Dragon's teeth

Who knows? It might all have begun with a tube of toothpaste. It was 1970 and Bunny and I were in Kathmandu for the first time. The city, politically and topographically, was very different from what it is today. It was a tranquil backwater, unrippled by the turbulence of strife and revolution. Bulls blue as midnight shadows lounged down crowded lanes so tortuous that time itself got lost and doubled back on its own tracks.The bronze snarl of carved lions guarded shrines to benign ogres and fearsome deities. But there were anachronisms in this mediaeval tapestry which bemused visitors from an India still screened by a swadeshi curtain of protectionism. Thanks to Nepal's liberal import policies, German beer and Swiss chocolates were freely available, even in hole-in-the-wall paan shops. All the cars, even the taxis, were Japanese. Then Bunny and I ran out of toothpaste. We went to a nearby kirana shop. It was run, as most such shops in Kathmandu, by an Indian whose broad vowels evoked the far-off plains of Marwar. Colgate? I asked. The shopkeeper nodded and put a Colgate on the counter. How much? I asked. Eighteen rupees, said the shopkeeper. Indian rupees, he added. Eighteen! It's only 12 in India, I protested. The shopkeeper shrugged philosophically at the relativity of all things, including the prices of toothpaste. Shelling out 18 rupees for toothpaste in the course of a carefully budgeted holiday was galling. But it turned out that I had an option. Why don't you take this, it's only eight rupees, Indian, said the shopkeeper producing another tube which said Oxygen. Oxygen? I'd never heard of a toothpaste called Oxygen. Where's it made? I asked. China, said the shopkeeper. And curiosity joined forces with thrift to help me make my decision. I'd never before seen a China-made product, let alone had the opportunity to try one. I'll take the Oxygen, I said, forking out my eight bucks, Indian. How can you possibly buy something from China? said Bunny, as we left the shop. Why not? I asked. But I knew what she meant. Just eight years ago, we'd had our national nose bloodied in a conflict with that country. Patronising China-made goods had a whiff of the unpatriotic. That in this case the product in question was for a use as intimate as oral hygiene compounded the squeamishness. But my journalistic curiosity got the better of such qualms. Suppose your teeth fall out? said Bunny. I pointed out that far from being a toothless nation thanks to its dental toiletry, China had shown in '62 that it had teeth aplenty. But what if through some unfathomable Fu Manchu-like prescience, the mandarins in Beijing had predicted that an Indian tourist would be a potential purchaser of toothpaste in such-and-such place, at such-and-such time, and had worked out a fiendishly complicated logistical scenario to have available for me a suitably sabotaged item of toiletry which would render me toothless in a symbolic de-fanging of the Indian state? The next morning, I tried the Oxygen and found it to be excellent. I wanted to take a couple of tubes home, but was afraid Customs would seize them and brand me a traitor to boot. But I did take back a revelation: Made-in-China was better - and cheaper - than Made-in-India. Today when the Chinese dragon is stretching its vast pinions to shower a bounty of goods - from toys to clocks, footwear to fine crystal - across the planet, I think of that tube of toothpaste. Was my consumer choice in Kathmandu the first flutter of the wings of a butterfly that would set off a global storm? Had I had a glimmer of future events, I might well have said the heck with toothpaste, of Chinese or any other provenance, and stuck to a good old datun of home-grown neem.