Two years ago I had a spiritual experience while being pummelled by an Indian guru called Dipu. I was staying at a spa hotel in Porto Cervo where they had invited one of the world’s leading Ayurvedic practitioners to set up shop as a guest therapist.
Being spa-sceptic (I was with a boyfriend who was a devotee of pampering) and only wanting to lie by the pool and read, I dodged the hotel manager’s entreaties to try Dipu, until finally I got so sick of being told I was missing out that I agreed to give him a whirl.
I entered the darkened treatment room wrapped in a bath robe over my bikini but before long was lying face-up, naked as the day I was born. This was a worrying opening proposition. However, any suspicions I had were quickly allayed when Dipu got to work. A man of few words and very considerable strength, Dipu used his entire might to speed-knead my body using the same technique one might apply to pushing a chamois leather up and down a really smudgy car.
It could barely have been less excruciating to be put through a carwash machine and a side effect of the process was that all the air got squeezed out of me. For a while I could not summon breath enough to form a sound betokening ‘no’, and once I could I was so deep in shock that all I could manage was a squashed-sounding ‘n…’, to which Dipu replied, ‘Louder. It works better if you scream.’ I was unable to, until he pressed a point on the side of my foot which activated my sciatic nerve. Whereupon I not only screamed, but also informed Dipu that he had indulged in unnatural relations with his mother, which he took very well.
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