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 tooth paste.
2. Use the corner of cardboard or writing paper folded times over to scrape between the gum and teeth, 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 tooth paste. If it sounds, familiar, you are right. You have just read it all in Method Number One above.
3. Use dry and clean tissue wrapped over your index finger nail and do as you would with cardboard or writing paper, followed by the rest of Methods Number One or Two.
4. When you are on an overnight train or bus journey and water is not available except what you have in your water bottle, scrape off all the dirt on and between your index finger and flesh and do as you would in Methods Number Two or Three.
5. Once on a Physical Training camp in the wild, I made do with leaves and twigs of edible plants, making sure that they were above the excreta range of both man and animals.
6. Pretend you have a slight sorethroat. Ask for a warm glass of water and salt. Dissolve the salt in the water and gurgle your heart out.
Now, some twenty years later, I might make do with a cotton bud, a tooth swipe or even the tip of my thick and strong tongue. If possible, just walk into any twenty-four hour convenience shop, or if in a hotel, just call the operator to direct you to concierge or housekeeping. Even if you are in a two star budget hotel, you are likely to be presented with a cheap toothbrush and that is better than having none at all. Just make sure it is not a recycled toothbrush!