Some memories from my early years as a physician in Kashmir have dissolved into one another. 

The hospital wards, clinic rooms, prescriptions and long succession of patients whose faces I can no longer summon have grown hazy with time.

One small ritual, however, remains vivid.

A patient would be ready to leave after an examination, a prescription and a few instructions, then stop at the door.

“Parhaiz kath chhum?”

What should I avoid eating?

The question followed almost any illness: fever, infection, injury, stomach trouble, headache. It hardly seemed to matter.

Patients appeared to believe that recovery came with a list of foods to keep away from, alongside the medicine I had prescribed.

I was young then, armed with the confidence that medical education gives before experience begins rearranging it. Anatomy, physiology, pathology and pharmacology had taught me to understand disease through mechanisms and treatment through medicines.

Nutrition had a place in medicine, certainly, though I rarely saw it as part of the central prescription. So I often had little to say.

Eventually, I found an answer that worked almost universally: aanchaar.

Kashmiri households commonly kept pickles on the table, and advising patients to avoid them sounded sufficiently sensible. The instruction gave the consultation a satisfying conclusion.

The patient left with medicine in one hand and a dietary restriction in the other, while I called the next person into the room.

Years later, I began to see something amusing in my younger days.

Long before medical school, I had encountered another system for thinking about food. My grandfather kept a diary recording the properties of different foods.

In the Kashmiri understanding of my childhood, foods possessed qualities described as hot or cold, dry or moist.

I loved those classifications.

I would sit beside him and ask about walnuts, meat, rice, watermelon and other foods that populated our kitchen. He would think for a moment and tell me where they belonged. 

Sometimes I wrote the answer into his diary myself.

I can still picture........

© Kashmir Observer