India Diaries: Days 4-6

September 2005
by Linda McGrath

Day Four
This time at lunch I made friends with Mary, a girl from Ojai. After discussing how tight-packed our schedule has been, we decided we must go check out the stores around the resort, today, while we still had the energy. Everywhere I went for the last 4 days, people asked me “where you from?”, and after that, “this, vacation?” To which I always replied I was here on a yoga training and jumped at the opportunity to ask if they practiced. It always went something like this:
“Yes, yoga, very very good”, shaking their head.
“Yes, it's very good, but do YOU do yoga?”
“Me”, they'd laugh, “no, me no yoga.”
“Why not?” I'd ask. They'd keep laughing.
“Me, very very busy”, they'd say, continuing to pick their feet. Let me tell you about “busy”. My ignorant belief is that at some point, the Indian government must have decided to solve the overpopulation problem by creating the most mind boggling bureaucracy and incenting private businesses to themselves create the most surprising job positions in order to absorb the masses of people that keep flowing in from the countryside. This has resulted in the most delightful effect in that everybody accomplishes very little and even that is done at the most leisurely of pace and lightness of spirit.

But back to yoga and shopping. On my way to the practice room, I had noticed a man always sitting at the steps of his store. He always wore a loincloth and his muscles while small looked very lean and well developed. He bore the three stripes on his forehead symbolizing worship of Shiva (God of yoga, among his other duties) and his white beard came down to his waist. He always looked very still and content and unlike all the other merchants who came out on the street to talk you into buying junk, he just sat on the steps and smiled. “Now, he”, I thought, “must practice yoga!”

Most of the stores we had seen had diversified into selling a number of completely unrelated articles: “You don't want beautiful sarong? We have the latest pirated Indian pop music. Very good for yoga!” but this store only offered shelves and shelves of stone figurines that our man had carved himself. Mary was in awe and was chatting him up. Eventually she told him we were here for the yoga retreat and my ears perked up to hear if he'd say anything:
“Oh, yoga, yes, me doing yoga too.”
“REALLY?” I jumped in. “Do you practice every day?”
“Every day, yes. Me wake up at 4 and do some yoga, sometimes 20 minutes, sometimes more, then me start working.”
“How long have you practiced?” I wanted to know more.
“Oh, very very long time: when me was small” he placed his hand by his hip to show me his height when he started. “56 now.” Wow! Apart from the beard, he had the body of a 20 year-old. I could totally see him doing sixth series (the most advanced class in Ashtanga). We went outside to see the rest of his stuff. I saw a statue of Devi, the divine mother laying propped on one arm, the essence of cool. I asked him how much.
“This, 300 dollar. Very big work…” and he showed me his hands. They were all shriveled in from arthritis and when he saw my face, he smiled and demonstrated almost proudly that he couldn't lay them flat on the ground. Maybe I'm being naïve but a simple padahastasana (stepping your feet on top of your palms) would have done a lot to prevent that over the years. I showed him the pose and told him to be very careful and he got pretty excited. He thanked me and told me he'd give me the Devi for 200. I said I would think about it and left, happy to have been of help but quite puzzled. How can someone practice yoga for 40 years and not do padahastasana?

I never answered this question but in retrospect I can see how much teachers like Iyengar and Bikram have done for yoga, in terms of practicing with a therapeutic purpose and creating intelligent sequences. Iyengar was the first to introduce the West to the hatha, the physical practice and because that was the platform we started from, I was surprised to realize that the quality of instruction in the US is actually very high. Part of it too is that in the US we are quite excited about yoga. It is a necessary balance to our lifestyle and our interest in its health benefits is very strong. That's not the case in India . They certainly pride themselves for having come up with it but probably a much smaller percentage of the population there actually practices the poses and so there are teachers who are absolutely brilliant but they are much fewer than you'd think and their students are mostly westerners. On the other hand, it seems that their sadhana, their seated practice (in other words, their spiritual and mental practice) is very strong, mostly because it is deeply entwined with their religion. That's the thing, in India , they don't separate the two; I even read an article in the local paper ranting about how teachers in the West are “bastardizing the jewel of India ” by trying to teach only the physical part. So I think in the end, if you are interested in exploring a spiritual depth to your practice versed in the Hindu or Buddhist or Jainist traditions, you can learn a lot from a pilgrimage to India . But if you already have a different spiritual identity, or if you can't commit to several months of study with Patthabi or Iyengar, then stay at home because you can learn a lot more here. And you won't get slapped on the head.

Day Five
As part of the Ayurvedic program, all the dishes at every meal were labeled for each dosha. Being a Vata dominant, and also warned about the Delhi belly threat, my diet over the last five days had consisted of: curried banana stew over oatmeal at breakfast, vegetable curry for lunch and sometimes the same vegetable curry for dinner. It was fun the first 3 days but by now I was giving dirty looks to the German guy at the next table who was making love to a juicy chicken thigh, complete with fries and a salad. My friend Irit saw me face:
“I know, just a few more days and you'll be home. It's not worth getting sick over.”
I debated internally for a split second and decided that the positive thinking was more pragmatic:
“That's true, and just look where we are”. Down, in front of us was a stretch of connecting white beaches framed by thousands of coconut palms on the left side and the blue of the surf to the right. No wonder the locals call Kerala “gods' own place”.
“Yeah, well, that beach”, she said “I'm not setting foot in that water!”
“What, why?” I asked. So she told me the story:
That morning she and her husband went for a walk on that same beach. They wanted to check out the village neighboring the resort. They walked past the fishermen and not before long, they could start to see the huts through the dense coconut trees. They detected some bad smell where they were, so they got on a path that ran closer to the village, also hoping to get a better glimse at the locals' way of life. They couldn't see much though through the vegetation so after a while they decided to turn around and walk by the water on their way back. They had been so focused on their anthropological spying that they hadn't noticed a man squatting by to the water line, and then another one, some 50 feet down. “How nice”, they thought at first, “they're meditating!” And then they got closer and noticed that both of them had their skirts pulled up around their hips and the lightbulb went on. There was line of human feces on the sand going out to the horizon and rhythmically caressed every few seconds by the waves of the ocean.“I don't get it, you know,” she said, “this place can be paradise and they've turned it into a toilet.” This story I think sums up my experience of India . There is so much beauty in India's nature and art and human spirit and some of the people from the training could just isolate that and they had a great time, but for me it was impossible not to notice the poverty and the filth that came very often in the same glimpse and not be affected by it.

Irit felt the same way, so as any spiritual yoga instructor would do in the face of depressing thought, we decided to skip the afternoon Kalari and get a cab to Parthas. Parthas is the 5 story saree and fabric megastore located in the heart of Trivandrum . Thirty minutes and three near death experiences later, the cab dropped us off and promised to wait an hour. We went to the first floor which was solely dedicated to the silks. I spotted 5 other girls from the training engaged in heated debates in various corners of the department. In terms of the choice that was laid before us, “overwhelming” is an understatement. I felt like someone who's never had ice cream walking into Coldstone Creamery for the first time. I think sarees are the most flattering attire any culture has come up with and they come in the most beautiful colors, embroidered or beaded or woven in with gold. You could be the clutziest and most androgynous woman (or man – this is the Bay Area), put on a saree and you'll look the essence of elegance and femininity. Plus they are huge – at 6 meters of length you can make enough pillows and bolsters to cover Martha Steward's guest bed. So an hour later, knowing that the cab was waiting, I decided that four sarees were going to do and went up to one of the clerks to pay. He led me to a line of about 20 women where they wrote up my order. I was then led up to the third floor where I stood in another line to pay. Then back to the first line to show them my receipt and then, finally, was sent downstairs where a sea of women were elbowing each other to get to the delivery clerk and collect the fruit of their labors. When my turn came some twenty minutes later, he looked at my receipt and went to find my bag. He took all its contents out and stamped each one of them, then systematically checked them off the receipt, put them in a paper bag, stapled that 3 times, put it in a plastic bag with handles and finally handed it to me. I clutched the bag and crawled out of there, grinning at the thought of what my husband would have done by now had he been brought along to this shopping experience.

The cab was still there and as soon as he saw us, he turned the engine so we jumped in almost in motion. I wasn't feeling so good but I just atttibuted it to the shopping trauma. Once I got to my room, I decided to lie down a little before the massage. As the time came to get up I wasn't feeling much better but I didn't want to cancel at the last minute and made it to the clinic anyhow. A different doctor was there. I told him I was feeling nauseous. He looked at me and then carried on with the daily ritual: he took my pulse and blood pressure and asked “how is sleep?” and “how is toilet?”.
“Toilet and sleep are great, but I am not feeling well. I feel like I'm going to throw up.”
He took my right hand and applied both his thumbs against two pressure points in the palm. He held on for a minute, looking very serious, then released and looked back at me:
“Headache Ok now?” This wasn't exactly going as I planned.
“My head is fine,” I said pointing to my head and shaking it to say no. “No headache. I feel like throwing up” and I performed my best mimic of food coming up and out.
“Ah, VOMITING!”
“Yes! Vomiting!”
“Ah, very good.”
“Very good?”
“You go massage and I'll send you medicine.”

Alright, I thought, at least he knows what is wrong me. This could be worse. I dragged myself behind my therapist whose smile dropped when she saw me: “you no good?” “No, me no good today”. Halfway through the massage, there was a knock on the door. She answered and after a brief exchange she came back to me holding a cup. I stood up and looked inside it: I could have sworn this was the same medicine they gave me before only this time it wasn't diluted: it was thick and black as Turkish coffee and smelled of really strong spices. I gave my therapist the “do I have to?” look but she was stern so I thought the only way out of this is through and chugged it without a chocolate to wash it down. I lied back down but I couldn't get the taste out of my mind so we cut our session short. I dragged myself to my room and sat on the bed, holding my head in my hands, trying to ignore the message I was getting from my stomach. You see, I really, really hate throwing up. That's why I never got drunk in college. I think it's the most violating physical experience so I'll do anything to avoid it. My meditation must still need work though because thirty minutes later, I ran to the bathroom. Some 5 hours later, I fell asleep exhausted.

Day Six
I woke up with the crows. My tummy felt light and my head was clear. “YES! I am healed!” I thought, and churpily went to breakfast. I devoured twice the oatmeal to make up for my missed dinner and came back to my room. I still had plenty of time so I'll lie down a bit, I thought. Thirty minutes later I tried getting up but I couldn't stand on my feet very well. I'll stay here a little longer, I thought. By nine o'clock the gates of hell had opened back in their full swing, so I decided to crack open my emergency cipro. “Thank God for real drugs; it will only take a few hours now and I'll be fine,” I kept thinking. “I'll be up and running for the teacher training at 2.” I wish I had known cipro takes about 24 hours to kick in. I spent the day in bed, looking out the open door at the same beach/toilet you couldn't swim in and reading the Kite Runner and crying (it's a real tear jerker, if you haven't read it – it's great), feeling sorry for the protagonist and myself at the same time. I was mad at everybody for everything. It was so unfair that I spent the last 5 days eating curry and I still got sick! And my husband was so far away! The phone lines were so bad that you could only hear every third word, which took any charm out of it:
“I miss you, I can't wait to come home”, me sobbing…
“What?”
“I MISS YOU”
“What?”
“Forget it, I'll see you in a week.”
And that was on the odd times that he could get through.

I was mad at the locals for not linking the dots between the quality of the water and their health. Just this morning, the newspaper's headlines proclaimed “108 cases of Malaria and growing” for Trivandrum alone. Maybe if you didn't cook your curry with water from the same river you go to the bathroom in and wash your clothes in and burry grandma in, you'd be in better health. And maybe so would I. I was mad at the doctors who always meant well but just didn't speak the same language, literally and figuratively. The next day when I went to my treatment, I told them I took antibiotics and they looked at me like I had just admitted to abducting a child. To them, if you don't have malaria, you're fine, just rest and be miserable. But I didn't care anymore. The day after, half our group was sick, we're talking 30 people, and I think they started waking up to the reality of the situation. Anyway, I was in the middle of my angry-at-the whole-world breakdown when I noticed the cleaning lady trying to peek in through the open door. She had seen me lying there as she went past several times in the day but she had gone by as not to disturb me. This time though she hesitantly stepped in and asked
“You no good?”
“No”, I said. “I am sick”, thinking, “because you washed the towels in the cooking water.”
She didn't pick up on the hostility and came closer.
“Sick?” she asked, making the same nausea describing hand gesture I had used on the doctor yesterday.
“Yes”, I said with a glimmer of hope, thinking “finally somebody understands!”

She disappeared without a word and came back with what she called rice soup, which was a few overcooked rice grains in their own brine. This woman was nobody to me but she stood there until I drank it, slowly. When I was done, she gently caressed my head, like a grandma to a sick child and then picked up the mess around the room. The soup didn't do much but I felt so grateful I was going to cry. It is amazing what just a little human attention can do for you when you're sick.

“Where is your friend?” she asked. I guess they've gotten used to unmarried couples and she was just trying to be polite.
“No, no friend. My husband, he's in California .”
“Husband?”
“Yes, husband; not here, in California .”
“You, alone?'
“Yes, me alone.” She felt even more sorry for me and petted my hair again.
“Next year, you come and bring him.”
“Yes, maybe… I come and bring him…”

The great thing out of all this though was that once you're on cipro, you can eat everything, so my last few days were one glorious culinary delight. I had fresh fruit and fresh fish and mango lassis and the best tandoori chicken I've ever tasted!