Mark Batterson once said, “You’re always one decision away from a totally different life.”

Maham experienced this quite recently and now when she’s happy with her new “different life”, she shares what she went through with everyone she meets.

It all started nine months back when a new girl, Alia, took admission in her college. Soon, she became the centre of attention because of her nice, friendly and talkative personality. However, Maham noted a strange thing about her.

Her mouth, almost all the time, moved as though she was munching on something. When asked, she told Maham she loved eating raw rice as she liked their crisp and starchy taste. Plus, she felt active while chewing them.

For Maham, it was a weird thing that had no logic at all. She knew some people like to chew chewing gum, paan or beetle nuts, etc., but raw rice? She never heard of anyone eating them.

When she got home, curious, she went to the kitchen, opened the cabinet, took some raw rice and put them in her mouth. She munched on them the way Alia did. She found their crispness and starchy sweetness interesting. That evening she made three more visits to kitchen to get rice.

Next day she got a handful of rice, put them in a jar and kept them in a drawer of her study table. No need to tell she had also fallen in the habit of eating them.

Days passed. Months moved on. And Maham started developing some health issues. She felt thirsty all the time regardless of the weather conditions and had to keep a water bottle with her to sip from it. Her skin and hair, once fresh, got dried and rough. She started having toothaches more frequently. Her stomach always felt full. She lost her appetite. Abdominal pain was now a usual matter.

One day she felt severe pain in her belly along with nausea. After tests and ultrasound, the doctor diagnosed it as a partial blockage in her small intestine. He suggested some medicines saying, “Eat them for five days as prescribed, if it still doesn’t get better, we’ll have to operate upon.”

The word “operation” really stuck in her head. She got scared. She realised that maybe it all happened due to eating raw rice. By this time, it had been eating them for six months.

She couldn’t approach Alia to share her concern because she had left the college only after three months as her father was sent to another city by his office. Both of them had not bothered to exchange their phone numbers while saying goodbye.

That evening, when everyone was away, she opened her laptop and did a Google search for the “consequences of eating raw rice”. What appeared before her eyes was extremely shocking!

She not only came to know about the problems she was suffering from, but also a long list of other problems such as anaemia, weakness, tiredness, worms in the gut, constipation, bleeding from anus, yellowish skin, skinny body, headache, food poisoning, kidney stones, pesticide consumption and lots more!

She learnt that this condition is called ‘pica’ where a person has compulsion to eat non-nutritive things such as sand, paper, wall paint, salt, rice or chalk, etc., due to the deficiency of some minerals and vitamins. Pica might also arise when someone is addicted to eating something nutrition-less because of the texture of the substance. Maham was sure she belonged to the latter category.

Horrified, she took the jar from her drawer, went to the kitchen and emptied it in the rice container. She’s been lucky that her family wasn’t aware of her habit. Finally, she had taken that one decision that made her healthier. Allah had mercy on her and she got better without any surgery.

From then on, she started controlling her urge for munching and when, at times, she felt she was unable to control, she ate almonds or coconut instead of rice. She also learnt about healthier food choices in her routine meals and switched to them. It’s been three months now and she’s happy, healthy and content.

Published in Dawn, Young World, September 7th, 2019