My left hip joint is seriously worn away so even on pavements I walk with a limp.

The early morning “brisk walk” is shortly after 6am, in the dim light of breaking dawn; it’s difficult to make out the path and easy to trip and stumble. I thought it would be easier in broad daylight, but by the time I completed this wake-up exercise I had decided that in future I would use my hiking poles – the kind that look like ski poles and which people use for Nordic Walking.

Down along by the river 

There’s a pleasant, level walk, starting along by the river bank and then winding through the paddy fields and vegetable gardens. It’s a wonderful context for getting back to the realities of life: the simplicity of life in what is essentially a tribal society.

On my second day here one of the girls who work here as a cleaner was to be married and the management organised transport so that both staff and guests could attend the wedding if they wished. Under normal circumstances I would have gone, but I was too drained by the combination of the journey and the start of the ghee treatment and I decided to take things easy and continue to relax into the Spartan regime.

The story behind the wedding was fascinating. The bride was a simple girl from a tribal family. Her father was a fisherman, and theirs was very much a subsistence life-style. There was a real family crisis a few weeks back because it seemed unlikely that the family could afford to pay for a full-scale wedding. However, the owner of this establishment offered to provide transport for estate staff to attend which meant that the bride’s coffers would be swelled by the cash contributions that are traditional at weddings. Then, when the paying guests here were also invited, not only were the financial problems completely removed (because of all the extra cash) but also the status of the bride’s family rose enormously from being attended by the cosmopolitan group of guests from around the world.

Staying here, surrounded by the homes of very ordinary, very humble people puts this time in Kerala into context. The facilities at the local level may not be to the standard of Western society but villagers have clean water, food, health services and education. What is more, they live in a society that is expanding dynamically with the newspapers reporting daily on new economic and social developments. By contrast, I find so much of Western society in cynical, social and moral decline. India has a genuineness that permeates so many aspects of life, and you get very close to it here in the bush, rather than in some 5-star Intercontinental Hotel.