Leaving India

The days that led up to my departure from India were as surreal as the day I arrived. I'd purposely given myself a few days after our month-long class ended so I had time to adjust, to prepare and, most important, to say my goodbyes to the people and places I'd come to love in my time there. Over those three days my friends left in waves and the goodbyes became more difficult.

On Friday night (the last day of our class) all 25 participants of "The Heart of Yoga" course gathered at Sandy's, the only Western style restaurant I frequented (largely because of their amazing chocolate desserts) and we did our rounds exchanging embraces, phone numbers, email addresses and reassurances about keeping in touch. The food at Sandy's was amazing, as always. It's the one place I allowed myself to eat meat and at that I kept it at fish. "Pesto fish" to be exact; the dish is unreal. We weren't in the main area of the restaurant that I'd come to know so well. Instead they placed us in a small private room with a dark brown door that resembled a Hershey's chocolate bar.

We asked for their wine selection.

"We have one red and one white."

Everyone settled on ordering both to suit differing preferences. Turned out they had exactly one bottle of each of red and white, which was clearly not going to serve everyone. Not that we had a class full of lushes, but after 4 weeks of intense physical, mental and, yes, spiritual exploration, most of us were looking for the proverbial release, which doesn't happen with just half a glass of wine.

"This is India." I'd used that phrase again and again to remind myself that there are places that don't follow the same rules I've been used to the last 27 years of my life, places that aren't designed to serve me. India is full of oddities, surprises and contradictions that are not familiar at all. It is a place where with few traffic signals and five times as many drivers on the road, traffic still manages to flow, where poverty and disease are rampant but people do not become animals and in fact interpersonal relationships seem to be the priority, where the dangers of the wild encroach on the safety of the city and yet people don't live in constant fear.

Where a Western-style restaurant has exactly two bottles of wine.

This is India. And India, I'd learned, wasn't there to give us what we wanted but would easily reveal and offer what we needed.

After 30 minutes or so more bottles started to appear. More reds and more whites. But all were different, making me wonder whether the owner of the restaurant had run home and tapped into his own personal supply to make sure his customers were served.

We ate off each other's plates, tasted and sometimes shared each other's wine (we had to, after all, since there was a limited supply of each) and exchanged glances and smiles that managed relief and sadness simultaneously. A few people shed tears here and there. But no feeling was indulged for too long. Something would interrupt it: the food coming out, the dessert menu, the mosquitos that had to be waved away or swatted, depending on the individual's interpretation of "ahimsa" (translated as "non-harming," it is one of the five restraints yogis are called to).

At one point, something that looked very much like a racquetball racquet was brought out. It had an odd metal mesh though, rather than the nylon strings I expected, and it had a thunderbolt-shaped emblem across the mesh and an "on" button on the handle. It took a group of us a few moments to realize that it was a mosquito swatter. We turned it on, waved it around and nothing. There were a few people who knew exactly what it was and what it did and who kept reassuring those of us that were confused that yes it was meant to kill mosquitos. Someone handed it to one of the girls, who was known to be a tennis player and she seemed delighted but equally confused. Before she could register and react to everyone's gasp and warning, she touched the mesh and from the look on her face it was clear she'd received quite a shock. She handed it off, swiftly shaking the shocked hand, as if trying to release the energy in hear hand.

Someone handed it to me and I was thoroughly terrified, having seen that it had enough power to make its improper use very uncomfortable. I waved it around and nothing. Then while holding it and talking to others about it and its lack of functionality, a mosquito flew lazily into it and ZAP!

I almost dropped the thing from surprise and shrieked like a five year old girl.

Then I was fascinated. I waved it around some more and could see the blue spark every time a mosquito came in contact with the mesh. A couple of times I even saw the bug drop to the floor.

I'm not a fan of killing things. My partner can attest to the many hours I've accumulated now trying to get silverfish and all variety of spiders (even the ones that look especially mean and hairy) out of our apartment without harming them. I even do my best with flies and roaches to get them safely out a door or window. But mosquitos fall somehow into an excepted category.

Towards the end of the evening, the waiters brought out a birthday cake with what looked like a flare in the center. Elyssa, one of the longest yoga practitioners in the class (and my rickshaw nightmare buddy) was celebrating her birthday. I'm not sure if she managed to blow the thing out or if we had to wait for it to die down. We sang "Happy Birthday" in English and then started the process of singing it in every language represented in the room. We had quite a few: Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian, Italian, French, Greek, German, Belgian, Dutch, Korean and Finnish just to name a few. I've never been in a room with people representing so many different cultures and languages.

Late in the night we filed out but lingered outside the restaurant, saying a second or third round of goodbyes, figuring out ways to keep in touch and even meet up in the coming months. When my group finally started to move, we did so lazily, or maybe hesitatingly. Every step got us closer to a final goodbye. And for me it was especially difficult because that night I was losing the person I'd been closest to this whole time.

I've mostly refrained from using names and (too many) identifying features. This is to protect the identity of those involved and also because there are some things about any experience like this that are best kept secret. Not everything is meant to be shared.

I am making an exception here for my friend Andrea. It is difficult to talk about some things in my experience, among them the difficulty of saying goodbye, without mentioning her.

I can't remember exactly how we met. That first moment when we exchanged names has since been overshadowed by so many moments that carry more significance. Many of these I must keep to myself because they are so personal; others seem to lose their power and meaning when put into words, but I'll share what I can in the best way I can to do it justice.

It's not enough to say that Andrea was the person that shared a writing stool with me everyday, that as every weekend approached, she was the one person I always consulted, that every powerful, beautiful, frightening and confusing moment I had in my experience was always immediately followed by a concerned or congratulatory look from her.

If I did not attend a class, she was asked about my whereabouts. If she did not attend class, I was asked about hers.

She was there to reassure me when I couldn't stand to look at the traffic as our rickshaw swerved around it (Andrea lived in China prior to visiting India and rickshaws were not unknown to her... though she did freak out as much as I did when we bounced off a car and hit a motorcycle), she was someone with whom I could share stories of Kevin and who in fact would prompt me for them because she knew I enjoyed talking about him. We could talk endlessly about anything and more often than not those conversations delved deeper than I'd become used to these last few years of my life. In my teens I remember discussions with friends being overwhelmingly emotional, with difficult confessions, passionate aspirations and deep regrets often discussed. In my time as an adult, I became used to discussions about generally practical, banal matters; those intense discussions were less frequent. With Andrea, no conversation was trivial: each one carried the weight of what we were working through (grappling with, really) in our practice and our lives. Not that all things were heavy with us. Even the most somber discussion still had a quality of lightness to it, perhaps in relief that we'd found someone with whom we could share anything and everything.

Oddly, some of the things I most closely associate with Andrea, things which accentuate my memory of her, are surprisingly simple: "Mikey" the roach that terrorized her and Julianna (her roommate, who would also become a dear friend), the Western style coffeehouse we discovered that became something of our spot... a place to flee to when we wanted a taste of what we considered home, the smokey crystal earrings that she gave me, and the fiery red scarf that had her name on it the moment I saw it.

I could always count on a kiss "hello" and "goodbye" each day from Andrea.

On our last class of the last day of the course, as we sat side by side in meditation, she moved her hand and placed it in mine just as I considered doing the same thing to her and we both encountered a powerful, almost burning energy moving up our hands and arms, a testament, I think, to the bond we both already knew we shared. I was so surprised at the sensation, that before mentioning what I'd felt, I asked her if she'd sensed anything, just to be sure that it had really occurred, that I wasn't generating this reaction within myself. She described exactly what I had felt. That surge was real.

How do you say "goodbye" to someone like that?

I believe the only way is with tears.

I held mine back as I hugged her in the dark, shaded street in front of her apartment. The evening was cooler than usual but still slightly humid. "Comfortable" is what I called it, trying to make small talk to distract from the difficult task of understanding my feelings at that moment. Our hug lasted longer than usual and I held her hand as long as I could as I began to walk away. I looked back to see her disappear into the dark passageway that led to the stairs and sighed when I considered the notion that this would be the last time I saw her for a very long while.

In that instant I realized I was going to miss this place, these people and these moments. Despite all the training I've had in recognizing and letting go of attachments, I held on as tight as I could to the image of Andrea standing in front of her building, wearing the beautiful red kurta I'd come to associate with her (she always looked so good in red). I wanted to take that image with me, to have it as an anchor for all the others I'd encountered both with and without her.

My heart was heavy the remaining days, each goodbye a chip to the heart so to speak. Another space that can't be filled even with memories. Another piece of me that now belongs with someone else.

If I close my eyes now, I can still see her there, infront of her building, even though she's been long gone, living with her daughter in their new home in Singapore. She left her ghost, her imprint in that place that I will forever link to her. A place that, because of that link, is among the few that I could easily find my way to if given the opportunity now. An imprint so tangible, so obvious that it drew tears the next day when I left Julianna there after our last shopping excursion (trying to get the last of our gifts for friends and family). As the rickshaw drove off I looked back and did my best to imagine her standing there, where she'd been the night before. The street seemed to ache with her absence.

On my last day I went back to the KYM to drop off the SIM card that had proven an ordeal to get. That in itself was a chapter, wasn't it? I timed my arrival so I could see the friends who were staying for the following class, a two week meditation intensive. The last ten minutes of the hour are always a break. I saw a handful of them and gave out the pharmaceuticals and food that I no longer needed. The I walked back to the hotel, slowly, taking every step in with the acknowledgment that it was the last time I'd be strolling down that street.

I met up with Holly and Wyatt at the hotel, finished packing and handed off the rest of the items I wouldn't be bringing back: sesame oil I'd bought to use as therapeutic body lotion, dental floss (which you can't find in India for some reason), the pumice stone that had become my feet's best friend.

In this sorting out of what would stay and what would go, it wasn't lost on me that as we travel we do well to travel lightly, carrying only the essentials, sharing everything else. I couldn't bring India back with me. Not the KYM, the stray dogs, the nervous cows, the traffic, the noise, the smiles, the dirt, the trees, the birds, the sounds or the sunsets and sunrises that greeted me daily. If anything I could take back the memory of these things, and even that, with the passage of time, will have to fade. In truth, I knew the only thing I could really bring back and keep forever are the changes this place had initiated, coaxed and nurtured in me.

When I boarded the Emirates flight, it's star-lit ceiling a welcoming return to the amenities and comforts (and excesses) of the West, I scrolled through my memories, giving them full attention again, hoping to keep them with me a little longer than usual. As many things as I thought of (seeing my first sunset, practicing to the sunrise at the rooftop of the KYM, getting lost in the city, the temples, the music, the street life, my close call with a roach, mahamudra), they all pointed, inevitably back to that night as I walked away from Andrea, doing my best not to let my feelings overwhelm me.

Strange as it is, if I were to describe the face of India, it would not be the rich dark Tamil faces that I encountered every day, the impossibly beautiful green eyes on the almond skin of Kashmiri boys, or the stern painted faces of the Brahmins. For me, the face of India remains a sweet smile on the beautiful doe-eyed face of a Mexican girl from China.

Do Not Read This While Eating

I’ve mentioned what I’ve termed my “ India moment” in a previous blog entry.  It was beautiful and even a little sentimental and it came to define India for me: beauty in the midst of chaos.  Consistent with the process of Yoga, of looking at things with untainted clarity, I’ve since had various encounters that have also come to define my time here, or, if not define it, at least elaborate on it so that I get both the good and the bad of what’s unique to this place (at least relative to what I know).  I’ve decided to compile all of bad into one entry for two reasons: (1) because, though worth mentioning, they are not nearly as significant as many of the other things worth writing about and (2) to help anyone who is a bit squeamish regarding hygiene, bodily functions and unsanitary conditions avoid reading about anything nasty.

If the title has not made it clear, I will reiterate here: if you are eating, you gross out easily, or if you are the kind of person who latches onto an image and cannot let it go, it is probably best that you stop reading right here because, as curious as you may be, you will not like what I am going to describe. 

So here we go.

I knew coming here that along with the colors, the food, the culture and the people, that India would offer unpleasantries of impressive proportions.   They presented themselves immediately alongside everything wonderful about this place.  The trash, the pollution, and the stench were the most obvious and, for a week or so, managed to draw my attention to such a degree that I didn’t notice some of the others.  But they are here.  And they span various dimensions of things that would elicit disgust and aversion. 

To start easy, there are lumps of feces on every street… on every block infact.  Some are recognizably canine or feline, others clearly bovine, some human, and some I’ve not managed to recognize.

“You have to scan while you walk,” Linda warned me my first weekend here.  Making your way from point A to point B is not insignificant for someone who isn’t used to cars and buses whizzing by just inches away from them.  You can’t walk on many of the sidewalks because they are loaded with trash or have pallets of bricks stacked on them (if there is construction nearby) or they are very clearly public bathrooms.  There is a bridge I cross daily on my way to lunch and it has a more distinct stench of urine than most of San Diego ’s public toilets.  Many times I walked past men who are in the process of pissing on the sidewalk, some bother to aim away from the road.  Some don’t. 

My walk to school is laden with shit.  All kinds of shit.  So that I have to be especially vigilant in the mornings when I go to school before sunrise or on the odd evening when I leave school after sunset.  The streets are not lit well and, when they are, there are so many heaps of trash, stored trinkets or cars, rickshaws and bikes in the midst of repair scattered throughout that the light from streetlamps rarely makes it to the street floor.  Which means you have to walk slowly and watch where you step at every moment.

Oftentimes I have to pick up the fabric of my pants to lift the cuffs a safe distance from the ground.  I made the mistake of letting them drag once… and only once.  I had to walk half the day with brown and green smudges on my pants whose source I couldn’t identify entirely, but which resembled something that made it at least part way through the process of digestion.  I sighed when I discovered it and told myself I’d have to send these to wash as soon as I got to the hotel and that I just needed to pray that it didn’t stink too bad and disrupt the four classes I still had to attend that day. 

It is not practical to be so rigid here, especially with hygiene.  It is much more practical to simply adapt and understand what is essential and what is not, what is a reasonable and appropriate response and what is not.  I have stepped on mushy, brown, warm stuff and felt the surge of emotions and let the swell retreat with the same deliberateness that it emerged.  There is no use getting angry at myself, at the shit, at its source or at India .  Anger won’t clean my pants or my feet.

Because of the practice of removing your shoes before entering homes, temples, some classrooms and yoga shalas (I’ve even been asked to remove my shoes before entering a jewelry store), it is inefficient to wear any kind of lace up shoes.  So I live my life in sandals here.  My toes feel freer than usual even as my feet ache from the lack of support.  But in as much as they’re free, they’re also less protected.  Everyday, when I get back to the hotel after class I take a shower and spend half that time trying to get the grime, dust and, yes, shit, off my feet.  The soles look black by 7p.m.  After two weeks I decided to buy a pumice stone and rediscovered what truly clean feet look and feel like.  I got to enjoy it for a few hours in the evening.  Then it was back to the regular accumulation of grime the next day.  It didn’t take away from the joy of that freshness.  I looked forward to it every night.  There are simple pleasures that emerge in the respite from what wears on us.  But we can only enjoy those pleasures if something is wearing on us to begin with.

It isn’t only the remnants of bodily functions that you come across.  At least once a week I walk past someone urinating on the street and once almost ran into an old man who came to a full stop as he walked infront of me, lifted his dhoti (the traditional wrap men wear here), squatted and began to shit right infront of me. 

I’m used to this now, mind you, and glad for it.  Yoga philosophy tells us that aversion is no better than attachment.  So when I see any of this in the street, I do my best not to entertain the feeling of disgust.  It just makes me more attentive.  There’s nothing more embarrassing than bumping into someone who is urinating or defecating.

This visibility is strange even now but with every passing day, it’s also taken on a different dimension.  I realized I’d never seen someone else defecate.  It is such a private process.  But here it is treated as a necessity that can’t be avoided.  And in a place with few public bathrooms to be found, there is no option but to do it wherever there’s an urge and an option. 

The streets are cleaned here daily, hosed down at least in some places in the early morning soon after trash is picked up, so the remnants of the day are cleared to create space for the next day’s.  It’s as good a place as any, it seems.  The streets it seems are a macrocosm of the same process my feet go through.

Many of us kid with each other about going native and giving public urination a try.  We don’t even joke about defecation, that’s how much of a hang up it remains.  Most of us, truth be told, can’t even allow ourselves to drop trash on the street the way some folks do.  We get funny looks from the locals carrying our trash for blocks until we find a large trash bin to drop it in.  But sometimes necessity drives changes in behavior.  My friend Wyatt told me that in his travels through the northern part of the country he came across even worse conditions than we’re used to here.  He became ill during his trip and had to use a public “toilet.”  The term is in quotes because it was open air, didn’t even have a hole, and was only really recognizable as a place to defecate because everyone else’s shit was piled up there.  With toilets we get to sit.  With holes we have to squat.  With THIS you squat… but not too low, lest you get somebody else’s stuff on you.

Even if you don’t allow yourself the liberty, though, you have to deal with everyone else who does, or with the mere reality that we can’t control what other people do or what situations others may run into.  My friend Ellyssa (the one who shared the rickshaw ride from hell with me) was on a bus to Pondicherry when the woman across from her became carsick and started to throw up uncontrollably right on the floor.  The bus never stopped.  Just kept going.  And the woman kept hurling every 20 minutes or so during the 3 hour ride.

“It was a lovely trip except when she was vomiting,” Ellyssa reassured me. “Or when the wind would blow throw the window and send a whiff of her vomit my way.”

We take the good with the bad here with the understanding that we don’t get to separate the two and, sometimes, with the suspicion that it wouldn’t be quite right to have one without the other.  It would be in an odd way incomplete. 

This is as true when you consider the condition of people’s lives here.  The very rich, the very poor, and the very ill live side by side, at each moment infinitely aware of each other.  It is an exercise in self acceptance to exist with these extremes presenting themselves so regularly and blatantly.  In the tangle of cars at an intersection you will see rickshaws, motorcycles, ox-driven carts and a brand new Jaguar.  No one does a double-take.  No one even bats an eyelash.  Every other day you see people on the street sporting one form of deformity or another, sometimes genetic, sometimes from accidents, sometimes from leprosy.  Alongside them you might see a person who is strong, vital, even beautiful.  To see both side by side enhances the qualities of each in a way, like putting complementary colors in the color wheel next to each other.  Green makes red look redder, and red makes green look greener.  But despite being opposites they offer balance; the partnership of the two makes for the presence of every wavelength in the gamut of visible colors.  In the same way, rich, poor, healthy, sick, old and young… none exclusively represent this place.  It is the mix that characterizes India for me.  It is the mix that gives this city more balance than I’ve ever detected in any city.

But people aren’t the only contributors to the affront on Western sensibilities.  Chennai can feel feral at times, with animals roaming the streets, making them home.  The animals in the streets carry themselves with a confidence that suggests they know they belong there.  No one shoos the crows here or calls animal control about the strays.  The streets belong to all. 

The streets and often the living spaces.  All of us in the class have learned to live with bugs and other vermin in the guesthouses and hotel rooms. 

My friends Andrea and Julianna have a roach in their house they’ve named “Mikey,” who seems to show up at inopportune times.  Andrea has encountered Mikey in the bathroom while she showered.  He was headed right towards her and she didn’t want to step on him (at least not with her bare foot) so instead she took the bucket that all of us have in our bathrooms but none of us really understand or use and she placed it over Mikey to keep him confined while she finished her shower.  She left him there for the ladies that clean the guesthouse to deal with.  Later on Julianna had a scare with Mikey when she went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, only to find him scurrying from the toilet. 

Wyatt has his own roach who he constantly tries to coax out of his bedroom, but who constantly makes it back.  I’ve had my share of roaches as well.  It’s impossible to keep animals out of my room.  The bathroom’s vent consists of a large hole that leads to the outside directly.  I can see the sky through it.  There’s a fan in it but when off there’s plenty of room for animals to come in.  My policy is that as long as they’re not on the bed, they can share the living space with me.  Many of them were likely in that room before I ever took up residence anyway, so it’s only fair. 

I did have a big scare when I saw something almost six inches long run across my wall and hid behind the books I’d collected on this trip, which were stacked nicely on a shelf.  My heart sank.  I don’t like killing anything but I also don’t like having something big that can bite or sting sharing a space with me.  So I wasn’t about to ignore it.  I went over to my books and started removing one at a time very slowly.  One by one I pulled them out, hoping to get a glimpse of the thing without scaring it or sending it scurrying away.  Finally I pulled one book out and got a glimpse of a fat tail, swinging cautiously from side to side.  Reassured that snakes don’t crawl along walls, I started to remove another book but the tail swiftly disappeared.

This wasn’t going to work.

So I put the book back in place and started to walk around the books, trying to get a glimpse of whatever was back there.  I started to see a head shaped like a snake’s, but, to my relief, I also saw webbed feet with knobby ends.  A little closer and I had a clear view of the big reptilian eyes starting up at me suspiciously.  It was a gecko.  Good! I thought.  These things eat bugs.  So as far as I was concerned, it was welcome here.  From that day forward I was careful wherever I stepped and whenever I put things down so I wouldn’t crush the little guy.

This may sound odd or like resigning myself to living with filth but I don’t think any of us would describe it that way.  We are spending hours a day learning about and discussing the connectedness of all things.  It’s only one more step to live that connection.

In Ashtanga Yoga there are eight limbs (hence the name: “ashto” is “eight” and “anga” is “limb” in Sanskrit), the first of which is Yamas (sometimes translated as “restraints”).  There are five Yamas and the first, which serves as a foundation and context for the others, is “ahimsa” (non-harming).  This is often used as the motivation and justification for vegetarianism.  It’s an aspect that is often disputed from both sides of that practice.  Whas is NOT in question is that stepping on a bug or lizard because you feel you are entitled to a vermin-free existence is a violation of ahimsa.  Living this concept in modern times is difficult and especially so in first world countries where sterile environments are valued.

Perhaps this is where countries like India shine: they highlight the connectedness between you and even the smallest beings.  You share the environment, quite closely, with a number of other beings.  And you learn to share it gracefully.

Ahimsa can be intellectualized, discussed exhaustively and nitpicked, but ultimately only means something when tested in life.  To what extent do you value life in general?  To what extent do you strive to be someone who leaves a light footprint in the world? 

This happened to me in my second week here when I was out doing the temple and church tour with Andrea and Bradley.  We’d seen a nice restaurant on our way to the Basilica St. Thomme, where the apostle Thomas’ body was said to be buried (it has since been moved).  We made it a point that we wanted to have breakfast there when we left the church.  But when we found it on our way back, it didn’t look the same as we remembered it.  It looked much dingier.  This is often the case here.  Things look different in the morning, middle of the day and at night.  Just depends on how the light falls on the place and how many people are around or how many vendors have set up their tents.  This place transforms from day to night multiple times, making streets almost unrecognizable, especially if you are not intimately familiar with them.

We were hungry.  So we went in anyway, despite it not looking as attractive as we remembered it.  This was definitely a local joint.  We were the only non-Indians and it wasn’t air conditioned.  We looked at each other to make sure we really wanted to eat here and it was unanimous that hunger trumped any hesitation we might feel.

The first thing I ordered was a sweet lassi, a drink I’ve become all but addicted to.  It is yogurt based, sweet and good for the digestive system (I’m told), especially if you’re a foreigner and not used to the food.  It is also more effective than water at cooling the heat of the spicy food here.

There is only one bad thing about a sweet lassi: it is dense and opaque and you cannot see what is floating in it.

I took my first sip through the large straw (you do NOT touch your lips to glasses here, since there is no guarantee about whether or how the glass was washed; also, straws are often larger than in the US to accommodate denser liquids and suspended objects, like nuts and bits of fruit) and immediately sensed something different in the texture in my mouth.  There was a sizeable object in that sip, an object with a mix of surface qualities I couldn't quite place.  I thought for a moment before swallowing, trying to go through all the ingredients of a lassi to determine what it might be.

Yogurt? No.

Water? No.

Sugar? No.

Some fancy spice like cardamom? Unlikely.

There is sometimes a film, like pieces of curd or something, that lingers in a lassi but that is thin.  This thing in my mouth was round and dense.  I kept it there, on my tongue, looked around to check that no one was looking and put my right hand in my mouth (the left hand is a no-no here when it comes to eating), delicately grabbed the object and pulled it out.

I looked down.  It was a tiny roach, covered in yogurt, its legs kicking furiously.  Suddenly all of the sensory input fell into place: the density, the papery wings, the tickling legs.

I dropped it from the shock and it fell on the table, still on its back and unable to turn over (it is a very strange feature of roaches here that, once on their back, they are stuck there).  I couldn’t speak and then suddenly a strange but lovely thought crossed my mind:

Thank God it’s alive.

Andrea saw that I’d ceased to be part of the conversation.  She looked down, saw the roach, picked up a napkin and gently brushed it off the edge of the table.  “See, honey, it’s gone.”  She thought I was being a little diva; that I'd seen the roach and been disturbed just by its proximity to my glass.  She had no idea of the gravity of what had happened.

The roach managed to crawl back onto the table top.  Andrea grabbed a napkin again, visibly annoyed, but before she touched it I asked her not to kill it.  “I thought of just that,” she said.  So she picked it up and dropped it gently on the floor.

We kept talking and I didn’t touch my lassi for a few minutes but eventually considered that the worst had already happened.  I’d had a roach in my mouth.  But that moment had ended reasonably well.  I had not bitten down on it nor swallowed it.  The roach had escaped the situation with its life (and all limbs intact, I should add!) and I did not have roach guts in my mouth or stomach.  The karmic release for both of us could’ve been much more severe.

So I kept drinking, but this time modifying how I drank so I sucked the lassi through the teeth, using the latter as a sieve.  If there was to be another bug in my lassi, it would stop there.

I finally told Andrea and Bradley what had happened and they were both horrified (more, I think, at the fact that I’d continued drinking than at the initial incident) and a bit impressed that I hadn’t gone ape shit in the restaurant.  I’ve told a few people about this incident since and have always gotten the same question: Why didn’t you complain to the staff?  Here’s the thing: I have enough trouble trying to communicate to the waiters exactly what I want to eat.  Modifications to an order are non-existent and, if attempted, will never be followed like you expect.  So relaying the intricacies of having sucked a roach through a straw but done my best to keep from harming it is outside the realm of possible communication.

Besides, that wasn’t the relevant part of the experience.  I had surprised myself with my reaction and learned something about the effect that this place, this class, my teachers here and the students who’d become my friends was beginning to have on me. 

Had this occurred in the U.S. a month before, I’m not sure how I would’ve reacted but I suspect it would’ve been different.  I would’ve been angry.  Indignant.  Entitled.  But there it was different.  Whatever I felt about that moment, of the two of us, the roach had been in the worse situation so in a way I’d been lucky.  And even as I walked out of the restaurant I was still happy that nothing had happened to it.

In that moment I’d learned the implications of ahimsa, or at least one dimension of it: that life has value no matter how it manifests… even if it manifests as something seemingly insignificant or inconvenient.
As we walked back towards the next set of temples, away from the roach experience, we came across the original restaurant we'd noticed.  We hadn't even been in the right place.  Just a block away, the sign and storefront that we'd originally seen looked bright, inviting and clean.  I am not sure I am the kind of person who believes that things are "meant" to be or not.  But I do believe that some experiences are more useful than others.  What I learned about myself in that restaurant was worth more than any dish this nicer restaurant could've offered.  It is also true in a greater scale: in the U.S. our sterile conditions can actually cheat us of experiences from which we could learn significantly.

To say that Chennai is a study in extremes is not inaccurate, but it misses the point of this place.  The contradictions, the visible presence of qualities we consider opposites, serve the greater purpose of studying life and ourselves.  In the West, we are often inclined to isolate what we want to study.  Here we are forced to study it in action and in the presence of everything else.  We don’t get to pull something out of context because it is within context that it belongs, that it functions, that it has power.  The effect of something, its purpose, is only really clear in the process of life and living.

In class, we’ve discussed the conditions in Chennai and they were unabashedly referred to as “dirty” by the teacher.  But those conditions are not deemed unnecessary or useless.  We were reminded that the drive to avoid any exposure to contaminants leads to a weak immune system.  It is through sickness that we achieve health sometimes.  This isn’t a completely alien concept to us in the U.S.   There are plenty of parents who have exposed their kids to chickenpox when they are young and their bodies better able to fight the virus and control it and, through that process, gain immunity to a condition that would be infinitely more destructive in an adult.

Perhaps most relevant is how the conditions in this city reveal that things that we tend to closely associate are not related at all.  Walking down the street at noon, the sun beating down on the few of us headed to O’Kady’s, our restaurant of choice, we came across a woman sowing garlands, her infant, naked and covered in dust, at her feet, playing with a large pot.  He would crawl along the muddy ground, wet from the leaky pipes that ran outside their house, dragging the pot with him.  Now and again he’d sit and bang the hell out of the pot, making such a loud noise that it woke the sleeping dogs nearby.  He had a wild look in his eyes and a large mischievous smile that betrayed the pride he felt in making such a ruckus. 

“He looks so happy,” one of the students mused.

He did.  Elated actually.  Much more so than the kids I know in the U.S. who have rooms full of toys, a warm home and parents who have read at least a handful of parenting books to help them do the best job they can.  Seeing him it was clear that joy did not require possessions.  That childhood does not require props.  And that the safeguards it could benefit from are likely basic and few.

“It’s because he doesn’t know any better,” another student said.

I didn’t say a word, largely because I wasn’t sure of what it meant to see this, to compare to what I knew back home.  As we walked though, I kept wondering: Does he need to?

The Road to Mahabalipuram

On the first weekend after class, the manager of the Heart of Yoga program set up a trip to Mahabalipuram (also referred to as Mamallapuram), a UNESCO World Heritage Site just 60km south of Chennai.  About half the class met up for the trip at 7a.m. on Saturday morning, got on a tour bus and headed South for our first site-seeing trip in the city.  The moment we got out of Chennai, the landscape changed in character.  Chennai is a proper city, with man-made structures at every turn and most buildings built side by side so there is little open area except for the parks. 

Once we were out of the city there was plenty of open space, with a clear view of the Bay of Bengal for most of the drive.  The topography is flat, with distant hills here and there.  The open space was refreshing, as was the silence we enjoyed whenever we were the only ones on the road, which was the case most of the time on the way there (the way back was a different story).

As we drove, most of us were quiet, looking out the window at the scenery.  From afar, it looked feral with no signs of people.  But on closer inspection you could see trash littered across the field of grass.  It was mostly concentrated along the road and dispersed from there, likely with the help of the wind.  There was at least some disappointment on most faces.  We were used to the trash in Chennai and accepted that the population density and the lack of waste management infrastructure contributed to it.  But out in the open?  It seemed unnecessary.

And yet is still managed to be beautiful. 

Mahabalipuram was no different.  When we arrived the density of trash increased again.  We got off the bus and were met with hoards of street vendors and beggars of all ages.  It was a bit overwhelming.  There were areas that had all manner of rubbish accumulated right next to signs explaining the significance of these sites.

The city is centered on the various 9^th century monuments built there, most of which resemble enormous temples, and all of which were carved out of single rocks.  They portray scenes from The Mahabarata, the Indian epic most famous in the West for its inclusion of the Bhagavad Gita.  The city, at its prime in the 7^th century, was a major port and its temples built between the 7^th and 9^th centuries.  Most of them were concealed by the elements and then rediscovered, leading to its re-establishment in 1827 by the British.  Some of the monuments, we were told, were recently revealed in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The monuments are nothing short of spectacular.  It was easy to get lost in some of these areas, they were so expansive, and infact I did at one point.  I had a momentary rush of fear as I realized I’d lost my whole group when I lagged behind trying to get the best photos possible.  I went back to where our bus had dropped us off and it looked like there were people in it so I figured they’d all returned and were waiting for me.  But as I came up to the bus I realized it was a completely different group of people.  This was not the right bus.  Ours was nowhere to be found.  So I picked up my pace headed back to where I’d been, figuring the group would either be looking for me there or had headed in the one other possible direction, deeper into the exhibits.  It was the first time I felt like that here.  For the most part I’ve been comfortable getting lost in Chennai, but I wasn’t in Chennai and to say that English is broadly spoken here is a laughable overstatement. 

The dogs which I’d passed a couple of times on my way to the monuments the first time and then on the way to the bus were visibly agitated as I returned.  They sensed my unease and started to bark, clearly channeling the same agitation I was (this happens a lot here, by the way; it’s bizarre; everything feels more connected here).  I got to where I’d been and didn’t see anyone so I headed further in and finally saw some familiar faces. 

It had been easy to lose them.  You could walk through tunnels that had been carved out with pillars strategically left to support them and come out on a completely different part of the exhibit.  And with the crowds it was easy to disappear.  At one point a herd of school children stampeded into a display that everyone seemed to be curious about.  They suddenly came to a bottleneck and the pushing started, dragging a handful of us in what felt like an ocean swell of bodies.  The kids pushed and chattered, trying to squeeze into the exhibit.  They were so strong that I felt like I was carried up 15 steps to the mouth of the display.  These kids are little but with that kind of determination they are a force to be reckoned with.  I was almost thrown into the exhibit with a few other kids that stumbled over the doorway as the passage opened up.  There was a large cylindrical stone in the center of the room that I almost fell on top of in the process.

I met up there with two other KYM students whose wide eyes betrayed the fact that they’d just experienced the same thing I did.  We all stood around the stone trying to figure out what it was until one of the students, via her Kindle, mentioned it was the Shivalinga, the phallic form of Lord Shiva.  I’d read about this representation but had never seen it and it was interesting to have a bunch of 7 to 10 year old school children walking around and staring at a representation of Lord Shiva’s humongous penis.  It was also interesting to think that a few minutes back I had almost ended up on top of it.  Oh, the irony.

Despite the room being small and the exhibit brief, I was in no rush to leave.  Going upstairs at least had the benefit that I was going against gravity.  I could see myself tumbling down steps if I tried to leave anytime soon.  So we all waited until the kids left, which occurred more quickly than we suspected, literally giving the sensation of the ebb and flow of a powerful tide.

Some areas looked more finished than others but all of it had a mythical quality.  Among the more impressive statues is one of an elephant that was so carefully carved, the curves on its body are unbelievably smooth. 

The areas that contain the monuments are kept very clean and usually behind guarded gates.  It was here that I saw my first public trash can in India.  But anything outside of that doesn’t have the same level of attention.  The surrounding area is an amalgam of street vendors, goats, dogs, beggars and stores selling art, textiles and trinkets that would make any tourist happy.  And trash.  Lots and lots of trash.  Everywhere.  But it didn’t detract from the place and in some respects gave it a sense of authenticity.  This was a place past its prime.  It’s the same kind of beauty you find in the wrinkled, worn face of an elderly man or woman.  As the body ages, its façade deteriorates and reveals what’s inside.  Something that has the wisdom of age and that is, if you believe in these things, close to or akin with the divine.

This is something I’ve come to appreciate here.  In the U.S. we’re used to beauty being manicured.  I remember the shock that Jessica Simpson’s Marie Claire cover caused a year ago, when she appeared with no makeup or retouching (http://photos.posh24.com/p/809390/z/jessica_simpson/jessica_simpson_marie_claire_c.jpg).  Plenty of celebrities followed suit.  Kim Kardashian being the one who received the most attention for her picture in Life & Style magazaine (http://images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/2010411//467.kardashian.wilkinson.baskett.lands.lc.051110.jpg).  All the magazines and news shows loved talking about how brave these women were by doing this.  Really?  Brave?  That seem like a strong word, given that from the pictures it looks like they had some foundation on and that their hair had been styled and they probably had on some powder to reduce the shine from the strategically placed lights.  No.  Not brave.  Have them take a picture with a point-and-shoot camera using on-camera flash right after they’ve rolled out of bed and then we’re talking.  And even then it doesn’t come close to the challenge of seeing beauty in something that initially disgusts us.

Seeing the landscape as we drove South, analyzing my initial awe at the scenery, my repulsion to the trash and my realization that the latter ultimately did not take away from the former, it struck me that our concept of beauty in the States requires hours of cleaning, reorganizing, tidying up, proper lighting, preparation infront of a mirror, hours of work at a gym or editing via the forgiving tools of Photoshop.  We identify and accept beauty only in an idealized state, which by definition means that we see beauty as our imagination defines it, not as it is.  We find it difficult sometimes to see beauty in something that is unpolished, in something dirty, in something broken.  But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there to be seen in these things.  India is proof of that and most of the people I’ve talked to change their views when they’re here.  They begin to see beauty in the day to day, sometimes despite the dust and grime and sometimes because of it.

That is what India is to me: a place that forces me to look past what something looks like as compared to the ideal I have in mind for it… an ideal that falls grossly short of the actual beauty of its being.  If I am not able to appreciate the monuments in Mahabalipuram or the landscape that we drive past to get to them because of the trash, because of the congestion, because of the noise, then there is something wrong with how I see.  

A friend of mine was telling me that in his months here he hadn’t come across any women that had caught his eye, except for one who works at the house where he’s staying.  She’s younger, that much he knows, but her exact age is hard to tell, and she’s at least 6 months pregnant.  She isn’t exactly beautiful the way we normally would think of someone beautiful, he explained, but you can see that she knows herself, that she’s lived a tough life (the life of a Sudra, the second lowest tier in the caste system, is relegated to service jobs, which are hard on the body) and survived it and there’s beauty in that strength.  You see all those things in her face.  She makes no attempt to hide them.

“Nothing is hidden in India,” my friend told me.  This isn’t entirely true.  Some things are.  AIDS is not discussed at all and this is expected to be one of the places with the highest incidence of infection.  Gays and lesbians are practically invisible, a necessity of life for the safety of the individuals.  And attitudes towards women (and by default the incidence of abuse) are still lagging behind many other countries.  But there are plenty of things that India leaves out in the open for everyone to deal with, which other countries do their best to conceal: poverty, illness, hunger, homelessness, unhygienic conditions.  These are things that everyone has to deal with, not just the poor.  Every rich person in Chennai has to drive or walk past it.  The luxury to avoid it is not available to them.  Perhaps this is by design.  India is, after all, the birthplace of the Buddha, whose journey began precisely because he saw poverty, illness and death just outside the palace walls.  There is wisdom in having these truths available for everyone to ponder.

A friend mentioned to me that in my blog, I seem to be focusing on what is wrong with India, something that I received with a bit of shock.  I don’t mean for my descriptions to come across that way.  I am merely writing about what I see, from the reference point of what I’m used to.  There is nothing wrong with India.  At least nothing more wrong than there is in any other place I can think of.  It has areas that can be improved upon, certainly, and that, in doing so would benefit its people greatly.  But every country has these areas of improvement and India has the benefit of having gotten something right that many others have not:  it is a place that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, that makes no excuses for its conditions and that offers you its shortcomings without shame.  What you do with it, what you think of it, is up to you and will, in the end, say much more about you than it ever will about India.

Yoga Therapy

I began practicing yoga sometime in 2000 as a way to address a lower back problem that was not severe enough for surgery and not light enough to ignore.  The only option I was offered was taking anti-inflammatory medication, sure to cause its own problems from overuse.  So when my then boyfriend mentioned he’d tried yoga and that he thought it might help my back, I jumped on the opportunity.  I was, without knowing it, walking into a fairly traditional Ashtanga-Vinyasa yoga studio.  Not that you would’ve known that from the name: “It’s Yoga!” was all that the sign read.  And with my complete ignorance on the topic and my mental image of people in lotus pose meditating I walked in and was shocked (and pleased) at how dynamic and athletic yoga practice can be. 

Within three weeks my back no longer hurt.  And though the practice did not eliminate the issue (if I go without practice for a few weeks the pain in the lower back inevitably returns) it offered me a pill (and side effect) free option for it.  I’ve been with it since. 

In 2006 I took my first teacher training (more focused on personal development than teaching mechanics, though the former without question aids the latter) and was immersed in the non-asana (posture) aspect of Yoga, which only intensified my curiosity and drive to learn.  In 2010 I did a second teacher training which focused more (than the first training at least) on the art of teaching.  Each training gave me a different dimension and purpose for yoga practice.  In my first training I was exposed to a breadth of knowledge and practice I didn’t even know was available.  It was my first time attempting pranayama (breath control) and meditation.  In my second training I learned how teaching can be a form of selfless service and, as such, an act of karma yoga.

And now I’m here.  I knew this trip would offer me a totally new dimension as well.  But, as before, I had no idea what that could be.  This last week I got a taste of that when I was called up to the front of the room to serve as a test subject in our Application of Yoga class.  In this class we cover some theory but mostly focus on how to learn to see another person so that the subtleties of posture, personality, habit, form and breath become clear as signals for what someone needs.  At KYM, Yoga is not something that is practiced in a class format.  It’s personal and most effective when personalized to meet the requirements of the individual’s current situation.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. 

Kausthub, the teacher for this class (and as I’ve mentioned before, son of T.K.V Desikachar, founder of the KYM, and grandson of Sri T. Krishnamacharya, to whom the center was dedicated) asked me to go into Uttanasana, a simple forward bend. 

“How awful!” he said when he saw it.

My mid back always folds in this pose.  I’ve always considered it an issue with my hamstrings, which are tight from years of jogging and weightlifting.  When I go into this posture I always engage my quads, which help release the hamstrings, and do my best to lengthen my spine as I go into it.  I can touch my toes, a huge improvement over where I was when I started asana practice in 2000, but for someone practicing as long as I have, my Uttanasana leaves much to be desired.  Kausthub asked the class what was wrong and, no surprise, everyone mentioned my hamstrings were probably tight.  What I’ve always heard. 

“Really?  Are you sure?” he responded.  He does this all the time.

We knew better than to assert that we did.  A couple of days before he had called a different person up and asked her to go into Utkattasana.  She did and his response was: “How awful!  Is that the best you can do?”

Class with Kausthub is nothing if not a humbling experience.  But in Yoga, that’s part of the point: reining in the ego, disassociating with it and, most important, understanding that you are not your ego… or rather than your ego isn’t you.

A girl in class seemed to be offended.  “That’s her anatomy!  Her ankle flexibility is limited.  There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Is that so?” was Kausthub’s response.

So he proceeded to give the subject a sequence of breathing exercises paired with movement.  Deep, conscious breaths.  At first he placed his hand on her lower, then mid then upper back and asked her to breathe deeply, using the inhale to move his hand upward, lengthening her spine.  Then he gave her some vinyasa: sometimes moving with breath, then completing an exhale before moving into Ardha (half) Utkatasana with the spine straight, then into full Utkatasana.  A few minutes of this and when she went into Utkatasana, she was in a full squat, spine long, arms pointing straight up. 

Everyone was silent.  So Kausthub called on the girl who had protested moments before.  “So.  Did her anatomy change?”

The girl was clearly humbled.  “No.”

“Wrong answer!” Kausthub laughed.  “But it was not her medical anatomy.”

That was our introduction to the effects of energy in the body.  If any of us thought prana was only a concept before, this clarified that it was not.  This was not simply explained by her body warming up.  She’d one just a few minutes of breathing synchronized with movement.  But it was breathing in a very particular way.  When you know how to manipulate energy in your body, how to direct it, you can change how your body functions to an impressive degree.

He’d shown this once before but not so blatantly.  He’d called one of the other men in the class to the front and asked him to go into Uttanasana and everyone could see the rounded back.  A few minutes of conscious breathing, again with Kausthub’s hand on his back to bring attention to the area, and then modified asana.  Then the guy could do Uttanasana with no problem.  No curve of the spine.

So when it was my turn, the students were less enthusiastic about offering assessments and solutions.  Kausthub brought up the other guy who’d had problems with Uttanasana and asked both of us to sit in Dandasana (sit upright with legs extended infront of you) back to back.  Everyone could see that where he had a rounded back, I was able to sit with a flat back, an indicator that my hamstrings were actually looser than the other guy’s. 

“He may have tight hamstrings but they are not the cause of his rounded back.”

Kausthub asked if anyone wanted to come up to help me with my pathetic Uttanasana.  One student jumped up and immediately began doing what Kausthub had done to the other two.  Her hand on my back she asked me to breathe and try to move her hand upward along my back.  I could do it with the lower and upper back but not with the mid back.  She became a little frustrated and kept trying to get me to move it but it wouldn’t.  She then asked me to do Uttanasana and nothing had changed.  The technique didn’t work.

That was Kausthub’s point I think.

Personalizing Yoga begins and ends with observation.  It’s typical of our mentality to want to take a technique and use it with everyone, accommodate the person to it rather than accommodate it to the person.  There’s something comforting about using a tool that works for everyone.  But everyone is different and two people who exhibit poor form in Uttanasana may do so for very different reasons and if you don’t pay attention to those differences then applying the same solution will be ineffective at best and detrimental to the subject at worst.

So she sat back down and Kausthub called on the other guy again.  “What is different between these two guys?”

There were plenty.  He was shorter and stocky.  We stood differently.  We breathed differently.  Everyone noted these things.  And Kausthub suggested that these differences, subtle as they may seem, indicated that the way to address the problem had to be different for both of us.  So instead of the process we were all used to, he asked me to breathe deeply into my solar plexus, the area just below the front of the ribcage and above the abdomen. 

“Inhale into here and exhale from there.”

This was a very different breathing technique than I am used to.  With Uddiyana Bandha, I exclusively chest breathe and, correctly or not, keep that area still.  With regular breathing, I tend to breathe into the chest and abdomen simultaneously.

The moment I started to breathe in this new way, I knew something was different.  It was tight and hard to move.  The more I breathed into it the more the sensation radiated from the area, especially towards my back which aligned perfectly with my mid-back.

He then asked me to lie down on the floor and inhale into the area then let out all the air with a “Ha!”.  “Do it twelve times,” he urged.  So I would take a deep inhale then release.  Sometimes the sound was so loud it reverberated in the room.

“Goooood.”  Kausthub would say in those instances.

It’s hard to describe what I felt in those moments.  The emotional sensations were more pronounced than any physical ones.  I felt vulnerable, sad, scared, numb and at peace.  I kept rolling through those sensations, sometimes feeling them at the same time.

When he asked me to stand up and repeat Uttanasana I went deeper than I ever had before.  I’ve been able to place my hands flat on the floor with straight legs but always with my arms extended.  Now my elbows were bent, my legs weren’t shaking, and there was an ease to the pose that I’d never felt.

I stood back up again.

“Look at his profile,” Kausthub urged the class. 

“It’s completely changed,” one student said, and others nodded along.

I sat back down and a few students asked me then and after class how I felt.  This all seemed like magic to us and that is not an overstatement.

During our break I was still in a bit of a daze and suddenly felt this terribly grief well up and I began to cry quietly.  It was strange.  I had no sense of where the sadness was coming from.  It was just there, without purpose.  I’d experienced this before during meditation in my teacher training so I wasn’t scared of it.  But it doesn’t cease to surprise me and I am never totally at ease with it.  I just watched as the emotion rolled through me and then dissipated.  And then it felt like a weight had been lifted; I felt physically lighter. 

For the rest of the day I tried to continue breathing into this area that had been stuck before and felt a pain that ran like a spear from the solar plexus into the back.  Every inhale took work and brought pain.  But each time it was milder.  And I started to feel my back open up.

The next day I awoke late, didn’t do my own practice at 6a.m. as usual and skipped the asana class at 7:30a.m.  Instead I chose to shave my head, shower, eat breakfast at the hotel, have my coffee and overall take it easy.  I was void of stress.  When I walked back into class the folks that I spend the most time with raised their eyebrows a bit.  Clearly the shave head was a difference but something else had changed.

“You look like a different person,” said the other bad Uttanasana guy.  “You’re a changed man.”

My friend Andrea asked if I was okay.  I was.  I was, if anything, at ease in a way I hadn’t been for a long time.

A couple of days later my friend Bradley experienced an even more profound change.  He’d hurt his back a week before, severely enough that he was skipping the morning asana class which, by most standards is not difficult at all.  He’d tried private consultations, gone to the hospital, done ultrasound massage and taken anti-inflammatory meds to reduce his pain.  None of these things helped much.  Perhaps they offered momentary relief but the pain ultimately returned.

Kausthub called him up to the front of the class, asked him to do some conscious breathing then a simple pranayama: inhale freely, then exhale through a partly closed right nostril.  Twelve breaths and his body visibly warmed up, his forehead sweating a bit.  A student was asked to come up to check his back: the left side, which had no problem, was normal in temperature; the right side, which had the problem, had warmed up so much he had started to sweat there.

Bradley felt some relief immediately but the next day was the surprise.  His pain was completely gone.  He told us later that up to five hours after class he’d felt his back constantly relax and grow, the tension in it dissipating, until he didn’t feel any discomfort at all.  And this relief had carried on to the next day.  What meds and massage and other forms of therapy had not managed was cured with only three minutes of conscious, calculated breathing.  That is the control of prana.

Primary Series in Ashtanga-Vinyasa is also referred to as Yoga Chikitsa (Yoga Therapy).  The idea is that in preparation for the harder asanas and the much harder work of pranayama and meditation the body has to be tuned, healed, softened and strengthened.  Yoga is a method of steps in the path of progress and the first step is always to deal with ailments and conditions that may get in the way of your journey.  There is a power to it that is undeniable.  My asana practice was responsible for changes in my life that led me to the 140lb frame that I now sport, a much more comfortable weight, I should add, than before and more than 40lbs lighter than I was at my peak.  The body does much less work carrying less weight and can devote energy to other areas that need it: digestion, immunity, reducing inflammation and increasing concentration and focus.  This therapy is amazing when yoga is approached even in class formats, where everyone is exposed to the same postures, the same sequence, with perhaps some modifications to accommodate limitations.  When the process is individualized it becomes ten times as powerful, focusing our own energy specifically on our needs, and this can carry us farther on the journey than we could manage otherwise.

"Wait! I Know That Cow!"

I do not like rollercoasters.  Never have.  I can’t say exactly why but I always have a bad feeling around them, either like you’re tempting fate getting on that thing or the thing itself has some bad juju about it.  This dislike was solidified the first time I agreed to get on the “Double Looper” at what used to be the Dade County Youth Fair in Miami and ended up watching a man get crushed by our train. 

That rollercoaster started with a very high peak and a steep decline that provided the momentum for the two loops that gave it its name.  I was with Elena, then girlfriend and now something akin to twin sister, since “friendship” alone understates our relationship.  She was very excited and had insisted that I must (1) keep my eyes open and (2) not hold on to the security bars that held us in our seat.  I obliged and when the full weight of the coaster succumbed to gravity in that steep decline I realized that when moving that fast you really can’t change your position: my eyes were locked open and my arms out.  Elena, meanwhile, was contorted into something that loosely resembled the fetal position, knotted over the security bars, face hidden between her boobs.  I’m fairly certain her eyes were closed.  Bitch.

In any case, the shock of that drop and the two loops was sudden but momentary.  But as the train pulled in to the waiting area, the first man in line, drunk and holding his beer in hand, fell into the track.  I started to scream for someone to get him out but by the time the next guy in line had grabbed his arm to pull him up, the train had pulled in and, though I couldn’t actually see much from my point of view, based on the bump I can assume we’d run over part of one of his legs and from his position when he was laid down alongside us, that we’d pinned his thigh against the wall.  When we came to a stop, he was lying right next to Elena.  For the first few moments, his eyes and his mouth were wide open but he wasn’t saying a word, clearly in shock.  I wrapped my arm around Elena and told her to keep her eyes closed.  A young parademic appeared within moments of the accident but the moment he was able to clearly view what had happened, he turned around, crouched and vomited towards the crowd.

It is never a good sign when a paramedic vomits.

I realize this isn’t the kind of entry you expect to see on this type of blog but I had to relay it because this moment, with all its detail, was precisely what went through my head when I got into an auto rickshaw for the first time last Friday. 

Auto rickshaws are the transportation of choice for those who do not have cars.  They are small, 3-wheeled motorized vehicles that have zero structural protection against impact, no seat belts, no doors, and though designed for one driver and two passengers, often carry four or five people.  They are fast, agile in the hands of an aggressive and creative driver, and able (and more often than not manage) to squeeze in the inter-lane space between larger vehicles.  In one word: dangerous.

I’d been warned by one of Kevin’s friends about these things.  We were at a company party, chatting about my upcoming trip, when she decided to explain how, during her work visits to hospitals in India, she noticed that at least two thirds of the broken bones, dismembered limbs and other forms of trauma induced physical deformity had resulted from rickshaw accidents.  “Don’t you dare get on one of those things!.”  

I remembered those words and my experience on the rollercoaster as I stood at the side of the rickshaw, driver staring at me with a perplexed look on his face, not sure of why I was hesitating.  But there are moments when you really have no choice.  Or rather, the only other options aren’t good or reasonable ones.  And this was one of those instances:  A classmate (Elyssa) and I had gotten lost trying to find a restaurant, Sangheeta, that we frequent for lunch in order to meet a couple of classmates and head to a shopping mall to check out the stores.

We were standing at a corner neither of us recognized.  Andrea, one of the people we were meeting, called. 

“Where are you?” 

“I have no idea,” I told her, “All I know is we’re right across the street from a Fresh O’Fresh.” 

“What is a Fresh O’ Fresh?”

This was not going to be resolved easily. This was the first time I’d attempted to head out somewhere I was not familiar with in the middle of the night.  In Chennai the streets manage to get even busier as the night progresses.  Rush hour doesn’t exist here.  Activity begins before sunrise with handfuls of people an cars on the streets as early as 5:30a.m. and this activity intensifies throughout the day, culminating at around 8 or 9p.m. when it’s virtually impossible to walk the street without bumping into people, motor cycles and cars on your way.  The only saving grace is that nobody, people or cars, can move too fast.

Elyssa and I knew that we were close to Sangeetha’s but we also knew that we had no clue where we were and that in the process of trying to find the place we might simply get further away.  So when the rickshaw stopped infront of us and the driver asked if we needed a ride, Elyssa and I both looked at each other and considered that we might get to where we needed to faster if we got on and let the guy take us there.

“Sangeetha?”  we asked him.

He nodded and said something in Tamil.  We had no clue what it was.  We asked him how much it would be.  “15 rupees.”  This is essentially 33 cents and we figured he knew exactly where he was going because it was so cheap (usually you pay 10 rupees per kilometer).  We got in, my heart racing, but my mind trying to quiet it.

It’s only a few blocks away, it said.  How bad can it possible be?

Famous last words.

The moment that rickshaw took off, I knew I was in for something stupendously frightening.  First of all you can feel every bump in the road and with the more severe ones which make your butt rise out of the seat you get the sensation that you’re about to be thrown out of the vehicle.

This man had no need to drive that fast or that crazy but it felt like I was back on that rollercoaster in Miami as he swerved from one side of the road to the other, driving around people who were walking along the street, cyclists and cows. 

Chennai’s smaller streets are not well lit and at night you count on the car headlights to offer lighting as much as any street light so we’d see nothing for a moment and then suddenly a car would turn the corner towards us, we’d see its lights and within moments it would whiz by, missing us by just a few inches.  Our driver did not seem disturbed by this.

I gripped the bar between the driver and passenger seats a little harder.

Within moments we knew that we were off course.  We didn’t recognize where we were going and it had been a few minutes, which meant we should’ve already come to a neighborhood we knew, if not gotten to the restaurant.  I tapped the guy on the shoulder “Sangeetha?” and he nodded and said something else in Tamil.

This was not going to end well.

Elyssa had a nervous smile on her face. 

I looked at her.  “This is just getting worse by the moment.”

“Yup,” she said.

And then it really got bad. 

The driver made a quick turn and we were thrust into a multilane road.  There are few of these in Chennai and they constitute major arteries in the system of roadways which get you far across town faster than any other way.  They are the busiest roads where the autos move fastest and they are generally avoided unless you have to drive long distances in the city.  Let me say here that there was absolutely no need for us to get on such a road based on the fact that we were only a few blocks from our desired restaurant.  So we were clearly headed somewhere much further from where we needed to be.

The opportunity for close calls increased exponentially here.  Every few moments someone would cut us off and our driver would honk at them and swerve, trying his best to get ahead of them anyway.  In the process he’d throw our vehicle against the car next to us, which would honk in return.  At any moment we would be within inches of the vehicle next to us, with one car coming up behind us, honking so we’d make enough room so they could get by.  If we didn’t move, they’d simply try to squeeze in.

From my point of view, it is laughable that this city requires driving lessons for you to get a license because there really seem to be no rules on the road.  Cars don’t abide by stop signs or lights (when they manage to be there… most intersections don’t have them at all), they switch lanes at will and often ride the divider lines (if they’re painted at all), right AND left turns can occur at an intersection at any moment, there are no speed limit signs anywhere so speed seems to be ruled by how busy the road is, and all manner of vehicles can use any lane on the road, be they motorcycles, trucks, buses, rickshaws, bicycles, or horse and carriage.  And that doesn’t speak to the pedestrians.  Anyone at any moment can dart across a road (or meander, which many prefer to do) and cows often wander out with little concern for the traffic.  Sometimes it’s just a cow, sometimes the bull or cow is pulling a cart.  Today I even saw a man pushing a large wheelbarrow with a woman in it.

This craziness on the roads is enhanced by the fact that sidewalks here are not used for walking.  People look at me funny when I walk along on them, which I did initially because I thought it was safer than walking alongside the cars.  Everyone walks on the street.  The sidewalk is instead a multifunction entity.  It can be used by street vendors, who can park their carts there or who sit on a blanket on the sidewalk with their merchandise organized around them to facilitate a sale, or store owners whose merchandise often spills into them (some stores even use the sidewalk as storage space).  Or they can be used for napping in the middle of the day (and I’ve determined it’s not just the homeless who do this).  There are even instances where the sidewalk is the public toilet.  I walked into one of these areas by mistake and was bitchslapped by a stench that made the Balboa Park public men’s bathroom (easily the nastiest bathroom in the city, where the guys with the worst aim choose to piss) seem like a botanical garden.  Once I was walking behind an old man wearing a dhoti, a traditional wrap that (usually older) men wear, on the sidewalk when he came to an abrupt stop, raised his dhoti up his leg, squatted down and began to shit.  Right there.  Infront of everybody.  I turned and started walking along the street.  Since then I’ve noticed that some of the feces on the road is too large to be a dog’s and too small to be a cow’s so I suspect the old guy was not an exception.

Maneuvering through the city then is an exercise in risk evaluation: brave the cars, which are constantly swerving to avoid hitting or being hit, or risk stepping on shit or tripping over carts, dogs, people or merchandise laid out in blankets.  I’ve done my best to avoid using objectionable language in this blog, but there are times when colorful words are due and this is one of them: Chennai’s streets are a clusterfuck. 

The only rule here seems to be the horn.  Cars honk all the time.  Bikes all have horns, in some cases added later.  The horns vary from funny, to muffled to piercingly loud.  And they are going all the time.  When I first got here it felt like the horns were just going in an uncoordinated cacophony but since then I’ve learned that they can mean a variety of things, among them:

1. I’m coming up behind you
2. You’re getting too close to me
3. I need you to move
4. I’m about to pass
5. You can pass me
6. You’re in the wrong lane
7. I’m in the wrong lane

Always contextual, thankfully most of the time the horn is quite brief.  On the rare occasion where the horn is sustained, it simply means the driver thinks you’re an asshole for doing whatever you did which clearly got in his (I say “his” because aside from private vehicles, women don’t drive here; there are no women taxi or rickshaw drivers) way. 

But when careening towards disaster in a rickshaw, the subtleties of the horn are not very comforting.

At intersections it was especially bad.  I got very good at saying my Hail Mary’s quickly as we’d approach an intersection.  In this city there are few stop signs and almost no stop lights, so that vehicles negotiate who gets into the intersection when.  This is all well and good in the small streets where nobody can speed, but in these multilane roads everything turns into a video game.  We’d be on the right lane and as we’d cross a vehicle would almost t-bone us as it tried to get into our lane.  Our driver would swerve and move quickly onto the next lane over, which naturally would have another vehicle in it so we’d get a honk and they’d swerve and the chain would progress across the street.

It’s only a few blocks away.  How bad can it possible be?

Sigh.

Elyssa and I just shook our heads.  This was going to be a long night. 

I used one hand to dig through my bag for the cell phone.  There was no way I felt safe enough to let go of the bar completely.  I even had my foot pressed up against the back of the driver’s chair so I’d have enough tension between that and the back of my seat so I wouldn’t slip on the cheap vinyl seat whenever we’d turn or change lanes.  I called Andrea back.  “Bad news.  Our rickshaw driver doesn’t know where we are going so we’ll try to fix this and get to the restaurant as soon as we can.”

Our driver finally came to a stop.  I peaked out of the rickshaw.  “Sangheeta” read the sign above me.  I looked around.  Nothing rang a bell.  Not the right Sangheeta.  So we both told the guy that this was not the place.  He had driven us across town, far enough away that there was actually another Sangheeta vegetarian restaurant.  If this was Starucks, I wouldn’t feel so bad.  But it’s not.  There isn’t one in every corner.

Finally the driver looked concerned. 

He stepped out, talked to a few people and got back in.

“He’s asking for direction,” Elyssa said.  I’d heard that this happened sometimes.

He got back in the car, drove out into the middle of the large road and without signaling or giving even the slightest indication of his intention, he immediately did a U turn, stopping every car behind us and on the other two lanes on our side of the road as he tried to get onto the other side.  The screeching of cars was deafening.  If I’d reached out my hand I could've touched some of them they stopped so close.

I dropped my head.  I couldn’t look. 

He finally got onto the other side of the road and we were off.  His driving was even more frantic this time, something I didn’t think possible. 

He kept looking out of his vehicle, scanning the store names.

“He has no clue where he’s going,” I told Elyssa. 

“Nope.”

He stopped his car again where there were a group of people, peaked his head out and asked something with the word “Sangheeta” in it.  They pointed in the direction he’d come.  He shook his head.  Then they started to argue with each other. 

Chennai is full of complications, not the least of which is the fact that nobody knows where anything is here.  The city itself, along with many other Indian cities, has changed names, in an attempt to erase the influence of British rule in the country.  Chennai itself used to be called Madras.  But that wasn’t enough.  Street names have all been changed as well to accommodate names that reflect local culture rather than imperial rule.  Add to this the fact that this city has not experience urban sprawl the way that many California cities have but rather has remained the same size and simply increased in density, with houses and businesses popping up in between existing houses and businesses, and you begin to understand that it is impossible for them to have a chronological system for addresses.  When house #29 on that street has popped up between houses #1 and #2, you have a problem.  The fix for this, if you can call it that, has been to renumber some of the districts; but because it would confuse everyone to have a business or house suddenly change numbers (and as a consequence, an address change location) the answer has been to associate every house with two numbers (so that addresses look something like this: Old Number 21/New Number 5).  This makes it especially frustrating when there’s just one number on the house and you don’t know if it’s new or old or what.

So everyone, including cab and rickshaw drivers, need to ask directions from locals.  And when you complicate matters with a culture that values giving any help, even when it hinders, rather than admitting that you can’t help at all, you’ve got the perfect setting for a comedy of errors.  What I have been told is the way to get anywhere is to ask multiple times along the way.  You’ll get some good directions and some bad directions and you just hope each time you’re a little closer.  The best scenario is asking a big group of people because they will argue with each other about the right directions and, more often than not, the actual correct directions will prevail.

The men finally came to consensus and the driver repeated a couple of times the directions they’d given.  Then he brought his head back into the rickshaw, started up the car and pulled out into the middle of the road with the same wild abandon that had been the theme of the first part of this ride.  He kept looking to his right at a road that he clearly wanted to get to but couldn’t because of the median which separated the lanes going in opposite directions.  When he came to the intersection he pulled the sharpest U-turn yet and I swear at least one wheel lost contact with the ground.  He was gunning for the street he wanted. 

I saw some headlights pointing at us, spanning the entire width of the street that we were in the middle of.

“Are some of those cars coming right at us?”

Elyssa was a little more flustered now: “It’s ALL oncoming traffic!”

He sped up, intent on getting to his street, but it didn’t happen before the traffic got to us and we had to swerve around a few cars that were coming at us.  I was glad I had not eaten or drank anything anytime recently because it would not have stayed in my system.

He came to another sudden stop.  I peaked out.  The sign above me read “Sangheeta Hotel.” 

“It’s not even the restaurant!” I told Elyssa.  “Let’s get out and find someone else.”

When we stepped out I gave him his 15 rupees.  He was upset because the ride had taken longer than he’d bargained for.  I was livid.

“You got us lost!  This isn’t even where we wanted to go.”

He said he’d used a lot of gas.

“That’s your damn fault for not knowing where you’re going!  We have to now pay another rickshaw to get us back to where we were!”

Mind you, he had no clue what I was saying.  The gesture and tone of my voice was really what was doing the communicating.  But in these situations I’ve learned that’s all that’s needed.

Elyssa was right infront of him and he tried to argue back, handing the money to her.  I started to walk away and told Elyssa that I was going to check the hotel to see if there was anyone there who could help us find our way back.  The guy tried to reason with her and she just handed him the money.  “This isn’t where we wanted to go.”

She caught up to me and asked me “Are we going to get arrested?” 

“No,” I said with a smile.  “He got us lost.  Some people wouldn’t have paid him anything.”

We went to the hotel, spoke to the guy at the front desk about our situation and he laughed with us and said he’d get us a “car.”  Elyssa happened to have the address of the KYM, which is near Sangheeta (the right Sangheeta) and he said he knew where that was and he’d make sure the driver knew.  Within moments another rickshaw pulls up to the door.  I was mortified.  The driver came in, spoke to the front desk guy and it seemed he knew where to go. 

So it was back on the rollercoaster.  At least at this point, the entire experience was beginning to be funny.  We got back into the rickshaw, showed the guy the address one more time and we were off.  This driver hit the road with less speed but more gusto.  The swerving was even more pronounced and he seemed to make more turns than could ever be necessary.  He then pulled into a gas station.  Elyssa and I followed him with our gaze, hoping to God he wasn’t asking for directions. 

“Is he pumping gas?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Shit!”

He stopped a couple more times and then seemed to catch an old man whose eyes lit up the moment the driver mentioned the KYM.  The old guy gave him some involved directions (at least it seemed that way from the many hand gestures he made) and the driver took off again.

Elyssa and I were a little more relaxed now.  I called Andrea again.  She and Julianna were having dinner in Sangheeta.  “We’ll be here until you get here, honey.”

That’s one of the many reasons I love that girl.

The driver drove for a bit and then stopped at the side of a dark road.

“Oh no,” I told Elyssa.  “He still doesn’t know where he’s going.”  But then I realized there was no one around.

He turned to us and said “One minute.”

We watched him walk away, step up to a wall about 50 feet away and take a piss.

Elyssa shrugged and relayed that it was a good sign that this was the only reason we were stopping, odd as it was to be in this situation.  She then mentioned that she was happy I had such a good attitude about being in this situation.  I told her I was happy that she was taking it well, too.  As bad as being lost and driven to a far away area of town we didn’t recognize was, the situation would be infinitely worse if you were sharing it with somebody who couldn’t laugh about it. 

The driver got back in and we were off again.  At this point we were an hour and a half late so we became a little more involved in the process, looking around for anything we recognized.  Unfortunately the streets of Chennai seem to change character depending on how they’re lit so that an area that is incredibly familiar during the day can become completely alien at night. 

The driver started to drive more slowly, looked around more often and we got the sense that he thought he was near the right place.  So we started to look more intensely as well.

“I don’t recognize any of this,” Elyssa said.

Neither did I.  None of the buildings looked familiar.  Then, as we turned a corner I saw something that caught my eye.

“Wait!  I know that cow!”

I would pass this cashew colored cow every morning.  I know it because it stares at me anytime I get near and I have to watch it as I pass to make sure it doesn’t charge.  I was elated. 

“These things don’t wander much in this city,” I told Elyssa.  “We’re close!”

She giggled at the thought that we'd used a cow to determine where we were.

The driver saw a group of people and stopped to ask directions and then we saw the ever familiar front wall of the KYM.  “There!”  The driver pulled up, we paid, and then started to walk to Sangheeta. 

When we got there, Julianna and Andrea were there.  We sat down, I ordered a sweet lassi, my drink of choice in this city (a lovely sweetened yogurt mixed with water that is both comforting and functional, as it helps reduce the heat of the spicy food more effectively than water can).  We apologized for being so late, then laughed about the adventure Elyssa and I had been on and decided we still had enough time to make it to the mall.  So when the bill was paid, Elyssa and I had to face the reality that we were not done being on a rickshaw that night.  But since Julianna and Andrea were the ones who knew where the mall was, Elyssa and I split up.  Andrea and I got on our rickshaw, a bit distracted by conversation as we chatted about how crazy the night had been.  I honestly believe she was just trying to ease my mind a bit with conversation so I didn’t focus on the fat that I was getting back on a death-mobile.  But as soon as our rickshaw pulled out into the road, wheels squealing, we realized this driver was nothing short of psychotic.

If the first drivers had been bold on the road, this one had a death wish.  I have never seen a driving video game or a movie car chase that has come close to how this maniac drove.  I moved in closer to Andrea and from the nervous look on her face I realized we were in trouble.  Andrea lives in China and is not unfamiliar with crazy-ass rickshaw drivers.  So if she was nervous, there was reason to be. 

We shrieked a few times as we were presented by one near miss after another.  Here a motorcycle that came to close.  Here a car that we were trying to speed past.  Once a truck bullied us onto oncoming traffic as it tried to get into the turning lane.  Now and again this guy would pull into the wrong side of a momentary median, headlights coming at us, as he tried to pass traffic.  We would be lucky if we made it to the mall in one piece.

“It’s amazing to me that there aren’t more accidents on these roads,” I marveled.

“Yeah, I haven’t seen any yet,” said Andrea.

Not moments after this comment our driver tried to squeeze between a car and a motorcycle.  He made a fast move and didn’t count on another car trying to pull in behind him.  He lost his focus for a moment and a motorcycle seemed to come out of nowhere.  He pulled away, and BAM hit a car that came up behind us, bounced off of him and hit the motorcycle afterall.  All cars came to a stop.  Our driver scolded the motorcyclist and the car driver scolded our driver.  It seems that the status of the vehicle and not the driver’s maneuver is what establishes fault in these cases.  The motorbike took off with no damage and so did the car.  And our rickshaw driver just cranked up (yes, there is a crank on these vehicles) the car and kept going.

We finally got to the mall and when we met up with Elyssa and Julianna we told them what had happened.  Julianna gets this great look on her face when she’s told things that seem this surreal.  “Crap!  You’re not having luck with these things tonight.” 

Nope.  I wasn’t.  And during the entire 30 minutes that we shopped (the mall was close to closing afterall) I couldn’t get my mind off the fact that we still had a rickshaw ride back to the hotel ahead.

I’ve since, of course, been on a rickshaw plenty of times.  It is no less crazy and no less scary than the first time around.  Whenever I think I’ve gained some level of comfort with these things, some new and more belligerent driver manages to surprise me.  I’ve been on rickshaws that have run children off the road, almost sideswiped cows (remember these things are holy in this country so it’s not insignificant) and bullied other rickshaws and motorcycles into a median.  Mid street U-turns and driving into oncoming traffic have become a regular event for me.  But there is no option in this city if you want to get anywhere so it’s just as well that I get used to it, or as used to it as possible.  There is always that “Oh hell” moment when I get on one of these things, but it’s become part of the experience itself rather than something that would deter from it.  As is the fact that anytime I give a driver an address and he says he knows where it is, there’s no guarantee that he does.  He just wants the money.  If it takes longer than he suspected then whatever fee you agreed to at the beginning of the ride (there’s no fixed price and no meter, you have to bargain each time) will be too small and he’ll try to get more.  I’ve learned to not give in.  All I need to do is get ethnic.  When I start pointing and raising my voice they just drive away.  I thought this was because it was such an unfamiliar response to them but since then I’ve seen a few old Indian ladies go apeshit on rickshaw drivers and that’s pretty much what they look like.  The old ladies always win with that technique.

This place is all about learning to deal with life.  What is proper in other places doesn’t so much matter.  What gets you through your day here may require a very different approach.  That may be walking along the road to avoid the sidewalks-turned-toilets, using livestock as landmarks when you’re trying to find your way back to a familiar path, or learning to sit back in a rickshaw and let go of the fear.  I haven’t managed the latter yet.  Not completely anyway.  But I hope to before I leave.