Mud, curd and cucumber eyes

"Ok, let's all meet after lunch so we can have a session," Giles heard himself say.

At two o'clock sharp, a small group was waiting at the house, and with no therapist, no oils and no plan, he led them down to the lake. They swam to the far bank, where he covered each of them in fine mud, told them to lie down in the sun and laid slices of cucumber over their eyes. He still describes it as one of the sights of his life, fifteen foreigners giggling on the grass with their arms flung out, caked in mud and gazing up through large white cucumber eyes.

Once they had rinsed off in the lake, they gathered round him on the bank, keen to know what came next, which was a fair question. A half-buried memory of his teenage sister with yoghurt on her face came to the rescue, and the whole party trooped up to the kitchen for pots of buffalo curd. The painting carried on until bodies that had been mud brown an hour earlier were white as milk, and at sunset they danced back to their huts to shower.

Giles was relieved there were no mirrors in the bathrooms yet. He had left them out on purpose, believing that two weeks in a sarong without fretting over one's reflection might be a liberating, levelling thing. He admits he had a great deal to learn about human nature, and the mirrors went up soon afterwards.
That evening the guests drifted into the ambalama for dinner glowing, stroking each other's arms and cooing over how soft their skin felt, while a faint smell of rancid curd hung over the whole meal. Giles went to bed thinking the experiment had come off rather well.

The mood at yoga the next morning told him otherwise. The silky arms and legs of the night before were now covered in red rashes, and the faces above them were silent and sombre. The villagers, who found the whole episode hugely entertaining, explained that the lake mud holds fish eggs that irritate the skin, and that anyone with sense avoids lying about in it for long, especially when the fish are spawning. The rashes faded within a few hours, though the story has lasted rather longer.

It was the end of Giles playing doctor. What followed was Ulpotha's own village treatment centre, run by the old medicine man from next door, and that is the next story.