Postcolonial colic

There’s a myth that ancient Romans faced their ten course meals by the simple expedient of intermittent vomiting. Judiciously timed, the stomach could be emptied of uneasy trivia like stuffed dormice, and readied for grande cuisine — boar stuffed with live starlings, or a bear grilled entier.

Don’t believe it.

The Roman vomitorium had nothing to do with emesis: it was the name given to the narrow passage leading out of the amphitheatre. Apt, when you picture the rush for cabs — but entirely metaphoric. 

Roman post-theatre crowds weren’t squeamish. They ate their way through the menu much like we do during Diwali. Galen of Pergamon, the hotshot medic, kept the Romans going on a recherché digestive, dià triôn pepereon with ginger and honey. Only the richest gluttons could afford it. Considering where that pepper came from, I’m not surprised this recipe is so familiar.

Two thousand years after Galen, most homes still dole it out as prophylactic on Diwali mornings. The dark glutinous gob that sandpapers your mouth once earned denarii for Galen in Rome.

The moment it hits the stomach, every enzyme you own is on red alert for the rest of the day. Now all the ghee and sugar you swallow can seep straight into your coronaries with nary a twinge of colic.

Colic, a gripe in the gut, is named with anatomical accuracy for colon, the large intestine, precisely where the trouble lies. Disregard that colic, and the colon throws a tantrum we term diarrhoea. Hippocrates first used the word in 3 BC. It means flowing through, and I imagine his preceding words were No matter what I’ve tried it’s still…

Our modern colloquialism is terse and descriptive: the runs.
The common denominator for all human experience is the body. We are, after all, one species.

Are we, really?

The British call it Delhi Belly, the Americans Montezuma’s Revenge, but it is the illness that felled me in Paris, in New York, and in Copenhagen. I had the runs. It was nothing to do with the Bastille or Times Square or the Little Mermaid — just the local coliform bacteria getting into a brawl with the
home team.

Delhi Belly is not so simple. It is the same bacterium, the same illness, but it isn’t happening to an individual. Delhi Belly is 400 years of Imperialism getting a purge.

Montezuma’s Revenge is even worse. In 1520, Conquistador Hernán Cortés took the Aztec Emperor hostage. Montezuma was tortured, humiliated, and finally murdered. His daughter was raped, and Mexico subjugated by the first use of smallpox as bioweapon.

That’s a lot to vilipend with a jibe. Montezuma wasn’t vengeful. He repaid Cortés’ brutality with a bittersweet gift we glut on today — chocolate.

So what is it with these ironic post-colonial labels — derision or guilt? What happens when these colicky globetrotters get the runs at home? Their shit don’t stink is a common expression of irony in any language. In this particular instance, it might even be literal.

The body is the only common arena left to our species. We talk, write and think about it in the universal language of science where vocabulary is dispassionate, and must eschew words for hate. Samuel . Huntington did not write Clash of Civilizations after a bad bout of diarrhea-even if the can is where it belongs. Why apply its ideas to science?

Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write as Kalpish Ratna