I am learning, or re-learning, how to eat.

Like everybody else my mother taught me how to eat. I remember seeing an old photo, now lost, where I am eating a bowl of rice as a baby. Under the watchful eye of a young woman, my mother in her late twenties. I am using my hand and getting some rice in my mouth and spilling the rest on the table and on my clothes. She looks on with indulgent delight.
 
What is most eye-catching is the expression on the baby’s face. It expresses sheer delight. It seems to say, “I am eating the most wonderful thing on earth. And I am having immense fun eating it.” The baby has its eyes solely on the rice. It is totally wrapped up in the business of getting the rice in its mouth. The only thing on its mind is enjoying what it is eating.
 
That is precisely the way I don’t eat now. I eat now, like everybody else I know, as if I am performing a chore. Something I have to do. Or something I need to do. So, I eat fast. Before I have finished a mouthful, I shovel another mouthful. Before I have fully chewed a morsel, I swallow to make place for the next morsel. On the occasions that I eat something I really love, I also do what others do. I eat faster.

I am told that there are excellent biological reasons for eating slowly and chewing thoroughly, and my mother always cited her three brothers who were doctors when asking us to be mindful of what was on our plate. As a loving son, I listened to her quietly; as a disobedient youth, I disregarded her counsel fully. I don’t even have to know the scientific reason to realize that, since we don’t have teeth in our stomachs, we need to take time to chew our food so that our body can absorb its benefit.
 
When I attended a Buddhist retreat in Virginia, the dinner hall amazed me. It was preternaturally quiet, most people eating in silence. The food was healthy and modest, and the monks were eating it leisurely and respectfully, heedful of what they were taking in. It was a stark contrast to the noisy, rambunctious scene of the average restaurant, which often takes on the semblance of a brassy pagan festival of Roman times.

​This came back to me recently when I went on a fast for a week. I ate no food and drank only water. I disregarded the advice of well-meaning friends who suggested I should be under medical supervision and emend the fast with juice or fruit. They feared I would feel weak and light-headed. I did nothing of the sort and felt wonderful, doing all the things I normally do. I drove, walked, exercised. Instead of being miserable, I made some interesting discoveries.
 
I was surprised to discover how little was the hunger pang I felt. I realized that I eat more from habit than from need. My body certainly does not need all that I am stuffing into it. It may be a great idea to stop and give the body a chance to tell you it needs sustenance.
 
Instead of feeling feeble or depleted, my body functioned superbly. Maybe it enjoyed the relief from its digestive duties. I did not have any inkling of weakness. On the contrary, I felt a certain keenness of mind, some ease of focus, an easier slide into a meditative frame.
 
Since I prepare my own food, I relished the holiday from buying, cooking, baking and washing. Including the time for eating, I felt I had an extra length of time gifted to me. My reading improved and my writing increased.
 
The biggest windfall was that I learned or re-learned how to eat. After the fast, I went to eat some cherries. They were red and luscious, and I put a bunch in my mouth. I realized my mistake immediately: I was gobbling, not eating, not really tasting the cherries. I started putting them in my mouth slowly, one by one, letting one dissolve completely before I tried the next. I tasted each one, discretely and pointedly. They were unspeakably delicious.
 
Just as my mother would have fed me.

Raj called to say he would see me on Saturday.
 
He lived in New Delhi but was visiting his daughter in Boston and planned to come to Washington for a tour.
 
He arrived in the Dulles Airport and I picked him up from the airport lounge, since I lived close by. We spent a leisurely morning over coffee and croissant.
 
Raj was in college with me in Kolkata. He was a short, quiet person, usually by himself. I saw him in the students’ lounge, mulling something on a chess board, and asked if I could join him for a match. We played two or three times. He sat with a fiercely resolute look and beat me easily each time. When I complimented him on his skill, he brushed it aside, saying he had got it from his brother, who was the true master.
 
We lived in a large apartment close to the college and my parents encouraged me to bring friends to home. Possibly they wanted to know what kind of friends I was spending time with. I invited both Raj and his brother. When they came, Raj was his usual reticent self, but his brother spoke a lot, mostly about chess, both to mother, serving tea, and me. But we both liked Raj more, his diffident personality and quiet way of acknowledging hospitality.

Raj took an inordinate interest in my father’s library. That pleased me, because books were an important part of my life. Unlike many of my friends, who read books only because they had to or were told to, I read books for fun. They represented a world of imagination and adventure.
 
Raj and I found a wide area of discussion. We talked about books we had read, endlessly and with enthusiasm. In fact, when he mentioned a book he was reading, I started reading the same book so that we could discuss it in depth. It turned out to be a very good idea, for I discovered that Raj had a very different perspective from mine. For instance, when we both undertook to read The Brothers Karamazov, my interest focused on the fiery Dmitri and the gentle Alexei, the eldest and youngest brothers, where Raj obsessed about Ivan and his struggle to reconcile unjust suffering with a benign God. Later, we both read Nabokov’s classic Lolita, and while I was quite swept by Humbert’s lust for a nymphet, Raj wondered a lot about Dolores’s reaction and Quilty’s quick, crazy intervention.
 
I felt I learned quite a bit from Raj, because I realized that literature, like life, can be seen from different angles. All the angles may not all be equally valid, but they tell us how rich the tapestry of life is.

​We would take long walks together, in Kolkata’s serpentine streets, avoiding vendors for whose wares none of us had money, rapt in our talk about imagined people, their joys and miseries, and the fanciful events that intertwined their lives. We talked so earnestly that people overhearing us might believe that we were discussing real people who made a great difference in our lives. In a sense, it made a great difference in our life indeed, for we were not only gaining an insight into great literature, we were also exploring, through each other’s eyes, life itself.
 
I so loved and cherished our walks that I often came back home and told mother of our chat and what new things I had discovered. When Raj came next to our home, mother would narrate my pleasure of discovery while serving him tea and biscuits, and Raj endeared himself by invariably saying modestly that he had only read an interesting book and briefly commented on it. I was the person that had gleaned the real message of the book. That was Raj’s style, an easy modesty coupled with a pleasant way of passing the credit to me.
 
After college our paths diverged, for he went to another town. Occasionally we talked on the phone, before I went abroad and became enmeshed in overseas travel.
 
When I went to pick him up at the airport, we had not met for decades.
 
We had some difficulty identifying each other but we gladly embraced, and I took him home. I felt genuinely thrilled to have been discovered by an old friend, who had traveled long to see me. 

I was happy to see him trim and sprightly, looking younger than his age. He spoke of his happiness to see his daughter and his admiration for the charm of Boston. He had clearly retained an active and receptive mind, however quiet his demeanor. His placidity was almost reassuring, for it meant that in some fundamental way he had retained something of his old self. I poured some tea for us both. Our conversation was warm and hearty.
 
Then, at last, after we had gone over our recent history, talked about our families and exchanged news of old friends, I came to what had initially bound us together. I had been looking forward to hearing what he has been reading and what new ideas he could surprise me with.
 
I asked, “Raj, you were such avid reader. Always exploring new authors and ideas. Tell me, what have you been reading recently?”
 
Came the stunning reply, “I just read the day’s newspaper. I don’t have the time for books.”
 
Clearly, people do change.

We don’t want to talk about our bodies. Except that we want to talk about our bodies.
 
We were brainwashed as children not to talk about our bodies. It was uncouth and vulgar to do so. We did not even have words for our private parts. I remember the shocked silence in Washington’s National Theater, when Eve Ensler, standing downstage center in her famous play, listed thirty names of the female genitalia. I thought the prim lady next to me in the box would faint. Eve went on to say that her mother would instead use the pronoun ‘it.’ That struck a chord for me, for in our very articulate family, even in a medical emergency, we spoke of a private part as ‘it.’

​When I joined school, we not only competed on how far we could make our urinary stream go, we also learned the choicest names for the unmentionable parts of our body. A classmate had overheard his uncle saying something endearing to his wife or a brash cousin sharing a bawdy joke with his friends, and he would proudly share his acquisition with us. Unknown to our teachers, so went, in the back benches or during the recess, our first lesson in the human anatomy.
 
That is where our education stopped, despite the occasional purple passage we would find in some novel, for we had no real or visual understanding. My friends, who are primary-care doctors, tell me that some young, eager couples come to them with problems that are both sad and hilarious, and spring only from abysmal ignorance of male and female bodies.
 
Among my school friends, I emerged as a hero, for I had found, in my father’s library, secreted behind Shakespeare and Tolstoy, volumes of Havelock Ellis and Marie Stopes. They were not easy reading, but I persevered, and finally figured out what Lady Chatterley was really doing with her robust gardener. I now drew diagrams that I had seen in the Stopes volume and stunned my classmates with my expertise.
 
Of course, it was nothing of the kind. 
 
I understood very little of the physical aspects of coupling. Worse, I understood nothing of its emotional aspects. Surely, I was not unique in my appalling ignorance. People who go through a process called education often get to know little of what is going to affect their life so much.
 
Yet it was not for want of interest. We were dying of curiosity. We wanted to know why adults always talked about some things in whispers and tried so hard to keep us out of hearing. We were eager to know what certain words and events in the newspapers meant, especially as the adults clearly reveled in talking about those. We simply wanted to know. But nobody told us anything worth knowing.
 
Trying to learn about our bodies from Havelock Ellis and Marie Stopes is like trying to learn language by scanning Facebook and to learn music from a couple of pop albums. You can go away, as I am sure I did, with a lot of wrong assumptions and suppositions. Growing up, I did not encounter Japanese or Korean women, and I nurtured the silly notion that a woman with almond eyes or a button nose simply could not be pretty. I was lucky to sit in a seminar next to a stunning French-Chinese girl and experienced a severe case of ‘cognitive dissonance,’ a conflict between my idea and an undeniable reality. I was young, and my hormones quickly told me the truth. Swiftly, I shed my naive assumption.

More serious is that many of us develop a poor notion of our bodies. My friends and I compared ourselves with movie stars and, predictably, came up short. We were not tall or muscular enough, nor did we have the right features or complexion. It did not help me that I had a friend who actually entered films and became a matinee idol, cavorting with pretty heroines. I am told that it is much worse for women, for they are matched against tougher standards. Like we learn the parts of speech in a language class, young girls have to learn the parts of corpus, and how to tinker with each part. Of course, the face must be just right, with ten types of cream and twenty types of make-up, to bring it the closest to Scarlett Johansson or Aishwarya Rai. In addition, great attention must go to the bust, posterior, thigh and hair, to bring a woman in line with standards of acceptability set by godlike gurus of fashion.
 
I am all for people looking their best, but it does little good, to men and women alike, to grow up with the idea that they normally look terrible and must resort to desperate means to come to par. Nor does it make great sense for people to spend enormous amount of time and money to achieve the perfect eyebrow or select the right color and switch for their hair. I could have done without the feeling of inferiority that the modes of the time foisted on me. I can recall the time when I ran to the mirror, the moment I left my bed, to make sure that my hairstyle was appropriate. What a relief it was, alas far too late, when I started shaving my head as well as my cheeks.

A friend reminded me that younger people these days learn about their and others’ bodies by watching explicit videos, on their tablets and their phones, and don’t need to hear about birds and bees from their parents. I saw several of such videos and decided that, as mentors, those are scarcely better than Havelock Ellis or Marie Stopes. Perhaps the videos reduce, to an extent, their ignorance about our bodies, but they may emerge with an added dimension of inferiority about their capacity for sexual acrobatics.
 
We live in our bodies. It helps to know of those abodes. It helps also to have that knowledge without acquiring false ideas about some standards our bodies need to meet.