Kawcaw
Maalish-Kerala
style
When I had a
bout of low grade fever a few months back, I didn’t take it seriously. No one knew
why I was running fever.
In the good
old days they called it “P.U.O”. When, in the early sixties of the last
century, my disease was diagnosed as PUO, I thought I had contracted one of
those unmentionable, incurable ailments that was only whispered or aspirated,
never put into words. Gingerly I broached the subject to the doctor. He looked
at my face frozen in fear and trepidation and laughed outright.
I was
aghast. Imagine a doctor deriving merriment from his patient’s predicament!.
“What is
funny, Doctor Saab?” I asked, a trifle petulantly.
He saw that
his response had hurt my sentiments.
“No, no. Believe me, I was just laughing at us doctors and the games we
play.”
“Games? What
games? ”
“Look here,
my dear young man. PUO is no disease. It stands for Pyrexia of Unknown Origin.
When the doctor finds a fever without understanding its origin, he writes
P.U.O. He doesn’t wish to admit his ignorance.”
The doctors
of today do not possess this brand of self-deprecatory humour. They call
everything they do not understand as ‘viral fever,’ as if it is a diagnosis.
So
officially I had viral. My platelet count went down. Whenever the thermometer
crossed 100 degrees, I had a tablet of Crocin. I drank plenty of fluids, hoping
to flush the febrile elements out of the system. After ten days, the fever subsided
and stayed down. I was declared cured, but I was told not to overstrain myself as
it might bring on a relapse.
This fever
gave me a certain weakness in the legs, which made it difficult to walk
normally. I exercised the muscles, I drank coconut water and juice, and ate apples
and pomegranates and drank Protinex with my milk, but the weakness persisted.
One day,
when we discussed the matter in a family council, my wife suggested we try out
the Kerala Massage. We did some exploration and then located the Santhagiri
Ayurveda and Siddha clinic at Saket Family Courts Complex. We had some previous
experience of the Kerala system and knew that they relied almost totally on a
set of massages by different names.
Very soon I
had embarked on a seven day course of massages on the entire body. I had three
masseurs with some bottles of oils which were heated to boiling point. Then two
of the hefty ones vigorously attacked my body as if it was an object to be
revamped and redeemed from its primordial state of weakness. First I lay on my
back and the fearsome twosome rubbed the boiling scented oils into me through
the pores of my skin. Then I was asked to lie down on my sides and then on my
belly, and they did some more of the same.
The rubbing
went on for nearly one hour. The warmth and the tactile sensation and the scent of far off herbs drawn from God’s Own
Country was so powerful a soporific that once or twice I caught myself snoring away
to glory unaware that I lay on a plastic sheet on a bed carved out of a tree-trunk,
in the ferocious grasp of muscled masseurs unknown to me.
After the
massage came the bath and then the teeka on my forehead and on the crown of the
head. Soon I had put on my clothes and been reunited with my wife who had waited
in the anteroom. We met the doctor and he prescribed medicines, elixirs, pastes
and capsules, He also suggested a diet chart which depended heavily on red poha
and such other delicacies of Kerala.
After a week
of this, I was shifted to rice potli treatment, in which after the oil massage,
my body was subjected to momentary touches of fomentation by potlis of cloth
containing boiled rice and milk.
To cut a
long story short, I undertook fourteen days of Kerala Massage. I wonder whether
there was any impact of the treatment, but certainly it burnt a hole in my
pocket. The only satisfaction was that the cost would have been four times
higher if we had gone to Kerala for the treatment. I have also noticed that wives
are duly impressed if you undergo an expensive line of treatment. It shows that
you are serious in getting rid of the problem.
No use
telling the poor things that there is no cure for old age, as it gently creeps
on one, unbidden and uninvited.
As the poet Ibne-Insha has sung,
“Qamar
bandhe hue chalne ko, yaan sab yaar baithhe hain
Bahut
aage gaye baqi, jo hain taiyar baithhe hain.”
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