Bee stings and banana skins
March 2, 2016, India
A few days ago, I was out at the tennis court, a place surrounded by lots of greenery. What comes with the territory is a teeming wild life, and not necessarily nice wild, as in chameleons snakes, ants, bees, mosquitos...
Take mosquitos for instance. They are not the puny kind but big, fast moving dive bombers who zoom around with an audible whine. You are fine if you are moving. But stand still, and a cloud of the pests descend on you, and eat you up alive. These mossies can be dangerous. My brother who is based in UK caught malaria on a visit home. When he got back to the UK and fell ill, the doctors there didn’t even recognise it as malaria doesn’t exist there. Fortunately, my brother being a doctor himself, self diagnosed and treated himself, but it was touch and go for a while.
Going back to the tennis court. I had just picked up my tennis racquet when something on the handle viciously stung my finger. I snatched my hand away, and sucked at the sting site, as a mosquito like bee with red legs hovered around. I put down the racquet, and checked with my coach for first aid but the kit box was empty.
It was time to go home anyway so I picked up my racquet to leave. I had forgotten the bee, and it had a second go at me but I was faster this time and snatched my hand away. But my finger was beginning to swell and itch badly from the first encounter.
My wife suggested I put on a paste of turmeric and it did give some relief from the itching. The problem was that the bee venom seemed to have made my immune system go haywire. Mosquito bites were now itching like mad, and getting inflamed and red, and I couldn’t go putting yellow turmeric paste all over myself.
Now the easy way out would have been to take some anti-histamines to shut down my body’s allergic reaction. But ironically, I’m sort of allergic to the anti-allergic pills, with headaches and clogged plumbing being some of its unpleasant side effects.
Anyway, we are the kind of family who treats colds, coughs, tummy upsets with ginger-lime-honey or pepper-honey concoctions and black tea. We do check with a doctor just to be on the safe side, but over the years we have dropped his countless prescriptions for antibiotics straight into the dustbin.
Besides I’ve been lecturing my kid about building up her natural immunity instead of grabbing for the medicine bottle at the first sniffle. So I bit my teeth, and tried my best to ignore the itching. However I was unable to sleep, and started browsing through my old family albums to kill time. That’s when I came across the picture of my father and mother with my daughter, taken a few years before he passed away.
Now in those days, we were still based in UAE and the child was not used to Indian mosquitos. Her skin tended to react with big, itchy bumps all over her body. She’d end up scratching, and bleeding, and generally leave India with scars all over. On the day, I shot that picture, my father saw her itching. He picked up a little yellow banana (plantain), popped the fruit in his mouth, gave the peel to my mother, and called the child over. She rubbed the peel on the child’s mosquito bites. In no time, the itching stopped, and the child happily went about her life. It seems bananas are not just for eating.
I got up from my Mac, and went downstairs to get a banana. It’s a fruit that’s always present at home, and a few minutes later, I was rubbing the banana peel on my itching finger, and then over the many mosquito bites all over my body. Ten minutes later, the itching had reduced and I drifted off to sleep.
When I woke the next morning, I realised that I had spent the night without scratching and irritating my skin, and as a result the mosquito bumps had disappeared. What’s more, my fingers were also no longer badly swollen, and I was able to use my hand. In a couple of days I was fine, and once again happily unaffected by the bites of India’s ever present mosquitos.
I do love bananas.
