I was in town yesterday with my friend Fiona. We were sitting on the terrace of a coffee shop, looking out on a busy street when a bunch of young men and women went running past carrying what appeared to be heavy bags of something on their shoulders. “What on earth are those clowns doing?” Fiona remarked.

“Perhaps it’s some sort of cult,” I said. “Maybe a cult of punishment.” I was half joking of course, but I went on. “There are some Christian groups that go around beating their backs with whips until they bleed. Maybe it’s something like that.”

Fiona gave one of her dismissive laughs—she has a number of these, ranging from outright scorn to mild disbelief—this one was around the middle of the scale. “Are you making this up, Dee? Why would anyone want to whip themselves?”

I sighed. Ask Fiona about trivia, like what Princess Kate wore on such and such a day, and she’ll know exactly—down to the color of her shoes. But anything else—stuff I find interesting—and she appears to be completely in the dark. “Because they believe it will help purge them of whatever sins they may have committed,” I told her.

She flashed me one of her sly smiles. “What, like coveting a neighbor’s boyfriend?” This, I took, to be a reference to Scott, who I suspected she was ‘coveting’.

Our speculation ended when the group of runners came puffing back—strung out now with the fatties trailing the pack—and entered an extreme fitness place.

My thoughts turned to Nouli, out there in the jungle, carrying not bags of sand but survival supplies and weapons. What would he think of these urban characters running back and forth with their bags of sand?

I pictured his brow wrinkled in puzzlement—imagined his very proper English. “But why would anyone carry something away with the knowledge that they will be carrying it back again?”

“They do it because they want to lose weight,” I would tell him.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense just to eat less?” he would probably reply.

In Nouli’s world, food comes from plants and animals, and it isn’t always easy to come by. The temptations of fast food are not at his disposal, so he wouldn’t understand the temptations we face in the Western world of plenty.

I saw myself smiling at his lack of understanding. “Yes, Nouli,” I would say. “It most certainly would make more sense to simply eat less.”

Daina

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