The Dreaded Oonga Boonga

(photo left: giardia intestinalis)

I have giardia. And I am currently sponsoring a genocide within my body. The poor bastards.

There are various stages to being sick in India. First is the physical illness, which manifests slowly and stealthily. Rumblings in the stomach that wake you up nights, a growing inability to keep down what you take in, and then the inability to eat altogether. The process takes a few days usually, from the infant-prophetic stage of realizing that you will soon be ill, to being fully and genuinely ill. Then a mixture of stoicism and lethargy sets in: this will pass in a day or so ... I'll just eat rice and bananas and sleep it off. But I've been sleeping for the better part of three days, and I can't bear the thought of another banana.

In the next stage, one turns to one's fellow travelers for a group diagnosis and general complaint session. Being unwell is so common that all travelers have the experience, the ability and the utter frankness to discuss the most intimate details of one's intestinal happenings. I had such a pow wow this morning, and the diagnosis: get thee to a doctor.

From the village of Bhagsu, it is a ten minute hike downhill, a five minute rikshaw into McLeod Ganj, and another twenty minutes via rikshaw down to the Dharamsala clinic. And the traffic. Not quite traffic in the traditional sense. Traffic here involves roads that were not built wide enough for two large cars to pass each other safely. When an impasse occurs, the beta vehicle is forced to back up (as are all vehicles behind the beta as well) until there is room enough for the alpha vehicle to squeeze by, outer wheels offroad and spraying mud and stones. The situation is compounded by the fact that this town is built on a hill, and the roads by nature snake around the hills curves in hairpin turns.

Sometimes the rikshaw merely idles while two cars decide by horn honking who is the alpha vehicle and who is the beta. Idling in the back of a rikshaw spewing unfiltered diesel smoke usually isn't pleasant under any circumstance, let alone when one's stomach is already turned inside out and spontaneous vomiting is a distinct possibility. It takes a while to make the decision to go the clinic because going to the clinic is a pain in the ass.

Finally, of course, one arrives at the clinic and registers at the desk. About forty other people in various states of physical distress line the benches - sneezing everywhere, looking faint, mothers clutching crying chilldren, monks clutching x-rays, foreigners green and weak as myself with the familiar exhaustion of dystentery and dehydration in their eyes, Indians wrapped in layers of fabric as is their wont, carefully hiding whatever sickness they suffer. And the grim knowledge that I am number 42, and they are still calling the twenties. I hear that if your number is not called before noon and your tests not submitted, you must wait until the following day for your diagnosis and prescription - which involves making the same trip from cozy bed and clean loo to endless rikshaw and clinic once again.

Pharmaceuticals in India are all over the counter, so I seriously consider finding someone with my same symptoms and simply purchasing a matching course of antibiotica on my own. In the end, however, I decide to leave it to the professionals, just in case I have actually managed to catch oonga boonga disease, or Japanese encephylitis, alien invasion, cholera or some other such miserable thing.

After two hours my number is called, and I crawl into the office and deliver my symptoms. I was given the world's tinest vial in which to produce a sample of my wares (with a toothpick as well - what the hell was I supposed to do with that?) and ushered away with a warning that the laboratory (or labratory, as the sign read) would close in five minutes. There were two western interns in the office, and they said to me: try to avoid mangoes, tea and coffees, soups and salads. I could tell they hadn't been in India very long. Their advice is akin to telling someone in Paris to avoid baguettes and brie, espresso, cigarettes and melons and pastries.

Two hours later I return to the clinic for the verdict: giardia. Solution: genocide. Feeling: better, actually.