There are people in this world with different degrees of tolerance to nausea. You have people who are ever ready to vomit at the slightest hint of a mal-odour anywhere in the vicinity while others do it when they are forced to use stinking toilets. Few over sensitive humans find it difficult to swallow even pea sized capsules or tablets and, more often than not, spew the contents no sooner than they put them very hesitantly at the back of their tongue.
During my younger days the dentist, a close family friend, of my mother had a harrowing time when he undertook the task of making her a denture when her teeth bid her good bye. Whenever the doctor put his gloved fingers in her mouth for making a mold to take the shape and size of her jaw, she emptied her entire gut content on the poor fellow who got drenched in her vomit repeatedly. How she managed to do it umpteen number of times in one sitting remained a mystery. Probably the doctor’s insistence to make my mother drink water after each bout, to prevent dehydration, added to his woes.
There are simple folks who are all sunny and beaming from ear to ear till they start a journey. Many of them cannot withstand the diesel fumes of vehicles while others have their stomachs churning when the road is rough. I recall my forest training days when we travelled nearly three hundred kilometers daily by Garhwal Vikas Mandal tourist buses for thirty days at a stretch. The study tours made life miserable for many of my batch mates. The poor souls used to take all precautions. They skipped their breakfast and popped many anti- vomiting pills before the journey to avoid the filthy mess they would otherwise create, especially on hill roads. Fortunately, I had a stronger constitution and I used to top up myself with heavy breakfast, inviting envious looks, just as the drivers filled the tanks of their vehicles with fuel for the day’s travel.
Even travel hardy people tremble at the mere suggestion of a ship journey. I have seen many enthusiasts boarding ship cruises for the first time with a lot of excitement that petered out as soon as they got buffeted by the waves making them wish that their ordeal got over as early as possible. The co-passengers on a ship journey may sympathize with a sea sick fellow traveler because they can maintain a safe distance from him on the deck. This privilege is not available to somebody who is sitting and cringing next to a person who gets sick on a flight and is vomiting in the bag, helpfully provided by the air hostess.
Expounding on the puke saga, I am also aware of the people who have a tendency to spill when they are nervous on any account. Young medical students belch on sighting blood or mutilated bodies long before they become accustomed to their professional hazards. It could be that the endocrine system is the culprit for shaking the bellies loose and making people retch whenever things are out of control. I wonder if it could be just a thing like mind over matter. How else do you explain a hard core vegetarian relishing a non- vegetarian dish unknowingly till he is told that he is actually eating meat and that makes him buck violently in an instant? Most likely he would vomit even if he was actually eating a vegetarian dish but was misinformed that it was a non-veg item.
According to Natyashastra, ‘Bhibhatsa rasa’ is one of the nine rasas and it evokes disgust. In the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, the audience can feel the disgust more strongly on watching the screen than that what is described by the author, Stephen King, when dwelling in the following passage on the ordeal of the protagonist, Andy Duffresne, when he swims through the sewage while escaping from the prison: ‘Five hundred yards. The length of five football fields. Just shy of a mile. He crawled that distance, maybe with one of those small Penlites in his hand, maybe with nothing but a couple of books of matches. He crawled through foulness that I either can’t imagine or don’t want to imagine. Maybe the rats scattered in front of him, or maybe they went for him the way such animals sometimes will when they’ve had a chance to grow bold in the dark. He must have had just enough clearance at the shoulders to keep moving, and he probably had to shove himself through the places where the lengths of pipe were joined.’ (Morgan Freeman who acted as a fellow prison mate in the movie gave voice to this passage after Andy's escape.)
However, against the mild description cited above, I remember reading ‘The City of Joy’ by Dominique Lapierre that has many passages bringing out the filthy details about the slum of Kolkata in a more powerful language . Some of those passages that make one’s flesh creep in disgust are reproduced below:
a) What the priest discovered was not so much a leper colony as a kind of ossuary. Were those skeletons consumed with gangrene, whose closed eyes were covered with white mushrooms, really human beings? Those breathing corpses whose cracked skin oozed out a yellowish liquid. Even so the sight was nothing compared to the stench. ‘I had never smelled anything like it- a mixture of decay, alcohol and incense.’
b) It was at this juncture that the municipal workers responsible for emptying the latrines and cleaning the manure from cattle sheds chose to strike. In a few days the slum was submerged beneath a lake of excrement. Blocked by mountains of dung from the cattle sheds, the open drains overflowed, spilling out a blackish, stinking stream. Into the torrid, static air, there soon rose an intolerable stench, borne upward on the smoke of chulas. To top it all, the month of May ended with a terrible pre-monsoon storm, during which the level of the drains and latrines rose by almost two feet in one night. The corpses of dogs, rats, scorpions and thousands of cockroaches began to float around in the foul sludge. People even saw several goats and a buffalo drifting through the alleyways with bellies inflated like balloons. Naturally the floodwater invaded most of the hovels, transforming them into cesspools.
c) Between the thighs of the leper woman he had just discovered the tip of a small blood-covered skull. The baby was wedged halfway out of the uterus. Its mother could not manage to push it out. Possibly it was dead already.
d) A few moments later they were both wading up to the middle of their thighs in slime. Bandona proceeded with caution, sounding the ground beneath with a stick because some of the open sewers actually cut across the alley. Every now and then she would stop to avoid the corpse of a dog or a rat, or to prevent Max from being splashed by the reckless floundering of children who were laughing and swimming about in the putrid flood-water. Just before he got back to her hovel, however, he suddenly felt the ground give way beneath his feet. A blackish stream rushed in to his mouth; then his nostrils, ears and eyes were submerged beneath the gurgling filth. He struggled against it but the more he floundered, the more he was sucked towards the bottom of the cesspool. This time, in this unholy slime, he was paralyzed: the density and consistency of the liquid made his attempts to surface ineffective.
Let me end with what I wish I could call, ironically, an icing on the cake in terms of causing extreme revulsion. One day I overheard a conversation between two students at a dinner table in the hostel mess in IIT. They were discussing as to what could be the most obnoxious thing to discuss while eating food - such quixotic talks were only possible in those engineering days. One student took the challenge seriously by recounting a small anecdote while he calmly gulped the contents from his own plate. According to his story two shipwreck survivors were marooned on an island and had nothing to eat for days- not even fish or any other sea food. They were starving to death and would not be able to survive another day if they did not eat immediately. As luck would have it, they found a bloated carcass of a dog floating near the shore. One survivor dragged the corpse out of water and started eating it raw though the foul smelling flesh was badly decayed. As he munched the soggy meat the swollen maggots clinging to it dropped to the ground. After few mouthfuls he looked questioningly at his companion, who just watched him silently, as to why he was not partaking the unconventional meal. The other survivor explained patiently, “I know that you are gorging yourself after long starvation. You are bound to vomit once your stomach is full. I will then slurp your vomit because it will have pre-digested remnants.”
I am sure that not many of the readers will have the strength to stomach this anecdote in the best of situations- forget the dining table! As for myself, I had extended my hand for another helping of the insipid dish of the hostel food in front of me on the table.
Footnotes
1) The Shawshank Redemption movie of 1994 was nominated in seven categories for Academy awards but won none! According to different surveys it is considered as one of the most loved films. In 2015, the US Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
2) ‘The City of Joy’ is a famous novel partly based on the work of Mother Teressa in Kolkata. The French author, Dominique Lapierre, won Christopher award for his book. He had written other famous books – ‘Freedom at Midnight’, ‘Is Paris burning?’, ‘O Jerusalem!’ and ‘The Fifth Horseman’. He was awarded Padma Bhushan in 2008. He died in December 2022 at the age of 91 years.
In 1992 a movie was also made on the novel that cast Ompuri, Shabana Azmi and many foreign actors.
Hard facts of life rather extremely tough situations which certain people are bound to go. We are blessed people.
You wrote on such a difficult topic with equal fun which made us enjoy 'this' too!!!
Way to go, Sir :)