I didn’t pack a travel towel, or any towel. There’s at least one other essential I neglected to pack, but that was unintentional. With the towel, though, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even seen it, or where, and it wasn’t worth investing the time it would take to track it down… only to then have to make more room in my already fit-to-bursting carry-on in order to accommodate it.
Upon checking in to my hostel, I didn’t yet know if my stay in Istanbul would be long enough to justify renting a towel. And I definitely didn’t want to have to go buy one. So the most sensible thing to do, naturally, was to look for a hammam. Why not begin my time in Türkiye with a proper Turkish bath? Towels are complimentary there, after all.
And so it was that my very first stop after stashing my backpack was to a walk-in hammam that turned out to be something more of a spa. The twenty minute wait of which I was advised when walking in only ballooned to a modest hourlong vigil, towards the end of which I was ushered into a self-administered shower by Aytan, my Azerbaijani massage therapist. The actual hammami scrubbing that I’d been expecting came only after the slickly oily but altogether pleasant massage, the most surprising part of which was when the cat-like therapist jumped onto my back, knees first, and ground down hard.
The post-massage scrubbing was cursory at best, however, and it had been my understanding that the full experience was only to be had at one of the old-school hammams steeped enough in history to have to now live up to it. One such place had been recommended to me by the last massage therapist that had ministered to me in Santa Marta, Colombia, and that was why Turkish bathhouses were on my radar in the first place.
I decided to really spoil myself and opted to chase the “Traditional Hamam Ritual” that is the standard entree at this place with a deep tissue massage afterwards. It meant coming back on Sunday evening, and I felt that Saturday night was best spent strolling from Taksim Square down İstiklal Avenue anyhow, when the city is beyond its fullest and this main thoroughfare overfloweth.
It also meant having to cut short an already rescheduled online plenary meeting that was to decide the host nations for a bicycling conference that I’d only recently fallen in love with attending, but the outcome of the vote at the end of this call that I’d now be missing already seemed in surer hands than mine, so I was at peace with this. Nevertheless, it still made for a somewhat jarring transition when I was abruptly yanked from being immersed in the internecine politics and petty squabbling typical of a group that is otherwise in alignment on most major issues… yanked away by being presented with my towel and being directed to the locker room to stow away my belongings.
I wrapped said towel around my waist sarong-style and made my way to the marble-tiled main bathing area, where I was greeted warmly by the younger attendants—who rinsed me with warm water and placed me on the even warmer marble dais, right alongside other waiting patrons—and I was then entrusted into the care of a dour-seeming older gent. This dourness melted away completely once he was done appraising me and had asked me the particulars of my name and national origin. He introduced himself as Uthman (probably spelled Osman here in Türkiye), and seemed rather mollified by the ingratiating ‘Namaste’ with which I usually punctuate delivering the news of my being originally from India.
He was very solicitous throughout all that followed, but also gave me the impression that he wasn’t cutting me any slack, nor would he have done so for any other customer. Scrubbing my skin intermittently with an unforgivingly bristly loofah, he would contort my body within the confines of the washing station at whim, in order to cleanse every square inch of my skin apart from the nether regions. He would occasionally pause to ask “Okay?” and “Good?”, and while I unfailingly responded in the affirmative, the thought struck me that he would just as likely have continued on in the same fashion regardless of my response.
It also occurred to me that other than my own partner at home, and the halfhearted scrubbing I was subjected to a couple days ago at the other spa, the last person to wash me this assiduously was my father, back in my prepubescent days when it was part of our weekend routine. It was a reassuring ritual, no doubt meant to afford me the opportunity to discuss my changing body with my dad, but I already had biology textbooks and CD-ROM encyclopedias to satisfy all my curiosity on that score. Next, my mind wandered to the tradition amongst my people of washing the corpses of our own deceased family members before their burial, and I rued that after childhood we must need wait until death to be able to share a bath with them again.
Interspersed with all this cleansing was a healthy dose of massaging and liberally applied bubble bath solution extruded from an air-filled sack, with the soapy suds that came to cover my body providing all the lubrication that could be needed, and my scrubber’s fingers and knuckles more than up to the task of kneading my flesh like dough, or perhaps pancake batter would be a more apt metaphor.
Most memorably, he would interlace his fingers through mine, and then squeeze all the blood running through my own all the way up to my fingertips—until I became convinced that my capillaries would burst!—only to finish with a resounding pop and the rush of feeling back into my hands. In fact, the sensation of numbness and pain that this action would produce reminded me acutely of the same feeling from earlier in the day when my hands were protesting against holding my phone up in bed while typing into it (much like I’m doing right now, albeit for a somewhat nobler cause) and this felt like a sharp rebuke of all the abuse that we put our bodies through in the mindless process of staving off boredom and remaining enslaved to our infernal devices.
As my scrubbing wound down, and as I was already beginning to feel nostalgic for my old friend Osman, I felt keenly aware that he reminded me not just of my dad, but of all my dads—my uncles, that is—whether by blood, or by bond. I felt like his avuncular spirit had distilled the essence of everything that he had to teach me into this quite formal performance of an experience, and so I feel obliged to write all of this down while I can still recall the details, blood-deprived gravity-defying benumbed fingertips be damned.
Of the deep tissue massage that followed the scrubbing, I only have more impressionistic memories. My therapist’s name this time was Reza, which I told him is also the name of my younger brother. He was kind enough to ask if I had any problem areas, and I described the region of my right leg between my hip and knee to him in enough detail that he never ventured too far from it for too long during the entire 75 minute session that he tended to me.
I found it impossible to turn my brain off completely even during this interval, and the one refrain I kept harking back to is that I want to learn how to massage others myself, just as I had resolved to do during my bevy of massages in Colombia, but then failed to follow up on once back amongst the comforting and familiar distractions of home. Knowing that a close friend has completed her journey through massage school and is now gainfully employed mastering the art of manual lymphatic drainage massage is encouraging enough to make my own ambitions seem more achievable, though, even if my masseur-ial aspirations are likely to remain more of a passion than a profession.
Throughout the massage, Reza seemed to be directing all of my stress and tension toward my already quite tense neck and shoulders. Once he had staged everything there, he went to work on what felt like the swollen frogs now taking up permanent residence within my nape, and it was at some point when the scruff of my neck was cradled between his wiry hands when the last of these frogs had croaked that I realized that—just like the classic Coca-Cola commercial “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”—I’d just like to give the world a massage, even if it means starting with one person at a time.
