Chyawanprash

Chyawanprash is a type of Indian supplement made from fruit and herbs. The concoction most closely resembles a very thick jam, if that jam was made not from strawberries or apricots but instead the thick clots of muck and twigs found in your gutters every spring.

I found the bottle in a nearby Indian market. Their shelves overflow with delicious-looking sauces and huge burlap sacks of Jasmine rice. For some reason I was drawn to this strange, humble container.

Okay: maybe not humble. View the full-size image and you'll read its intoxicatingly persuasive slogan, "Strength from Within." How could one not buy this for $3.49, especially when one needs quarters for the laundromat? One needn't worry. In fact, one was told by the waif-ish Indian girl who works there that its consistency was like Nutella. One should have paid more attention to her immediate addendum.

"But no," she said, waving her hands, as if waiting for me to throw the rope in the water, "it does not taste anything like that!"

I plunked it down on the counter, next to my frozen onion-flavored parathas. When I got home I read the instructions, not realizing I was reading instructions for what I thought was a spicy jam that boosted my immune system.

'Take with hot water, milk, or juice. May also be taken as Bread spread or Jam.'

Take? Why 'take'? As I soon learned, you do not merely take something made with 43 natural ingredients using a 2000 year-old recipe. It takes you.

That next morning, I spread half of my toast (I was being cautious) with a thin layer of Chyawanprash. Known for its antioxidant properties, this alternative to my morning spread of raspberry would surely make me leaner, healthier, happier, an altogether stronger person. From within. Other studies show I'm not alone in wanting to improve through a daily regimen of the stuff. I would learn later, after the toast, far too late to derail the effects, that Chyawanprash has been proven to prevent steroid-induced cataract in the developing chick embryo. None of this can be good.

While I still can.... before it's too late.... you must know the cause of this, whatever is happening to me..... here are the ingredients, the nutrient-rich list of herbs and fruit that is causing me to grow strong, oh so strong, until I can no longer bear my own strength and break from my skin like a tumescent cob of corn from its own inferior husk.... please help......

1. Fresh Indian gooseberry fruit, 2. Sugar, 3. Honey, 4. Clarified butter, 5. Long pepper, 6. Sesame oil, 7. Giant potato, 8. Cardamom, 9. Bamboo manna, 10. Indian kudzu, 11. Winter cherry, 12. Asparagus, 13. Cinnamon Bark, Dashmool (14. Bengal quince, 15. Migraine bark, 16. Indian trumpet flower, 17. Indian Purple Trumpet, 18. Sal leaf, 19. Urara pitch, 20. Indian nightshade, 21. Small nightshade, 22. Small caltrops, 23. Cashmere bark), 24. Country mallow, 25. Wild green gram, 26. Wild black gram, 27. Galls, 28. Feather-foll plant, 29. Raisins, 30. Ceylon-cow plant, 31. Irish root, 32. Chebulic myrobalan, 33. Round zedoary, 34. Nut grass, 35. Spreading Hogweed, 36. Blue water lily, 37. Malabar nut, 38. Liquorice [sic], 39. Ice plant, 40. Sandalwood, 41. Clove, 42. Chinese cinnamon, 43. Indian Rose Chestnut

And so I bit into that side of toast, the one with the gleaming black layer underneath the earthy nut-brown of Teddy's SuperChunk. The familiar buttery, peanutty taste soon fell away, as did I, into a swirling mass of pepper and anchovy and ketchup and sand and baby vomit and Coca-Cola and rhubarb and burnt hair and passing diesel trucks and baker's chocolate and carrots cooked far too long and dentist's fluoride and blood and the taste in your mouth when you realize you'll never be 12-years-old again...

Goodbye.