Given that many of my friends who were born in the year I did, face
another decade-birthday this year, leaving me way behind at 26, I seem
to be more and more interested in "health" food. This, however, is not
new to me. I have always surfed the sine wave, with a few days of
uber-virtuous living, alternating with spongecake-samosa- chocolate
binging, which the body has been taking pretty well thus far. My
rapidly aging erstwhile classmates, held in the throngs of midlife
crisis, are now passing their metabolic problems to me, believing that
THAT's what friends are for, and so the body, in particular the stomach
area, complains whenever there is as much as a whiff of culinary sin in
the zip code. By stomach, I mean the area extending from a few feet in
front of the face to the toilet bowl, so that at the sight of the
doughnut which usually makes the tongue drip, there is an automated
voice that tells the brain that a single sniff of that thing resulted in
some interesting fluid dynamics in the bathroom last time. The voice
is hyperactive these days, correlating coffee with the duodenal balloon
that that fills up with sulfurated air that often finds exit at the
most inopportune moments, ice cream to the cushion at the seat area,
bhajji to the aqua regia along the entire plumbing route and so on.
