I am ill

April 6-9th

Around this time, I started to get really sick and continued to stay that way for three or four days. I suppose the 16 hour overnight flights, the questionable hygienic practices and the climate change finally did me in. For the next three or four days I did little but sleep. At some point, we removed to Muchilipatnam, the town of about 250,000 where Ganga’s parent’s live. Ganga was super awesome during this period. He ran all over the place getting me juice and cold medicine and whatever else. Periodically, he’d call the doctor cousins and they would recommend a new medicine – I say recommend and not prescribe because he would talk to one of them on the phone and wander into the bedroom where I was sleeping with medications ranging from antibiotics to cough syrup with codeine in it.
One of Ganga’s aunts also performed a nightly exorcism on me. I don’t know if it really was an exorcism, but that’s the closest thing I can compare it to. I guess she thought I had gotten sick because of something evil. Anyway, she would pull me into the kitchen, hold rock salt in her right hand and circle the top half of my body, first clockwise three times, then counter clockwise.
For my part, I just slept and got lots of fluids. Eventually, some combination of exorcism, sleep and medicine did the trick and I got better.