Hands on

Elizabeth Eapen recalls some close encounters

Kamla’s hands were firm and smooth. She could flip me over as expertly as I can a dosai on a griddle. A neighbourhood masseuse who charged Rs 100 for a one-hour massage, she was as much in demand for her ministrations as for the stories she supplied her clients with, as she massaged olive/coconut/mustard oil into youthful and firm or old and flabby bodies as the case might be. In fact, the invaluable information on the inhabitants of D 306 or C 208, a free and generous add-on, made the Rs 100 seem like a great bargain.

 

Kamla remained my weekend fix until a trip to Bangkok, that Mecca of massages. It was there I discovered that there was much more to a massage than Kamla. First of all, the masseuses themselves. Girls (mostly) with rose petal hands, walking on tiptoe, seeming to float. They smiled a lot, talked very little, were gentle, unobtrusive and knew how to make you feel special. After a one-hour foot massage (yes, a full 60 minutes just for the feet) anything pedestrian, even walking, seemed sacrilegious.

But that did it. On subsequent trips, I was more than ready to succumb, and to date have had varied experiences, in ‘five-star’ environs, in open-air shacks, at wellness centres, even at the hole-in-the-wall ‘beauty parlour’ near my house, where Rs 500 can buy a fuss-free olive oil rubdown on a narrow trestle table (you have to get off it to turn over) draped inelegantly in flowered plastic.

I’ve flirted with mud, seaweed, honey, brown sugar and lava stones, luxuriated in rose petal baths and got mired in the oil slick of Ayurvedic treatments. Stem cells and diamond dust await my passage to eternal youth and beauty, but the most memorable experience so far has been in the courtyard of the Wat Pho temple in Bangkok.

In a large, dormitory-like hall, with hundreds of fans whirring overhead and around, are rows of raised cement platforms each roughly the size of a single bed. You buy a ticket, wait your turn in an orderly queue and hop on — the only concession to comfort is a thin cotton mattress — fully clothed, but without footwear. There was time, but only just, to exchange pleasantries with a young German tourist to my left and a wispy Parisian (both barely half an arm’s length away) to my right. There were no candles, no flowers, no scented oils, just the hum of the fans and muted conversation. A diminuitive masseuse confirmed that I had no particular aches or pains and then displayed divine strength, as in a series of practised, fluid movements, she pulled and turned, coaxed and admonished my bemused body into a vortex of sensations. Emerging into a sunlit courtyard fifteen minutes later, I felt, well, different.