Today the gap between my breakfast and lunch was just three hours. Exactly three. On usual days, it’s more than five hours, I noticed. Today I felt energized. But the poor belly could not take a breather today! A bunch of grapes was hung on the fruit cart, and I picked up a berry from the bunch after lunch. It had no calories. Ancient medical sciences give guidelines that ‘allow three or more hours between two meals. That keeps the fire in your belly in control. The longer gap is also dangerous. The other interesting fact is that our digestive power is strongest between 12 and 2 PM. Eat the most nutritious stuff during this time. You will feel better and energized. Take proper care of your health before it’s too late; have you not heard that saying, ‘A stitch in time saves nine!

Enough about food and health! Let’s talk about being ill now. What do you do when you fall ill? Imagine what will happen if Virginia Woolf gets sick. Is there any doubt that she would write another fine piece on something! In her work, On being ill, Woolf writes that there is so much to quote from literature when you are happy and healthy, but what will you say if you want to say something about your illness in literary style? “To hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and headache.” She says that literature has all grown one way, and she seems not happy with that. “The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let the sufferers try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry.”

Illness is a universal phenomenon; who does not fall ill in his life? In novels, so many characters get sick. Isn’t it? Sometimes illness becomes a cause of emotional salvation for the readers; sometimes it becomes a guise for hiding the cruelest of criminals. A repugnance at the mere fancy of an imminent disease that is incurable fills the pages of a book with an air of abhorrence. Have you forgotten that celebrated specialist who came to ascertain the state of Kitty’s health in “Anna Karenina,” when the prescription of first cod-liver, then iron, and then nitrate of silver did no good to her? Wasn’t that character so unique, who insisted that a maidenly sense of shame is only a relic of barbarism. He was talking about handling the woman patients.

What about that first scene of Dostoyvesky’s ‘The Idiot,’ where that fair-haired young man in the cloak, conversing with fellow passengers in the third-class wagon of a train coming back from Switzerland to Petersberg (Russia), said that he had been sent abroad for his health: that he had suffered from some strange nervous malady- a kind of epilepsy, with convulsive spasms.

A question came there,

“whether he had been cured?”

“No, they did not cure me,” was an answer from the young man.

” Hey ! that’s it!. you stumped up your money for nothing. And we believe in those fellows here” Said one passenger.

“Gospel truth sir Gospel truth!” exclaimed another.

Even if a work of fiction is not primarily based on some disease, whether it is infectious, hereditary, or physiological. Still, someone on this or that page falls ill in almost every story. A major character or any minor, they are bound to fall ill. And a novelist knows how to use that illness in the plot to extrapolate the true substance of the book he is writing. Anyway, let that novelist do whatever he wants with the illness of his characters; you keep yourself fit to avoid any illness. Here is a health tip from my side:

 ‘Drink plenty of water throughout the day and limit sugary beverages.’

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