Singing the praises of a magical herb
IN MY my native tongue it is murungai. I cannot bear to Anglicise it to moringa.
As a child in my beloved Chatsworth, it was a regular part of our diet. It was not medicine. Food was medicine. The tiny leaves were braised like spinach with a healthy dash of onion, garlic and frequently a chopped tomato at the end (I fear often cooked to death).
The drumsticks were divine in dhall. In the original version in South India, drumsticks are a key ingredient in sambar, which is eaten for breakfast.
The miracle plant belongs in many places from Africa to India to China and the Philippines. While I love it, I do not want to chauvinistically claim it as my heritage.
Everything rains in abundance when shared. For now, I am taking it as a powder but I hanker for the fresh leaves from the Bangladesh Market.
There is an aunty there, who cleans the leaves off the stalks. For all of R5, she hands over a bag ready for the pot. I buy all that she can supply and freeze it for when I am not able to get to the market.
There is a point to this long story. Just the other evening, I was a talkative dinner guest in the home of Durban’s second most charming couple but probably the best read pair.
My place card was next to the host. He was a classical musician in a previous birth and a storyteller in a Mughal court in the life before. He remarked on his every bit as posh brother-in-law’s white mop.
Being a fisher for compliments, I simply had to ask whether anyone had noticed that nowadays I wore a healthy crop myself. From a decade or more of being clean shaven or crew cut to hide the patches, light hair has just been sprouting these past six months.
That is in large part due to the testimony of my brother’s wife, who for most of her life has stoically borne the burden of female pattern baldness, androgenetic alopecia.
Murungai capsules have given her a new lease of life. Just last week she was showing me growth as long as her fingers.
Pricey products from fancy French laboratories have been unable to make magic like the miracle herb.
I am creeping closer to my Sassa card, so my hair is no longer jet black under coconut oil coating. Let us just say that there is light snow on the mountain.
An unintended consequence of the murungai is also a raging fire in the valley below. That is a stolen metaphor
marintheseloo best confessed lest my dinner host come asking for royalties.
This might be hard to believe but I frequently feel 15 and without a date. Now before anyone dashes off to the market with a basket and a prayer, be warned that the best effect comes from a regular dosage. Being often skint I buy a packet of the booty from the spice shop. A quarter teaspoon in hot water, morning and night, tastes like licking the gravel driveway.
Coming from the Indian indentured stock of the plantations, I often wondered about the flowing manes in both men and women and the step ladders of children that followed them. The answer my friends was not blowing in the wind, it was up a tree.
Naidoo is an aspirant botanist with hope for more children.