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.
But the screaming did help and after doing quite a bit of it I started to laugh. Then I started to cry. When he had finished, he wrapped me up in a towel and left me weeping on the table for about half an hour.
The conclusion I came to as I sprawled serenely on my Sardinian sunbed for the remainder of the holiday was that Dipu had shifted more emotional blockages in 55 minutes than a shrink could have dug up and made no sense of in 55 years. And as you surely only need an intervention like that once in a lifetime, I have avoided anything calling itself ‘strong massage’ since.
Until the other night, when, as we sat around her kitchen, bored and listless, a girlfriend said, ‘I know, let’s go to the Thai massage place round the corner.’
I suppose I was relying on them not being able to fit us both in simultaneously at ten o’clock at night with no notice, but when we got there they were very much up for it. Two Thai ladies were conjured from thin air, seemingly, and my friend and I were led to adjoining rooms.
I noticed a polite little sign on the wall saying ‘Please don’t ask for sexual’ as I took off my clothes. I must have been subconsciously expecting Dipu, for I lay face-up nearly starkers so when the girl came in she ordered me to turn over and covered me in a towel.
My face was poked into one of those oval-shaped peepholes and as she began to tackle the knots in my shoulders it crossed my mind that I might well be sick through the hole. Just like Dipu she didn’t take no for an answer. When I could get breath enough to cry out, she said, ‘Ha! You wan’ hard massage!’
‘No, please, I don’t. I want nice massage.’ But it was no good. ‘Hard massage! Ha!’ she shouted as she climbed on the bed, sat on top of me and slapped me around. What is it with these people? They have the courage of lions. In a world gripped by fear of law suits, they punch and slap and twist you without a care in the world for the compensation culture. It makes you glad to be alive. She had to apologise briefly when she poked me in the kidney. But apart from that, she was relentless.
And afterwards it was clear she had performed a miracle. Every part of my body felt rearranged. I’m not sure how my muscles and joints got to be in the wrong place previously but there is no doubt that as reordered by the Thai lady the whole construction works a lot better.
Even my organs feel massaged. I’m pretty sure my kidneys are an inch higher up. I can’t bend my right thumb and suspect it may be dislocated. But this is surely a small price to pay for such a worthwhile renovation.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
Comments