This is a clip from my childhood home in Punjab. Every evening, there would be loud, ceaseless and high-speed chatter in a dentist neighbour’s home lasting a couple of hours. I hadn’t yet touched my teens, but my siblings and I understood that the din was not normal. We heard our parents discuss the source of the maddening noise: the sundowners that the 50-year-old dentist and his wife had. Their Peshawari Punjabi accent was already hard to bear; post-drinks, it was sheer torture. In snatches, my mother came to know of the neighbours’ failing health.
Not all the vinegar-soaked onions and other ‘good’ food they consumed with the liquor could safeguard against its ill effects. The wife developed liver problems. Her doctor advised her to eat a full papaya every morning on an empty stomach and nothing for an hour after that. She did that for 40 days on end. The liver healed. My mother did not know the medicines she had, but was convinced that it was mainly the papaya that cured the woman. This was 50 years ago when all fruits were truly wondrous foods, filled with curing and nourishing properties.
Chemical manures, especially in kitchen gardens, were a far cry. If the fruits, especially papaya, mango and banana, were plucked prematurely, they were kept in special holes made in the garden ground or wrapped in newspapers. I remember having found it magical to unfold the wrapper and see a green fruit turn yellow.
Seventeen years ago, I met a yogi, who advised me against eating sugar when I complained about the ache in my knee joints. He himself was merrily popping gur rewaris (made out of jaggery and sesame seeds) and grinding them with his original teeth at 98. I told him, I was already cautious against sugar. “Stop eating fruits, then.” I found it odd and told him that I had a lot of fruits because I believed in their nutritious power. “What about the chemicals you are consuming that are injected into almost ripe fruits to enlarge and sweeten them?” Off and on, I had read reports about such contamination and had been buying fruits at chosen places, but nobody can be too careful.
Nine years ago, a massage woman, whose 56 years had not dented her energy for her strenuous livelihood, told me that she actually saw green brinjals turn big overnight by the injections they were given the previous evening. When I probed her further and expressed interest in doing a story on it, provided she could lead me to the place, she said she could not afford the trouble it would bring her. “After all, I live among the murderers,” she said. Unwittingly, the woman hit the nail on the head. There is no word that describes more aptly those who are poisoning our fruits and getting away with it.
The three stories I heard over the last five decades have a message about the almost irreversible decline in our systems. Our awareness, activism, financial and educational status are worth nothing if the unaccountable and unbridled market forces can get away by poisoning us wilfully and systematically. When is the last time we heard about such murderers being brought to justice? When did we last hear an outcry in parliament over this? When was the last time we heard an NGO take up the cudgels on an issue that involves our fundamental right to life? After all, each one of us, across the social, political and economic boundaries is being served poison. Each one of us needs to raise a stink over it for our own sake.
It is rather disturbing to know that the highly educated researchers in India are still conducting tests on animals, injecting them with mega doses of the Arjun tree bark powder or its alcoholic extract to see if they are enough to cause death by toxicity. Compare it to the knowledge that an unlettered tribal in Odisha’s Malkangiri district has. He knows the value of the juice of fresh Arjun bark—and exactly how much to have–to treat acidity, and a concoction made out of the bark to treat bleeding gums and piles.
If there is one education system that needs to be re-introduced to Indians, it is the medicinal formulae of Rishi Charak and Rishi Vagbhat, to name just two of the numerous medical geniuses of the yore. Those who are practicing these ancient cures are much better placed than all of us in the towns and cities of India because they are not trapped in the systems created by the market forces. It is the criminal market forces that are responsible for injecting the papayas and watermelons, it is they who wax and polish the apples to improve their shelf life and it is they who are responsible for turning health foods into hazards.
What triggered me to write this piece out of the blue? The answer is: the soft and unexpected sound of the shining black and beautiful seeds on the plate, as I sliced a lovely- looking, organic papaya in my kitchen. Most papayas being grown today are the seedless variety, which are also injected to artificially ripen them. If I did not know of an organic choice, I would be having the poisonous one commonly available. There is a limit to one’s tolerance of those who are literally killing us slowly.
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