Karma

The youngest attendee was the nine-year old author, Emma, who is pictured here as I shook her hand.  Tomorrow night is another event at the Morson Collection in Boston. You can listen to the two radio interviews I gave last night and this morning here.

Image: africa / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The leaves of the plant produce a burgundy colored dye molecule called “lawsone” that’s able to bond with protein and thus “dye” skin, hair, and fingernails. The henna plant is native to tropical and subtropical areas of the world, so it makes sense that the cultures that developed there would figure out a way to use it—and it has been used for body art since the Bronze Age. (Refresher: Stone Age roughly two million years ago, Bronze Age roughly beginning 3,300 BC, Iron Age roughly beginning 1,200 BC.) You can imagine how many women of many cultural and religions including Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Christians have used henna as body art on their hands, palms, feet, soles of the feet, and faces throughout the ages for weddings, for holidays, celebrations—especially victory in war—and in general to be blessed with luck, joy, and beauty. Let’s face it, they decorated their bodies so they could look hot!

Henna is not exclusive to women. If you travel in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India you’ll see gray haired men who have died their beards with henna (not sexy….).

Henna leaves are dried and ground into powder, sifted and mixed with something mildly acidic like citrus or tea and then mixed with an essential oil like eucalyptus, tea tree, lavender to help the stain absorb into the skin. The resulting paste is applied by various tools of the trade that are reminiscent of cake decorator cones and funnels.

The colorful lawsone molecule migrates into the skin within minutes, but really needs a full eight hours to absorb. In Karma, I fudged a little on this because it didn’t further the story to have Meredith sitting around waiting for the henna to take. Body artists draw the henna paste onto the skin in various patterns. It starts out being orange then darkens reddish brown and even to a maroon color. The longer the paste is left on the skin, the darker and more lasting the design—up to eight weeks. Most women try to leave the paste on overnight, and then flick it off in the morning.

Steaming the paste designs, holding your hands or body part close to a fire (with caution of course), or otherwise warming the paste will darken and stain and make it last longer. The henna fades as your skin naturally exfoliates (sheds skin cells) over a period of time.

Naturally prepared henna paste has been used safely since the Bronze Age. But beauty product manufacturers pre-mix henna with toxins such as silver nitrate, carmine, pyrogallol, disperse orange dye, and chromium which can cause potentially lethal allergic reactions and chronic inflammatory responses (also ultimately deadly), and the FDA has deemed illegal these pre-mixed henna dyes (for hair mostly). If you’re interested in learning more about the five pounds per year of chemicals that your body absorbs through FDA approved beauty products, read Toxic Beauty: How Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Endanger Your Health . . . And What You Can Do About It by Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. Dr. Epstein is one of the world’s leading experts on cancer causes and prevention and contributed to my last health book Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America.

Henna artists are springing up in the US now that there is a demand. But whatever you do never use so-called “black henna.” In the late 1900’s fermented, dried indigo was mixed with henna and used as hair dye. Then henna artists in the East got the idea to use para-phenylenediamine in place of henna, (think synthetic, plastic, varnish, silicone). Painting it onto your skin can cause blistering, even life threatening allergic reactions and at the very least permanent scarring. It’s still used in the East in tourist areas as the allergic reactions don’t necessarily kick in immediately so they can get away with using it on unwitting tourists.

Stick with natural henna paste and you’ll have a wonderful experience.

Someone who read my novel Karma said to me that she felt “that the message that what happened to our heroine was somehow the result of her own actions, that is her karma, was just too unsettling.”

Whoa Nelly! Either she was reading Karma very late at night or decided to skip the ending altogether, or most likely all she did was read the title of the book and made up her mind about the book’s message.

Blaming the victim is not the message of the book. It is exactly the opposite. The reason the novel ended up with the title of Karma was because of the venue Meredith Fitzgerald finds herself in—India. As a medical doctor Meredith would naturally interpret the psychological aftermath of what she went through as “post traumatic stress disorder,” but because she is in India—living in the thick of all things Indian—it’s logical that she would be curious when both her oppressor, Mrs. Pawar, and her accidental spiritual teacher, Mr. Jhombarkar begin talking to her about karma. Westerners have the cause and effect interpretation of karma ingrained in our heads, and Meredith is suffering from PTSD (and one of the hallmark manifestations of PTSD is self-blame), so she would naturally feel that what happened to her is her “karma,” i.e. her fault.

Meredith is in India, carrying around a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita is a summary of all the knowledge contained in the Hindu holy texts, the Vedas and the Upanishads. Hindus consider the Gita is a guide to life. Those who are not properly educated in the Gita believe that people bring bad things on themselves by their actions. But karma isn’t isolated to each individual. Rather, the world rebounding continually with the karmic activities of everyone. Bad things happen because life is harsh, according to the Gita, we can only control our own actions and reactions. It’s our choice to contribute in a good or bad way to the karma of the world.

A student of Buddhism emailed me, “Blaming the victim is indeed a misunderstanding of karma, but it is regrettably how many people use the concept—as an excuse not to help suffering people. Quite simply, the law of karma presents us with the opportunity to act, here and now, in a way that yields a better future. The notion of karma can be used to empower ourselves, to add insult to injury, or to succumb with resignation. Perhaps human nature is the problem, not the idea of karma?”

I learned a lot from reading and rereading those letters. For a long time I thought I wasn’t destined to be a novelist, though I love writing fiction. I wrote a series of books in the health genre, books on weight loss, Chinese medicine, adrenal burnout, and my latest sole authored book Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America (no explanation needed, I assume).

But I still missed writing fiction. So I got out my draft and started working on it and a year later I was ready to shop it to publishers. The only problem was, as one editor put it to a friend of mine who was shopping his memoir, “. . . this is without question the absolutely worst time the publishing business has experienced since Gutenberg invented the printing press.” She went on to write, “Honest to God, the entire industry virtually imploded upon itself late last year and things continue to deteriorate, with every major house laying off dozens of employees and drastically reducing the number of books signed for publication.”

I could understand that. What really blew my mind though was editors at major publishing houses telling my agent, “We don’t read manuscripts on sexual slavery.”

Okay . . . why not? Because this is an important social issue, so why wouldn’t a publisher want to at least look at a book with an urgently important social message?

It was after hearing many variations on that theme that I decided to self publish.

This column by Maureen Dowd about the disparity between nuns and priests in the Catholic Church is just one illustration of how much further women have to go for equality—and this is the United States. It’s hard for us with all of our privileges, options, and freedoms to imagine the oppression most of the women in the world endure.

Karma has not even been published but so far I’ve heard basically the same comments about it, it’s disturbing, and it’s making people think. I’m not happy about giving people nightmares, but I am glad that people are thinking more about the woman and children who are victims today.

Way back when I first started the first draft there was virtually nothing written on the subject but now there are many organizations and numerous experts who have written non-fiction books on what’s happening to 2.5 million women and children across the globe. I would like nothing more than to be helpful to the cause, if nothing more than bringing awareness to this issue.

I had to make a lot of decisions during the writing of Karma. The first thing I decided early on was to make the protagonist American because even though Americans have firm convictions and heartfelt desires to help others in the world, for many reasons–which I’m getting into on my blog–trafficked women and children have fallen through the cracks and are virtually ignored. Making my protagonist American allows readers to ponder what it would be like to have something like that happen to themselves or to someone they know or care about.