Getting sick. One of the larger fears of would-be-travelers to India. Up until mid-March I would have said that these fears are ungrounded; that the food of India kept me healthier than food in America. But that all came to a screeching halt at a very bad moment: while living on a houseboat.

I had spent two months in India, weaving north from Bombay all the way to Dharamsala, trying new foods, drinking any chai that was offered to me, and eating sketchy meats from glorified bus stops. I had been drinking bottled or boiled water the whole time, but had grown tired of the tedium as well as the privileged status it seemed to place me in. So I decided to toss the paranoiac advice aside and drink the water that was so kindly offered to me in a plastic jug. In two days, I would regret it.

What happened, from the symptoms analysis I can gather, might have been a case of giardia. Whatever it was, my ambitions extended about as far as my arms, and an overachievement was rising up and getting to the end of the bed. This lasted, more or less, for two days and a half. It didn't help that the only available food, fuel for recovery, was ridiculously salty and tasted, whether in fact or in imagination, like fertilizer-water. The parasite or whatever it was that coursed through my body wasn't nearly so scary because it chewed at my muscles, but because it chewed into my brain and transformed my entire personality and thoughts.

I became understandably angry at next door's hammering renovations (10 hours a day). I was understandably angry at the approach of the Distant Mass Moaning sound, a harbinger of the inevitable wails that megaphoned out of the minarets five times a day. But I was inexplicably also angry at the screeches of falcons overhead (or were they vultures?) I was inexplicably angry at the furniture around me, the rugs around me that reminded me of Indian con artists, the broken English of the owners of my (death?) bed, even the tip of my nose for hurting so damn much. Altogether, life was so terrible I envied the stomachless brainless mannequin of a superficial department store.

I could only escape through sleep, but when sleep wouldn't come I was angrily bored. My attention span would sustain only a few minutes before consuming itself in some irritability. I could only alleviate this by finding a thirty-year old People's Almanac, where, amongst the soundtrack of an irregular hammering, I passed my pained boredom by learning small digestible morsels of history, such as the inception of graffiti, the etymology of "sandwich", famous utopian experiments, and American Revolutionary spies. Then I could happily rip the pages out (for a very practical purpose) and ensure that no one would ever want to read those words again. I hated the fact that I was a bloated carcass of petty trivia. I hated myself. I hated air. Thrice have I been hit by flus/food poisonings this year, but this was the most mentally insidious and aching sickness I have ever had.

I realize Dave Matthews is not a prophet, nor is he talented in any fashion. But if there was a soundtrack to those days, it was: Don't Drink the Water.

The evening of the third day, I could stumble down the hallway bumping into things and cursing and wishing I could muffle my mind for all of its useless thoughts and whinings. But slowly I managed to improve to the point of eating about one ball of rice and a piece of fruit... per day, for a week. Well, ok, I'm embellishing; towards the end of the week, I could eat: two pieces of fruit. My India experience, strangely and accidentally, became an ascetic experiment. And, awkwardly enough, not without fruit.

The Accidental Experiment

I was barely eating. My body barely had any fuel. The first few days I could only think childish thoughts. And then, a strange thing happened. I slowly increased my diet by one fruit more, or a small piece of potato or cauliflower, and each laughably small addition came with a remarkable change. All of my usual twitchy habits of motion were dulled into a slow steadiness not unlike an old but determined man. I was incredibly weak, hunching everywhere and poorly communicative to those around me. But, for the two days of transition back to health, if I had that extra half potato, I stayed up all night with a fervency of mental patchworks. And the next day, on hardly any sleep, had some of the most creative thoughts of the year. Even more incredible, this wasn't just a one day alteration. Imagine that, half a potato, the same potato you've been eating for years, being the source of an expanded consciousness!

What happened? I'm still trying to reason this out myself. The only thing that seems to make sense is that there was some physical set of atoms that were responsible for the usual track of my thoughts and reasonings, and that the parasite mutilated them, cut them into newly efficient enzymes, diasporically rearranged them... whatever happened physically, when my body reset and used very basic blocks to rebuild itself (um.. potatoes, bananas, and rice?) that it rebuilt new avenues of thought that, three weeks later, feel more streamlined than my pre-sickness methods. My knowledge is still there, but it presents itself differently to this day and I cannot say exactly in what way but... is it possible?... Shiva destroyed the mental blocks and Vishnu preserved everything that mattered? A parasite turned me into a more efficient thinker?

The only thing I can assuredly say is that, however the human body works, I am newly awed, and there actually are, spiritual or otherwise, powerful enlightenments that come from starvation and poisioning, maybe even from slowly dying.

Yikes, this is the point where I flee from my own philosophical logic. So! Who wants to learn about resistentialism!?

P.S. Please keep in mind this was the state of my mind when I composed the skeleton for this next subsequent journal entry.