Tiny Dried Roots
Upon Googling the word 'mulethi', Aseem's mind, for reasons inexplicable, led him to the bar where one of his students had invited him to attend a music performance following his finals.
Winter almost always comes by pushing the temperature down, creating a vacuum for the mindless cold virus to fill it in. Akin to the dawning of gravity and grace…Simon Weil would not have appreciated such loose metaphorical use of the word ‘vacuum.’
The ongoing pandemic, or rather the continued endemic respiratory illnesses, had turned a regular winter into a miasma for the mutants of the coronavirus to hide, making the existence of the virulent nature of the regular cough and cold all naked. People were coughing or sneezing around Aseem, making him very uncomfortable. Half of the campus was down with a cold and cough, but no mask; people were nakedly skeptical of the strength of the virus.
Assem had lost a few members of his family, and he didn’t want to leave his body so cheaply.
Aseem was careful, but not those around him. His caution and fear boiled down to nothing. He would avoid sitting around people coughing or sneezing in the dining hall, but lest he come across as rude, he stopped doing that.
One day, Shruti, a fellow faculty member, came close and told him to relax. It was not a big deal if he got infected. What was the point of all the talks about courage and fearlessness if he was so afraid of getting sick? Was he not not his body and not his mind, she said and was ready to walk away when she didn’t find Aseem welcoming. As she was about to walk away, Aseem told her that he had not gotten sick and hadn’t had to take any serious medicine in the last 23 years and would like to live that way.
Shruti coughed again and walked away, saying naughtily, “Good for you, Doctor Saab.”
That evening, Aseem came down with a body ache and fever and woke up drenched in sweat. He forced himself out of bed, showered, and went to teach. It later struck him that he had become a carrier like Shruti was. Here, his sense of duty had turned him into a virus bomb.
When Aseem saw Shruti in the hallway, she immediately sensed he was down with a cold. “On a lighter note, seeing something of me inside you feels nice. Lady Gaga…she is a genius,” and Shruti softly broke into the song.
“I want your ugly; I want your disease.”
“Shruti, that’s cruel,” Aseem could not believe that Shruti was taking his illness too lightly.
“Let me tell you, you will not die. Yama will take me away earlier than I will ever let him get close to you.”
Aseem knew when not to speak, and he chose not to pay attention to what Shruti said; after all, what did she know about him and what he had lost? Nothing.
And Aseem had no intention of sharing his life story with anyone around him. All he wanted was for the people around him to take, after more than two years of the ongoing pandemic, the symptoms of cold and cough a little more serious.
Shruti noticed his squeezed forehead and realized Aseem didn’t enjoy her lightheartedness.
“Don’t be afraid, Doc. I am here; I will take care of you,” Shruti squeezed his hand lightly while finishing her sentence. He didn’t want to fan a mind on fire-waving stories; he heard her and slowly walked away.
Wood Splinters of Tiwari Ji
After gulping a cup of coffee, he left the campus. The next day, he was back again and was not fully recovered. But he had to return a library book, and it was there that Tiwary Ji, the head librarian, was putting a bunch of wood splinters back into an envelope after handing a few to a peon.
“Give this to Shraddha, and tell her to keep it in her mouth and suck on it without chewing.”
“What are you sending for Shraddha? Am I your enemy that you didn’t feel like sharing it with me?”
“Here, Doctor Saab. Take this,” Tiwary Ji said. Soon realizing that the piece he was handing over was too big, he pulled back his hand and looked for the paper knife on his office table. As soon as he located the knife, he looked up at Aseem and repeated the instruction given to the peon for Shraddha.
Mulethi, a Tiny Wood
Aseem put the tiny piece of wood in his mouth and walked to his office. By the time he reached his office, around 100 steps away, the root had started releasing juice, and he was left with a subtle sweetness in his mouth. It tasted like something he had before, but his mind could not place it. The limbic system of his brain was now active, seeking and establishing connections. Suddenly, he felt his mind was intuiting the first place where he had tasted something similar.
Vincent Van Gogh and His Ear
After Aseem googled the word Mulethi, his mind, for reasons unfathomable, went to the bar where one of his students had invited him for his music performance; the name of the city still was not yet clear to him. It happened so many years ago.
It was immediately after the final exam of the introductory macroeconomics that I was teaching. After going to his house, Aseem took his car early in the evening and went to the bar where his student was going to perform. Almost all the patrons stood up to greet him as soon as he entered. Noticing his dismay, they all told him they knew who he was.
“So…you are the professor who moved Zandi from music to machine learning. We know all about you. Welcome to our corner!”
Aseem felt nice and congratulated himself for such recognition. Soon, he was well-ensconced in a loveseat in the small bar around a big coffee table. A woman in her late twenties walked to him and introduced herself as Zandi’s sister. Her exotic beauty, with her matted hair and fulsome body, had made it difficult not to notice her, and she had noticed him checking her out.
“Thank you for saving my brother. This street would have gobbled him up. We all feel so secure about him now. Can I kiss you on your cheek?”
As Aseem turned his face to let her kiss him on his right cheek, she firmly placed a kiss on his lips and tried to bite his lower lip. Startled by her audacity, he got up from his loveseat and was about to leave when Zandi came rushing to the table.
“Dr. Das, that’s my crazy sister. I saw what she did. Please don’t mind; she did that to annoy me. She is otherwise a sweet woman and plans to enrol in the community college for a diploma in computer programming. It is all because of you.”
What Aseem didn’t know and which became apparent later was something gift-wrapped on the table. At exactly 9:30 PM, his student’s sister opened the gift wrap and poured a whitish transparent liquid into the glass.
“Dr Das, this is the drink, Absinthe, that Van Gogh used to drink, and under its hallucinatory spell, he had cut his ear for the prostitute he used to visit. Zandi told me how passionately you had told him about that story and how you didn’t know what drink Van Gogh had. It was then that I decided to get this drink when I heard you were coming.”
After taking a shot, Aseem realized the proximity of anise to saunf (fennel) that his mom used to give after any of her home-cooked sumptuous meals.
While Jackie filled his shot glass again, Zandi turned to Aseem and looked at his sister. “Don’t expect him to cut his ear because you placed a kiss on his lips.”
Aseem remembered asking Jackie if she was all clean in terms of not having any mouth herpes.
“Even if I had that. Dr. Das, you would be fine. More than 50% of Americans carry that thing in their bodies. I see you have all the signs of spending your old days alone.”
Zandi looked annoyed, “Jackie, you should not have done that. There were many other ways to become playful; why jeopardize anyone’s health?”
“Dr. Das, I did not think of that. In my wildest dreams, I would not have imagined that a man would mind such playfulness. We, I do it all the time.”
Googling Mulethi
Many years removed from his interaction with Jackie and Zandi, Aseem felt a similar interaction with Shruti had pulled those memories into the present. Intrigued and in awe with the workings of the human mind, Aseem googled the word “Mulethi.”
After an online search, the first image on the top of the webpage confirmed that Tiwary Ji had given him mulethi.
Aseem read more about this root and discovered that the liquorice candy, one of his colleagues would always share with him after he published his research papers, was made of the same root.
The use of mulethi had skyrocketed in India during the pandemic, and a newspaper even reported a man dying of overeating liquorice. The next time Aseem saw Shruti, he asked her about Mulethi.
“Doc, you are going all desi. Yes, mulethi is quite effective for sore throat and many skin diseases. I know why you look different over the last few days.” Shruti extended her hand and tried to touch his cheek, and again, for Aseem, it was like a deja vu moment.
“Relax, we are in the dining hall, and this is not America. I don’t want people here to start gossiping about us,” Assem blurted, a little embarrassed.
“Doctor Saab, no ruggedness of American Individual left in you just in 18 months. All the paani (sheen) has drooled down from your face. This is no longer the India when you were here; India has modernized. I know people having live-in relationships; no one cares.”
Aseem requested Shruti to maintain some maryada, but he regretted not letting her touch him while leaving her behind.
The Indian Connection
When Aseem saw Shruti again, she had almost scrapped so much information online that she had turned encyclopedic about mulethi.
Most likely, Europeans found widespread medicinal use of mulethi in India, took the plant away, possibly to Denmark, and used the extract in any n-number of medicines they had been selling to the world.
Looking visibly annoyed, Shruti was inconsolable.
“What would they have lost by acknowledging that they learned about the plant and its roots from India or other countries?”
“People must have had reasons not to divulge such connections,” fearing a gale of negativity building around him, Tiwari Ji tried to placate Shruti.
“Yes, they must have had reasons. Don’t we see animals covering their poop so as not to let other animals know their whereabouts?”
Aseem told Shruti not to get so irritated; the new technology would finally make all these connections obvious. No one can suppress the truth. Satyamev Jayate—Truth Will Prevail.
Shruti had no patience for such escapist talk. She was empathetic that the likes of Aseem were not helping humanity by their obsequiousness.
“What are you guys afraid of?”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“The likes of you, always ready to pander to the West.”
Aseem felt somewhat ambushed by her aggression, and to calm her down, he extended his hand and squeezed her hand. Getting the cue, Shruti smiled and didn’t say anything.
Seeing her getting calmed, Aseem asked if she was going to the dining hall for coffee, and then they walked together.
“To tell the truth, Shruti. I feel bad for Europeans for erasing so much of our collective histories for their myopic material gains.”
“You feel sad. I don’t. Please don’t get me started. Let’s go and have some mulethi tea. I asked the cafeteria to boil some mulethi for us.”
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The Commodification of the Sacred
[….TO BE CONTINUED]
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Disclaimer: Nothing I have written here is set in stone. I am putting these ideas to start a conversation and bring people to discuss and debate the issues captured here. Give me feedback, and it will help me learn. I will keep updating this article.