So I was walking slowly along the shops where Ajeesh had told me I could buy the medicine ingredients. All of the shop signs were in Malayalam and none of the shops appeared to me to be an ayurvedic pharmacy.

A bloke leaned out of his car and asked me what I was looking for. I showed him the page of my diary where Ajeesh had written the items in malayalam (with english transcriptions). He recognised I was looking for ayurvedic ingredients and told me I was in front of the correct shop. (It has sacks of food such as rice and pulses hiding the more exotic stuff.) He then came into the shop with me and read out the list of ingredients and quantities.

The shop folk got it all together smilingly and explained where possible what each ingredient is:

• gerakam is cumin seed (jeera in Hindi)
• chukku is dried ginger
• karipatty appears to be a bit like jaggery (raw cane sugar).

This little piece of spontaneous niceness, especially of the bloke who guided me, has me almost in tears. I’m going to head back to the house now but I had to let the world know about it first.