by Lokemun Magar

Created on: September 22, 2008   Last Updated: February 16, 2009

How do you brush your teeth without a toothbrush? What constitutes a toothbrush? Other than using our conventional plastic rod with bristles on one end to scrape off the dreaded plague on and inbetween the tooth and the gum, we usually cannot think of other ways to brush our teeth without a toothbrush!

"What! Brush your teeth without a toothbrush? You must be out of your mind!" I can almost hear my eldest sister scream in heaven. She was the fastidious one among the five of us girls. Her teeth was her shining glory, as her naturally frizzy hair lost out to all our glossy hair.

I was the lazy and most illogical sibling, and being an attention deficit Edison-gene hunter child that I was, you will not be surprised that I often thought my toothbrush would appear out of the sky or the bathroom air with the click of my fingers. Unfortunately, no matter how many times it occurred to me, I would always end up pretending that I actually brushed my teeth in the normal way, with the aid of a toothbrush, during the youth church camps and school camps.

How did I survive those camps without a toothbrush? Well, desperate situations often call for desperate measures, and being the hunter child that I was, I came up with ingenious ways of cleaning my teeth and getting rid of my bad breath.

When the private cubicle was not available, I would make sure I was the last to brush my teeth by busying myself elsewhere, or I would bring my toiletry bag into the bath cubicle and 'brush' my teeth together with my bath.

The bright attention deficit gene in me reframed my mind to read 'Brush your teeth' as 'Clean out your teeth of all the plague and smell'. It was easy to brush my teeth without a toothbrush then. I could always borrow toothpaste which I could honestly claim to have forgotten to bring, so half the battle was won. If twenty-four hour shops existed then, I would not be in the rut of having to brush my teeth without a toothbrush. And in those days when AIDS awareness was just beginning in my country, nobody would even begin contemplating sharing his toothbrush with a sibling!

These were methods I tried, disgusting though they may be and ranked lowest in terms of pleasantries:

1. Chew on a hard fruit, such as a crisp apple, followed by flossing with borrowed dental floss or thread possibly pulled off a part of your Tee-shirt, or even a strand or two of your longest hair under most desperate circumstances. Rinse your teeth after smearing and rubbing your teeth over with the borrowed

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