Even just being here for a few weeks affords such a privileged insight into people’s lives and their ways of being. Particularly in terms of health, as that’s what I tend to be most attuned to.
There’s a huge reliance on “medicine” here and a really interesting synergy between indigenous explanatory models for disease and an overwhelming faith in allopathic treatment, usually in the form of a pill. The ayurvedic basis of explanations for illness is very perceptible – lots of people are ill at the moment and they attribute it to Mussoorie’s erratic climate and the constant fluctuation between heat and cold, wet and dry.
According to Tasleem, his sore throat was likely caused by the sour mango he ate the night before his symptoms began. People rarely stress a single symptom, though, but rather the interconnection of several. “Bukhar” (fever) and “body ache/pain” are high profile symptoms that get mentioned a lot. Although Habib said that if you go to the doctor with a fever and other symptoms, the doctor will explain that the accompanying aches and pains are as a result of the fever which is the main illness to be treated. He also took some almonds from me one breaktime because they help his body to generate heat.
Kaushal and Aasha have both been unwell with colds and fevers. Finances will only stretch to a very short term cause of allopathic drugs, so Kaushal supplements them with “ghar ke dawai (I think)” (home remedies). For Aasha, Kaushal heated finely chopped garlic in some oil and massaged it into Aasha’s chest and back. She also warmed a paan leaf in the oil and placed it against Aasha’s ribs under her clothes before she slept as a means of drawing out the fever. I wonder if Kaushal would still employ these methods were she financially secure enough to afford allopathic medicine whenever deemed necessary. I’ll try and muster the Hindi to ask her.
The most intriguing thing for me though was Kaushal describing a year-long period of serious illness she suffered when her kids were small. She told me about the huge amount of pressure she was put under by her husband’s family – particularly by her mother-in-law, a situation which persists years later. She had a toddler and a baby yet was expected to prepare food for the entire extended family on a daily basis, as well as undertaking whatever paid work she could find outside the home. After several months of this routine, she explained, she became weaker and weaker until eventually “[her] blood finished” (which I can’t remember how to reproduce in Hindi, but it involves “khoon” and “khatam” – “mera khoon khatam ho gaya” ?)
She didn’t elaborate much on the symptoms, but she did say that her brother had to give her a bottle of blood and that she slowly recovered. Amazing. Her blood finished. I’m so curious to know what that means for Kaushal. And I’m so inspired to witness first hand examples of culturally influenced experiences of health and disease. Three years of anthropology readings brought to life.
And the role of language in the framing, understanding and expression of subjective experience couldn’t be more clear. In English, “my blood finished” is grammatically nonsensical and conceptually alien. But in Hindi, in Mussoorie, in the life of my friend Kaushal, it is a very real and traumatic phenomenon that deprived her of her health for months on end.
We’re endlessly fascinating, we humans.
Partial Truths 