Shortly after dawn, as the sun suffuses the eastern sky and temperatures start to rise, the bees arrive to forage on the bright yellow flowers crowding the wild “carille” vine.
Known as the “baan carille,” it is an aggressive creeper that sprouted on its own, covering the ornamental tree in the far corner of the garden, so that it now appears as a strange, looming sentinel.
A milder version of the bitter gourd plant, this specimen bears miniature bumpy fruits only about an inch big. These are traditionally gathered by the bowlfuls from backdams and village fences, to be painstakingly peeled and stir-fried with fresh water or succulent swamp shrimps caught from the nearby swamps, trenches and rivers.
Birds raid the ripe, orange balls which are surprisingly sweet and added to flavour hot pepper sauces, while the acrid-scented shiny dark green leaves go towards the dreaded Caribbean “cerassee” or herbal tea touted for everything from treating ailments like cancer and diabetes, to stomach trouble, constipation and body cleansing.
My mother called it “karela” using the common South Asian name for the crop that originated in the Indian state of Kerala, from where it spread to China, other parts of Asia, and Africa. Indentured immigrants carried these and numerous other seeds and cuttings in their “jahahji bhandal” or “ship bundle,” like the night jasmine or “chameli,” “tulsi” or holy basil, “karapule” or curry leaf, “saijan” or moringa, varieties of mango, squash/bottle gourd or “lauki,” “jhinge” or ridged gourd/luffa, “seim” or flat green bean, “paan” or betel leaf and the acerbic “sourie” or bilimbi.
She would cook the large “karelas” stuffed with “bhunjal”/dry curried potatoes, grated coconut/spinach or ocean shrimp whichever was available, and then sear the fruits in hot oil, seasoned with black spicy seeds of “mangrile” or nigella, called “kalonji” which gave the dish its name.
As children, we dreaded the regular cathartic “clean-outs” our determined parents deemed necessary for holistic health and harmony. Pale green, thin lanceolate leaves and shelled, translucent brown pods of the senna tree would be purchased cheaply from the nearest neighbourhood pharmacy and soaked overnight in water, at the weekend, in preparation for the mandatory purge.
Early morning, before breakfast and despite our noisy protests, we would be carefully administered small amounts of the potent, smelly brown liquid with milk, or supplemented with a generous touch of pore-raising Epsom salts if we appeared to be even slightly off-colour, particularly bilious or decorated with too many blackheads.
Bitters were reserved for extreme cases when we had seemingly indulged heavily in serious excess, and gorged on far more oily and syrupy school snacks than were suspiciously judged neither safe nor sound for lucid thought, long life and languorous limbs.
Steeped in the tiny cup smoothly sculpted from the trunk of the tropical bitterwood/quassia amara tree, or drawn from pale splinters of this red-flowered beauty characteristically called amargo in most of South America for its namesake acrid taste, this tea was termed tonic, laxative, fever reducer, antimalarial, and anthelmintic or an intestinal worm killer, all in one.
Any sign of an abscess or “hard boil” and we would have to hurriedly swallow clear castor oil and take our medicine of the fetid boiled “carille” bush to stabilise blood sugar levels. Yet, we were rarely ever sick enough to revert to tablets other than cascara sagrada or see a medical doctor until late adulthood.
But we were confined to earthly purgatory and outside lavatory often at uneasy night, by the most unholy trinity of treatments. Senna from the Arabic “sana” for brilliance/radiance contains chemical sennosides that irritate the lining of the bowel causing a laxative effect. A distinctive mineral created from magnesium and sulphate, the crystal “salts” derive its epithet from Epsom, the small settlement in Surrey where it was discovered in a saline spring.
A villager reputedly found a trickle within a hoof print left by his thirsty cow grazing in the common, one dry summer around 1618, so he dug a hole and by the next day, it had filled up with clear water, but his animals refused to drink. He bravely had a taste and enthusiastically set about promoting it as a medicine.
Following the find, the rural community expanded and developed into a popular spa town by the early 17th century offering the powerful product that was guzzled from sturdy stoneware jugs and distributed in huge jars across the country.
I recalled the Guyanese fondness for salts, shrubs and “bush,” given our long-time fatalistic Creole sayings, with the accompanying cynical shrug, of “wha nah kill nor cure yuh, will fatten yuh” or “after laugh, come cry.” Trinidadians have their vivid version complete with bilimbi along the blunt West Indian lines of, “What sweet in goat mouth does sour in he bambam…”The twin-islands’ veteran calypsonian, Seadley Joseph, who performed under the name “Penguin” would immortalise the proverb in his 1983 hit of the shortened adage, declaring, “Keep singing everyday/ remember Mammy say/What sweet in goat mouth does sour in he bambam/What keep you flying high, same ting does make you cry” and “Little bit of treasure, little bit of pleasure/So you take, and you take, and you take, and you take…”
“Penguin” warned, “Tell the youth who gone off on dope/That they are the future and hope/Tell them if dey too tight/Nothing wouldn’t go right/Is dem and the whole country blight” while pointing to “the new bourgeois/
Drinking scotch, travelling afar” with “Air-conditioned car, dey ‘fraid breeze.” He cautioned about the far-reaching consequences of selfish actions, maintaining, “And if you check, you will see is true/The ill effects of the wrongs men do/All who make women catch dey tail/All who lie and send men to jail/All who rob dey neighbour…”
These days, many Guyanese are increasingly experiencing the astringent taste without ever having indulged in the promised sweets, whether it is over the conduct of criminals local and foreign, lingering
questions over the Exxon oil contract and the bonus, or the still unexplained granting of rich oil blocks to greenhorns by the previous President and his Natural Resources Minister. More recently the behaviour of old diehards and the resurgence of ongoing bad habits have come to the fore given the unashamedly authoritarian attitude of the Prime Minister in rescinding the dismissal of a perceived ally by the Board of the Directors of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited which publishes the Guyana Chronicle, as he prepares for a hard battle to stay as his party’s top candidate no doubt hoping to continue into a second term, should the majority APNU agree to another coalition for the upcoming elections.
Hopefully, by Tuesday, when the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice should rule on related questions, the country will move closer to overcoming the incredible numeracy challenges over the 32-33 no confidence motion.
Days ago, scientists announced that bees not only get the concept of zero and can do basic math, but they are capable of connecting symbols to numbers. It is a finding that sheds new light on how numerical abilities may have evolved and even opens new possibilities for communication between humans and other species. Guyanese who understand the national urge to purge, can surely learn from such an enlightened insect.
ID supports studying how minute bee brains manage information to open elegant and efficient “paths to bio-inspired solutions that use a fraction of the power of conventional processing systems.”
