Read the six products together and they cover a day. Not a regimen and not a schedule: five small things that already happen in a lot of houses, at the hours they already happen.
On waking
A teaspoon of the digestive blend in warm water, before anything else. Cumin, fennel, ginger, coriander, ajwain and hing, ground fine. It is the bowl of seeds by the door of a restaurant, moved to the beginning of the day and put in water instead of in your palm.
Warm the water, do not boil it. Stir and drink it while it is still warm. That is the whole of it, and it takes about as long as waiting for a kettle.
Eight in the morning
A small spoon of the citrus cleanser in your palm, mixed with water to a paste, before the day starts. Orange peel, lemon peel, besan, sandalwood, turmeric.
It is a powder, which means it does not go off in the way a wet cleanser does, and it means you mix what you need. It also means the first time you use it feels wrong, because it is not a foam. Give it a week.
With lunch
The flax and garlic sprinkle over dal, or rice, or straight off the spoon as a dry chutney. Flax, garlic, Byadgi chilli, groundnut oil, hing, salt.
This is the one that is simply food. There is nothing to prepare and no correct amount. It is a podi, and it is on the table.
Ten at night
The latte. Milk warmed, not boiled, one teaspoon stirred in, honey or jaggery if you like it sweet. Turmeric, ashwagandha, nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon, black pepper.
Boiling is the common mistake and it is worth avoiding, because milk that has been boiled has a skin and a different taste and the drink stops being the comfortable thing it is meant to be. Warm it to the point where you would not want to hold the pan, and stop.
Most people start with one and add another when the first stops being a decision.
Sunday
The hair mask first, mixed with water or curd to a thick paste and worked into the roots and the scalp, then left for twenty to thirty minutes. The face mask goes on while that one sets, which is the only piece of choreography in the whole range and is really just a way of not wasting half an hour.
Rinse the hair with lukewarm water. Hot water and a clay mask do not get on.
You do not have to do all five
This is the part worth saying plainly, because a page that lays out a day tends to read as an instruction.
Almost nobody does five. Most people start with one, usually the latte or the sprinkle, and add another some months later when the first has stopped being a decision and started being a thing they just do. That is the difference between a ritual and a regime, and it is the only sense in which any of this is a practice.
None of the five does anything to you that we are claiming here. They are foods and cosmetics, not medicines. What the day describes is when people use them, which is a different kind of statement and the only one we are in a position to make.
If you want the short version: warm water first, wash your face, eat lunch with something on it, drink something warm before bed, and keep Sunday for the slow one. That is a day. The jars are just what is in the cupboard when you get there.
