marma points

in the place where man woman child meets is family, represented by the ankh in ancient egypt, and by the secret science of marmas in ayurveda.

kind of.

marmas are vital points where tissue, bone, vein, muscle meet like family. a family gathering. an ankh. it is known to ayurvedic doctors, in this current age of info through degree programs. it is also known by westerners through the internet’s  google-guru, but understood only by kalari masters.

after reviewing the 108 marma points during one of our ayurvedic classes, the lead doctor and director of the program who lead this class, when asked about how marmas were used, shrugged.

 i don't know, the doctor said. we just learn about them in school, but we don't actually use them in our treatments. we don't know how, he said when he was prodded further.

d, gurrukal, knows marma. he had to learn them as part of the secret trainings in the kalari martial art. gurrukal's 20 year old master student, who is built like an alvin ailey dancer, and moves his body like a wu tang ballerina, reviews the marmas with me. he knows about 25.

why not all? i ask, as he fake-strikes me in between my eyebrow.

i'm not at that level yet, he says.

marmas are revealed through a progression in the art of kalari. mahesh has been training rigorously for 5 or 6 years, and now almost exclusively trains the young batch and assists d in training the adult batch. on his simple phone, mahesh shows me pictures of him somersaulting, defying planetary pulls, as i practice pressing the marmas on his shaggy head.

not too hard, he says, widening his wide eyes as dramatic as the china white of his eye and the black of his skin.

right, i say, recalling d's words.

marma points should be left alone. they are extremely sensitive, dangerous, points used to kill, d tells me . we are in his kalari shala, which resembles a cave, with a bare rocky ground, and brick walls like ruins.

i stare off at the statue on the corner, a set of 7 steps that d uses as an alter. a single candle sits defiantly on the apex. we bow and pray towards it  everytime we enter the shala. according to d, the steps  represents the chakras and the levels of nadis, the ascension from lower self to higher self.

everything here means something, n not in a big deal way, not like we have to be quiet n keep our head bowed n say mantras a million times. sacred is just matter of fact here, just the way it is.

before i know it, i am nearly on the ground. d catches me off guard, flips air to wind me off my feet, grabs my arm to break my fall, twists it behind my back like nypd, and juts a single finger below the center of my scapula.

that's a marma point, he says. it will leave your left side paralyzed in 20 minutes. he says something like that. to release it, you... he shows me.

this is how d teaches me the marmas. sometimes. at other times, a patient comes with a frozen shoulder or a back as stiff as french greetings. d is pressing somewhere and sliding and pressing again. i ask him about marmas, while he's operating.

there's a marma here and here, he shows me on the lower back of the patient.

i thought you said we shouldn't use marmas.

not on a healthy person. but you can use them to release pain. that's the only time they should be used.

gurrukal shows me some common treatments with the vital points, describes when marma massage would be used in total, which is rare.

d gets behind me when his patient leaves, presses some points on my neck and shoulder, and slides down my veins, working his way down my arm.

this releases neck pain and shoulder issues, he explains, staring at me with his dark eyes, dark eyebrows gently sitting in place, his light skin starkly lightened by his blue-black hair, his face maintaining a sweetness.

go ahead, he says, turning his back to me. try it on me.

i do, to no, not like that, to yes, but, to yes and yes almost.

 good. keep practicing.

podi-kizhi conversations

packed heat in a bolus bag. leaves picked from the streets tightly tied in a kizhi, ready for use in the kalari room, where d and i do the nadi marma massages. 

d - gurrukal - wipes the sweat falling over his beard, while i cook  the bags over a portable rusty stove. he careflly pauses for a minute to look at raesh, the body builder d is massaging. raesh the muscleman with expressions more intense than the the arab sea, which gathered every few minutes into menacing monsoon clouds that pounded on the tarp covering the shala.

i hand d one of the medicine bags, browned and dripping like a samosa. d takes it, claps it over his own bare olive skin before rapidly smashing it on the back of the bodybuilder. 

body builder glares at d like a wwf wrestler who hulk hogan broke a chair over, looks like someone who has seen the lord. d grins through his semitic beard. he knows; he has seen the reaction before. without turning his head from raesh, d holds his hand out towards me. i know the deal. i hand them fried kizhi. our transaction is swifter than a drug deal - slap, shake, grip - 20 bag and a jackson.

the kizhi consists of ella and errandi, garlic that d and i peeled wih a switchblade and coconut i grated under his tutleage, on a machete style cocount grinder. its the kind of machete my ammu whipped miracles with for my brothers and i.

13 ingredients later we punctre an egg, drip the white like icing over a cake, and d nods at me. at once, we are mixing the ingredients into brownie batter, into cake, into color.

gurrukal's boy, shantu, has appeared, was there all along, pacing in the backgrond, talking to d's sister, mom, sister in law, the babies, until it was just him and the wind talking unemployment . d introduces us, tells me that him and shantu started doing kalari at the same time, back in the day.

shantu is pudgy with a beer belly. he has the same look d's boy raveen had, when i asked him whether he still practiced the martial art. both shantu n raveen had the same hollow voiced response. with beautiful indian eyes the color of melancholy, they looked away and said no. said that they'd been drinking these days. when i asked shantu, when i asked raveen why, wondering how they could give up  this ancient mastery, they shrugged, like it was a choreagraphed dance they knew too well. They said, kalari was no longer interesting. when i asked what they did now, they laughed, said nothing, said they were looking for work and a miracle. 

shantu helps me tie the string around the bolus bag. d holds it up like an inspector, tests it out by playfully pressing it on the head of his little girl, who is on her way to terrorizing grandma, shantu, the stray dogs, the sea.

already i can see what i did wrong. d looks at me, like: come on my dude, you know what you gotta do. but i feeling lazy, want to eat coconut and lounge in a hammock well above the dying whales and sea turtles. 

do it again, d says to me with the ease of a brother, a real one, the kind who can whip your ass and you'll still be cool with an hour later. i do. 

shantu gives me advice, real detailed and long-winded, as he paces, running his hand through his receding curls. he tells me stories with morals, several of them, in the way only a broke dude with lots of time and without a job can tell.

i hold  the kizhi bag, smack it over the porch ledge, over my thin wrists, hold it  to the grey and moshing clouds.

yeah, d says. that's it. 

the medicine man's leaf

gurrukkal flips through a book on plant medicine as he describes “communist pacha” to me, one of the indigenous plants of the region. it is large and pointy like a castor leaf. part of it’s medicine, he explains to me, is that this plant concealed communists in hiding. it helped them temporarily win the battle against the landlords and big bosses in kerala, preventing them from taking over everything. Temporarily.

i get the sense that gurrukal and his family are communists. didi, gurrukal's sister, walks around the neighborhood helping the fisherman fill out government forms so they are not fined for fishing. gurrukal is always talking about and living about service to the community. it's what some of my yoga friends talk about as karma yoga, but just talk about, or do in the ashram, or in internal events. they don't come to the villages, the busthees, the hood, just like the yogi's who visit America n give talks on nonattachment on the upper west/eastside, park slope n dumbo.

as a believer in the yogi way, one who has looked for guidance n gurus, didi is the kind of yoga teacher i've been wondering about like Christians losing their religion, wondering about the possibility of the trinity, of the father, son n holy ghost. didi points at the handkerchief with the hammer and sickle on the dysfunctional lamppost, next to the green handkerchief with the islamic moon n star. she smiles like someone sharing a favorite dish that they are proud of.

as gurrukal and I study the medicinal values of the communist pacha, didi closes the door behind her, after the last of the fishermen or their kids and wives have walked in for the free yoga sessions didi hosts every morning.

i look behind gurrukal, who holds the communist pacha up like a flag and waves it at his boy anu, who cougars in, who flips through the fat book gurrukal's mother is reading - biography on subhash chandra bose - the revered bengali communist who led a guerilla movement against the british. 

there are no posters in gurrukal's neighborhood that warns them about helping the poor, as there r in nyc subways: if u want to help, give to valid charities. everyone here is poor. gurrukal's family isn't into charity, the way middle-class people in a capitalist system maybe. they don’t believe in making that daddy war-bucks n feeling guilty that they been getting fat – clothes, cars, drinks – the capitalist way of accumulation - and then giving to dirt-faced kids singing about the sun will come out tomorrow. 

for some reason in babylon, we see our ability to purchase a hundred jeans and have a beamer and throw all our phones n furniture out - cause there is newer, the latest, edgier stuff - as freedom. our 
guilt exists for a reason.

for many of the people i know, the sound of a community that is not Facebook, that is not a club or social networking sounds like a cross and garlic to a vampire. the belief, -ism, in community is so scary to us babylonians that community-ism (=communism) is worse than the f word, can land us in jail, is enough to dismiss someone in an argument on issues - s/he's a communist - really? Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah.

gurrukal, gets up to treat the patient who has stumbled off the bike holding his back. d places the communist pacha carefully on the ledge of the porch like a sacred ganesha statue. he continues on the topic with me, even as he is pressing marma points and sliding to arteries with his thumb on the hefty injured dude. d admits it. he's down with communism.