chyvanprasha - witches brew

wisdom blows like a breeze here, over the arabian sea n into the city center of a scorching kannur. on the fourth floor of a building, above the dusty roads of south bazzar my peers n i make medicine. like witches in salem, we share our love for ayurveda, stir the large spoon over the concoction of herbs and amla, our witches brew.

chyvanprasha is a decocotion of over 40 herbs, gathered, dried and made into a decoction, until the herbs disintegrate, ending their life as an herb and beginning  a new beginning as liquid. they look like wet mud, a blend of all the people of the earth into medicine.

robert smith, of the cure, in the song disintegration, sings, shouts, laments, how the end always ends. there is no end in sight, bush said about the war on terror. he may have hit on a truth, that there is no end in sight, life is a continuum, without beginning or end, that dark and light coexist and that as far as the eye can see, is not far enough.

a day after the decoction is made, we mix it with the amla that boiled in a cotton cloth, above the herbs. reduced to mush, the fruits are blended into a paste, which we stir with ghee and fry to a brown as rich as the earth in pheni, bangladesh.

blends make our features. my mothers cheekbones point to malaysia, cambodia, china, somewhere east. her hair paints the sky in frizz, like blended girls in brooklyn from berkley, with cotton candy fros and mexican noses and irish eyes and arabic written on their eyebrows and india on their nose.

ayurvedic medicinal preparations are about blends, about the alchemy of plants and understanding their property, their dravyaguna, by listening. thousands of recipes have been listed in caraka samhita, susruta, asthanga - books older than the americas, than the mughals and christianity and judaism.

we stir, elena, a light hearted brunette from a past life in india, and i. she laughs, boisterous, full as christmas carols in claymations. i laugh too, until their is no sound, only the vibration of ghee and amla going into herbal decoction and dissolved sugar cubes. the brown becomes richer, the consistency thicker, but hours later it is not thick enough to be paka (sticky) in the way we need it to be. we keep stirring, taking turns to take shots of the honey we will add for our medicine.

cyhvanprasha is like centrum, the a-z immunity booster of ayurveda.

yesterday, when we first began the preparation, we walked into a room of fifty herbs in sandwich bags, sitting around like a forest of elder trees. i fell in love.