Bad Mango. BAD!

HA. The irony. Mangoes are my favorite fruit, and ever since Trader Joes started selling them in small, frozen chunks, they had become one of my staples back in America. So you can well imagine why I chose Southern India as a destination. There are mangoes everywhere! Unfortunately, the mango that was once my friend, recently became the instigator of some intense misery. I hadn't eaten a single piece of fruit since arriving in India, and although chapatis and curry sauces are great (breakfast included), I had a true craving for mango. I asked one of the staff members here if I couldn't get some, and he bought me three. We shared part of one. The next day, I woke up feeling worse than I have in years. The thought of food was revolting, and the thought of moving almost as bad. Being sick in India is beyond words. It's not even, somehow, the very pain of an aching body and a queasy, rebellious stomach, it is the power failure that makes the fan in my cement block room stop working. It is the sweating of my own large body of water. It is being alone in my room, not knowing what's wrong, visions of tropical microbes marching across the ceiling. It is the heat like no other heat. By 3 in the afternoon, I still hadn't eaten a thing, but there was a mango in my room, fated little chunk of fruit. Sure that my headache had to be due to the fact that I hadn't eaten, I decided that the mango was a real blessing. Having no knife handy, I ingeniously scalped my mango with tweezers, and ate a tiny portion of it, only to find myself, moments later, leaning over my Turkish toilet. There is no hanging onto the porcelain God here.

Luckily, I have stumbled upon a group of incredibly kind people here in Tiruchuli. Three staff members drove me to the local hospital. And this is when I found out that eating mangoes during the drought season is a really, really dumb idea. I don't understand the specifics, but something about the "heat" of the mango can make people ill, and sometimes they are also treated with a dangerous chemical. I had a very nice female doctor who prescribed lots of medicines plus a meal of a water rice drink. As we jostled back down the thin paved road back from the hospital, beeping at every moving thing (the rule here is: beep at something if it moves, regardless of whether or not its on the road and whether or not it obviously knows you're coming. You can also beep at large holes in the road, if only for your own satisfaction in telling them what's up), lurching and swaying past herds of goats, piles of trash ransacked by hogs, tea houses and bikers, I was sure that I had never felt so awful in my entire life. And that's kinda India for you. One day you are in love with everything you see, and the next day, the thing you loved the most makes you as sick as a dog.

-Phoebe