I’m not a Bengali. But having lived among GOP – God’s Own People – all my life, I’ve developed – through osmosis – what one might call some ‘Bengalinesses’. Not the cliche monkey cap, or language pride – and certainly not the delusion that I know everything better than anyone else who knows everything. No.
But ‘The Stomach’ has been inescapable. So, when winter arrives and Kolkata crams a year’s worth of events and revelry into the hinge weeks around New Year, I had good reason to wish for the parcel to arrive soon-like the proverbial cavalry relieving a critically besieged fort.
The package arrived one evening, its L-shaped silhouette making it look as though the couriers had dropped off an AR-15 assault weapon.
Upon unwrapping, the slightly less-threatening components revealed themselves. There was a long box and a small square carton. Inside the long box were 14 small, Yakult-sized plastic bottles. The carton contained tubes of powder. To paraphrase the ad: Clean guts make a happy butt! This little laboratory was designed to cleanse me over 14 days, the bottles containing something called ‘prebiotic,’ and the powder aiming to seed my alimentary labyrinth with ‘good bacteria,’ a.k.a. probiotic.I pieced this together with help from the internet – and yes, those ads that had already relieved me of a couple of thousand hard-earned INRs. Nowhere on the boxes was there a pamphlet explaining how to consume the contents.
A couple of days later, I found instructions printed in discreetly small type on the side of the box. The probiotic tubes were an extra feature. But they hadn’t sent 14 to match the bottles-only 10. Presumably, they were following the principles of striptease: leave them wanting more.
The instructions said to knock back a bottle of ‘Happy Butt’ [name changed] every morning on an empty stomach. The same applied to the ‘Pro-Butt’ powder: tap it into your mouth on an empty stomach. However, none of the instructions joined the necessary dots.
If you took the powder after the liquid, how long should the gap be? Could the powder be taken later in the day, still on an empty stomach? Was the powder meant to be taken daily, or every four days? The only promise was a perky posterior – inside and out – after two weeks of this so-called ‘cleanse’.
Before ingesting the liquid, I examined the ant-sized font listing the ingredients. These included purified water, some fructo-oligarch, one souring agent common in South Indian cooking, the usual suspect triphala – literally ‘three fruits’ comprising amla a.k.a. Indian gooseberry, bibhitaki a.k.a. beleric, and haritaki a.k.a. myrobalan – debittered neem flower extract, and other kitchen spice extracts. Plus, an unspecified preservative.
Drinking it, the primary taste was reminiscent of Kerala’s ayurvedic medicines – watered down and infused with industrial orange flavour. As the liquid settled in my system, it left a strangely unpleasant taste in my mouth, and a growing awareness of the hard, non-biodegradable plastic bottle in my hand. I realised there were 13 more of these ready to pollute the city’s landfill. As my stomach began to churn, I looked up instructions for uninstalling Instagram from all my devices.
