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The New Yorker, August 14, 2000 P. 38
Our Far-flung Correspondents
The Yoga Bums
The West beats a path to a guru's door.
August 14, 2000
By Rebecca Mead
Sri K. Pattabhi Jois is a devout Hindu, a Sanskrit scholar, and a strict Brahmin. He performs an hour of prayers before dawn each day and can recite long passages of holy texts from memory.
He won't let a cup touch his lips if there's a chance it's been contaminated by a member of a lower caste. He lives in the provincial city of Mysore, in southern India, and is eighty-five years old.
He is perhaps the last person you would expect to own a framed photograph of Gwyneth Paltrow.
Yet in the sitting room of the simple suburban house that serves as Jois's workplace, in a glass-fronted cabinet filled with family mementos and images of favorite gods, there she is, in snapshot taken in a New York yoga studio. Paltrow, who is in her short-tousled-hair phase and is wearing black workout pants and a black top and no makeup, has her arm around a short, powerfully built Indian man of fifty-five, with a smile so wide it splits his face in two. The man in the photograph is a yoga teacher named Manju Jois, Pattabhi's son and student. Pattabhi Jois is also a yoga teacher, the master of a strenuous brand of the discipline called Ashtanga; and though he is little known in India, he has found unlikely fame among the American upper middle classes and their entertainment gods. It may be enough to note that Madonna cast herself as an Ashtanga teacher in her most recent movie, and that there are plenty of people in Hollywood who would be more excited about taking a meeting with Pattabhi Jois than with Gwyneth Paltrow.
Ashtanga is a system of practice and belief which embraces meditation and breath-control techniques, and includes directives for ethical behavior. But the distinguishing characteristic of Ashtanga is a set of extremely demanding physical postures, or asanas, that are performed in a linked, fluid series and are accompanied by a focussed pattern of breathing. It's a spiritual practice in the guise of a gruelling workout. If you go to a "power yoga" class in an American health club, chances are that what is being taught will be Ashtanga--either a relatively faithful version of the original or a modified version that is accessible to those who are as yet unable to fold their legs into the lotus position, weave their arms pretzel-like behind their knees, flip onto their backs, and roll around like frantic inverted tortoises.
Ashtanga is hard-core yoga; and Pattabhi Jois's school in Mysore is for those practitioners who are at the crystalline center of the hard core. Ashtanga, like any institution, has a sharply defined hierarchy, and getting your training from Jois himself has a status rather like that, among early psychoanalysts, of having been treated by Freud. Beginning in the sixties and seventies, Jois instructed a trickle of Westerners who made it to Mysore, and they spread his teachings back home, prompting more followers to make the pilgrimage. In the past several years, yoga has become widespread in the American mainstream, and Ashtanga has experienced a corresponding boom: these days, Jois often has as many as eighty students from the West studying with him, paying around five hundred dollars a month for the privilege. In India, where the annual per-
capita income is less than four hundred dollars, this makes him a wealthy man. He is the engine of any number of local businesses--inns, restaurants, Internet-access outlets--that have sprung up to accommodate the tastes and needs of all the spirituality-seeking Westerners flocking to the city to absorb his wisdom.
Jois is an affable, portly fellow with a big grin, a sketchy command of English, and a steely intelligence that is initially obscured by his more Santa Clausish characteristics. His yoga shala (or studio), a modest place with an aging paint job and barely enough floor space to teach a dozen students, is an unlikely locus of a multimillion-dollar American pop phenomenon, and Jois, while a nominal guru to the stars, is blessedly ignorant of America's lurid celebrity constellations. I spent some time in Mysore this
spring, and, on seeing the photograph of Manju with Gwyneth Paltrow, I remarked to Jois that his son must be a short fellow. He agreed, and pointed to the gamine Paltrow. "That man is a tall, tall man," he solemnly informed me. "He is a movie actor."
2
Mysore is a university town, with ice-cream-colored buildings of classical dimensions. In the center of the city is an imposing palace that was built in the first half of the twentieth century for the last Maharaja, the now rather dilapidated mirrored-and-marbled halls of which are open to the public. Mysore is three hours from the city of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, home to the
country's thriving technology industry. The current prosperity of Bangalore has spilled into Mysore: walking around the city's wealthier neighborhoods, you can see new construction every few blocks, apartment towers and luxury homes rising to house the newly rich.
While Mysore speeds into the new century, Jois's yoga students are refugees from the propulsive energies of the West. Inner tranquillity
of the sort that yoga promises can, however, be hard to come by when you are surrounded by the frenzy of Third World industriousness: the only time there is anything approaching calm in Mysore is in the hours before dawn, when the roads are free of trucks; instead, you'll see a man on a bicycle whose handlebars are laden with
wreaths of pungent jasmine blossoms to be given as holy offerings. The early-morning hours are considered the most auspicious for practicing yoga, and shortly after 4 a.m., six mornings a week, students start to arrive at Jois's yoga shala.
Inside, most of the male students are stripped to the waist, the women are in spandex, and all of them are slick with sweat as they twist their bodies into unimaginable knots or drop into breathtaking backbends, seeming to hang suspended in the air as they jump from one position to the next. It all looks like something
from a David Cronenberg science-fiction fantasy, in which sliding pieces of steel machinery have been replaced by body parts: limbs point at angles that limbs don't usually point at unless they've been in a car accident. Jois doesn't teach in the manner of a Western aerobics class, by standing at the front of the room and yelling instructions. Instead, each student shows up at an appointed time and works through the series of postures at his or her own pace, while Jois, barrel-stomached in black Calvin Klein briefs, and bare-chested except for his Brahmin strings, performs what are known in the yoga business as adjustments--winching a leg into place, or leaning heavily on a student's back to stretch him or her out further. He is assisted by his twenty-nine-year-old grandson, Sharath Rangaswamy, who handles the bigger students. The room is silent but for a subtle chorus of long, repetitive,
nasal hisses, and the occasional pidgin-English command from Jois, who barks, "Nooo! You go down!" It is a serenity born of concentration and pain--torture meets bliss.
A good number of the students I met were first-timers in India, and some of them thought of visiting Mysore the way a devout Catholic regards a trip to the Vatican. There were full-time spiritual seekers in the class, like Allison, a yoga teacher from Toronto, who, within seconds of telling me her name, announced that she was a celibate Buddhist renunciate. There were youthful wanderers, like Jessie, a recent graduate of Vassar's women's-studies program, who had come to India with some inheritance money a few months earlier, and had gone sufficiently native to ride through the teeming streets on a rented scooter. There were yoga bums, like Charlie and Alice, an English couple who had met in a yoga class in London a year earlier, given up their apartments and their jobs--hers as a preschool teacher, his as a copywriter--and taken off for India, getting married on New Year's Eve in the hippie beach town of Kovalam. They were being treated by a local doctor for their allergies, which involved having foul-tasting oil syringed up their noses every morning; and they were considering the implications for their conjugal life of the practice of brahmacharya, or sexual self-control, as described in Jois's book "Yoga Mala," which has recently been published in English. ("Yoga Mala" proscribes sex at any time other than between the fourth and the sixteenth days of a woman's menstrual cycle. It also says that
sex during the day is a very bad idea. Sex at night is a good idea only if the man happens to be breathing through what yogis consider his nighttime nostril--the one on the left--rather than
through his daytime nostril. The book cautions that if one should find oneself breathing through the nighttime nostril during the day, it should not be considered an excuse for a daytime quickie.)
Most of the students had made sacrifices in order to practice yoga: once you become an Ashtangi, I was told, you don't want to go out at night, you don't want to eat rich meals or drink
alcohol; your non-yogic friends start thinking that you are no fun. One of the constant topics of conversation among the students was whether you could have a satisfying yoga practice and also have a more conventional life: a job, a home, a spouse, a family. The general consensus seemed to be no. There was one student who
was regarded by many of the others as the Ashtanga ideal. Peter was thirty-seven and came from New Zealand, and had started visiting
Mysore twelve years ago. He'd been back perhaps a dozen times since then, sometimes for a year at a time, and by now his yoga practice was very advanced. When I asked Peter what he did when he went home to New Zealand, he told me simply, "I practice yoga." He'd sometimes teach yoga in one country or another, in order to raise enough money so that he could go back to just practicing. Peter was crinkly-eyed and handsome; he looked a little like Brad Pitt except with a better body. He was one of the calmest,
most good-natured people I had ever come across, which doubtless had a lot to do with his commitment to yoga and was probably enhanced
by the way he spent every afternoon lying poolside at the Southern Star, one of Mysore's best hotels.
Many of the students were yoga teachers, or would-be yoga teachers, whose journey to Mysore was a career-enhancing investment.
Twenty years ago, starting a yoga school in the West was a way of insuring that you would exist in something approximating the poverty of an Indian hermit; now it is possible to live more like
a raja. It is hard to imagine that anyone would become a yoga master simply to make money, but commercial success has become a potential perk of the job, now that overworked Americans are flocking to yoga as a new way to unwind. This gives rise to a certain comedy of yoga manners, according to Nancy Gilgoff, a twenty-eight-year veteran of Ashtanga who teaches in Hawaii. "All
these people who have spent years making money and stressing out are now coming to us, the people who have been out of the mainstream,
and giving us the money that they have earned so that we can get them out of stress," Gilgoff told me over the phone. "That's fair. They can teach us how to take care of money."
3
"Ten dollars," Pattabhi Jois demanded with a chuckle. He was holding out a letter that had been sent to one of his Mysore students in care of his yoga shala and pretending to withhold it until he'd collected his fee. We were at Jois's daily afternoon conference, when students are invited to sit with him and ask questions about yoga theory or about his life. Conference was
instituted a couple of years ago, after Jois's wife died, and the atmosphere is more one of companionable comfort than pedagogical rigor: on many afternoons, Jois, who is known to his students as Guruji, will settle into his chair in his tank top and dhoti, the Indian version of a sarong, and immerse himself in the newspaper, while his students sit cross-legged in beatific silence at his
feet.
Jois grew up in a modest household in a village called Koshika,sixty miles from Mysore. He was one of nine children; his father was a landowner and an astrologer. (Jois is now spending part of his fortune on building a gleaming temple in his village.) When Jois was thirteen, he left home to attend the highly regarded Sanskrit College in Mysore, becoming the first member of his family ever to move to the city. Once there, he studied yoga at a school
that had been founded under the auspices of the Maharaja at the Mysore Palace, by a teacher named Tirumulai Krishnamacharya. Jois was already athletic--he played soccer--and he rapidly took to yoga.
In the West, yoga is commonly and mistakenly understood to refer simply to the physical postures, but they are only one branch of the discipline, and are known more correctly as hatha yoga. Yoga's classical text, the Yoga Sutra of Patañjali, is about two thousand years old, and deals primarily with matters of the spirit; the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the classical manual of hatha yoga, dates from the fourteenth century.
The specific series of Ashtanga postures is said to have been depicted in an ancient manuscript made from leaves that Krishnamacharya found
in Calcutta's library after being directed there by his yoga guru in the early nineteen-hundreds.
The original manuscript no longer exists--it was, Jois says, eaten by ants--and opinions vary as
to whether there ever was, in fact, such a manuscript. (A recent book published in India suggests that many yoga asanas bear a striking resemblance to the poses seen in British calisthenics, which were imported during the colonial period.) The physical postures of yoga are not an end in themselves but a process of inner purification that assists in achieving the ultimate goal of the practice, the dissolution of the ego. Yoga's pinnacle is a state called samadhi, in which the practitioner feels a union
with all nature that amounts to a full consciousness of God.
In 1948, Jois established his Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute and started teaching the discipline to local Brahmins. His first European students came in the early sixties, and the first Americans began arriving in 1972, whereupon they started lobbying for Jois to visit the United States. In 1975, he arrived in California, accompanied by his son Manju. Jois stayed for three months, firmly establishing an Ashtanga beachhead in America. David Swenson, who is now a well-known teacher, was one of the students awaiting Jois's arrival. "The day they got off the airplane, Guruji said, `This is my son, Swami,' " Swenson told me. "Manju said, `I am no swami--my name is Manju, and we have come to break your backs.' "
4
"The first lesson Guruji teaches you is trust," said Anne, a twenty-five-year-old yoga student who, by the time I arrived in Mysore, had been there for a week. We were eating diced papaya
and yogurt for breakfast at one of the regular yoga-student haunts, the home of a local woman named Nagarathna. I had just completed my first Ashtanga practice with Jois, who had alarmed me while I was attempting a forward bend by coming up behind me, grabbing my hips, and tipping me over, holding me so that my head
hovered inches above the ground and my feet almost slipped out from under me: it's hard even to think about meditating when the only thing preventing your head from crashing into a concrete floor is the physical strength of an octogenarian.
Anne had recently graduated from college, and had been practicing Ashtanga for four years. She'd come to Mysore on an impulse with Tracy, a six-year Ashtanga veteran whom she'd met while living in London. Tracy ran a hairdressing business. When I said that my left knee was a little tender after the morning's exertions, Tracy said, "Your knees are your ego." Both Tracy and
Anne had a kind of quiet calm about them, though in Anne's case that may have been due to exhaustion, because of a bad experience with a castor-oil bath, something Jois prescribes for many of his students to improve their suppleness.
This involves smearing castor oil all over your head and body, and leaving it on anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour, then scrubbing it off with a special green soap powder. Castor oil is a powerful purgative, whose application is supposed to be cleansing and soothing; it
is also supposed to penetrate your skin, enter your joints, and lubricate them into new heights of flexibility. Users report psychological effects, of weepiness or spaciness, and Jois's students discuss taking castor-oil baths with the same degree of obsessive monomania with which the druggie kids in high school used to talk about dropping acid.
Getting sick was not, you might think, the kind of thing that would engender trust; but Anne, like most of the other students, had surrendered to the methods of Mysore. Obedience to the guru
was part of it; but so was giving yourself over to a routine that combined yogic mindfulness with what looked like a fair amount of mindlessness. The yoga student's day is a languid one: after
you finish the yoga postures and spend half an hour meditating in a darkened room at the yoga shala, you wander off for breakfast at Nagarathna's or go to a local chai stand. You might make your way to the Internet-access outlet, where you can download, with
excruciating slowness, your E-mail. Soon it's lunchtime, when you go to Auntie's--the home of another enterprising Indian woman, who cooks chapatis and dahl and curried vegetables and three different kinds of rice, all for twenty rupees, which is slightly less than fifty cents. Then you might retire to the poolside of the Southern Star Hotel, which would probably not be where you were staying, because one night there costs the equivalent of nearly five months of lunches at Auntie's. Later, you wander over to Jois's for the
afternoon conference, then have some fruit, and try to be asleep by nine so that you are rested by the time you rise at four the next morning for another day of the same.
The yoga culture in Mysore offers immersion in the exotic while also providing a certain amount of insulation against the less beguiling aspects of India. The female yoga students quickly adopt Indian clothing, wafting around in the pajamalike salwar kameez and diaphanous scarves, to guard against the sun and the eyes of the local men. New Yorkers who usually wear all black start looking like Woodstock revivalists after a few days. There are, however, limits. Charlie, the recently married Englishman, told me about how yoga had transformed his life--he'd given up
drinking and meat-eating, he said--but he had no trouble relapsing one evening in my hotel room, ordering fish and chips and a beer from room service while watching "Friends" on cable TV, and going into raptures over the European-style toilet, after months of squatting, Indian style.
India is, to Western eyes, alluring and strange; and among the yoga students there is a tendency to see all that strangeness through the prism of spirituality. One day in conference, a student,
newly arrived from Manhattan, recounted how she had just seen an elderly woman sitting on the ground with outstretched hand, begging. "I looked at her, and there was so much love in
her face," she said. "And I thought about the suits I see on the street in my neighborhood, these millionaires grimacing into their cell phones. And I thought, Who is happier, really?"
Another afternoon, I sat by the pool with Jessie, the Vassar grad from the Upper West Side, who sustained herself in India with care packages from home of miso soup and gel-roller pens. She
was tiny and plump, with black curly hair, and was perpetually breaking into peals of laughter. Jessie had just returned from
a visit to an astrologer. "He pretty much told me when I was going to die," she said. "But it was like, whatever. The more you get into this Eastern stuff, the less threatening death seems. I mean, you realize living is hard." Life didn't seem so hard, actually, as we sat there in our swimsuits, but her talk of dawning self-knowledge was utterly sincere.
Most ordinary Indians have about as much interest in yoga as contemporary Americans do in, say, the practices of the Shakers: it is part of their history, but hardly part of their present.
Still, the modern spiritual seeker needs infrastructure, and this has presented the people of Mysore with all kinds of commercial opportunities. I met a young local couple who were converting their home into a Western-inspired bed-and-breakfast, providing such amenities as unlimited free filtered water and photo opportunities with a troupe of elephants from the Mysore Palace which pass by the house every weekend. And, across town, an enterprising young woman had transformed the tiny family store by stocking products that appeal to Westerners, such as sugar-free granola, peanut butter, and sweet corn--foods that she said, politely, were not to her taste at all.
Some residents of Mysore make it their business to get to know the yoga students, like the bunch of skinny local kids who congregate outside Jois's shala. "You come from New York?"
a boy named Ajay said to me. "Do you practice at Jivamukti?"
Ajay had learned about Jivamukti--the very cool yoga studio in downtown Manhattan, where you're the odd one out if you don't have facial jewelry or a tattoo or otherwise look as if you have a standing reservation at Moomba--because, for poor kids like him, knowing the yoga students is not just a way to practice speaking English but a way to get a meal, or maybe some other favor.
Particularly among local women, the yoga effect has inspired otherwise undreamed-of entrepreneurial ambitions. Nagarathna, in whose home so many students eat, told about the famous yoga teachers from around the world who had made their way to her house.
"If I get a chance to work for a family in your country, I will take it," she told me, hopefully. "I will cook for them, or look after their babies. I just want to see how the people live. I have grown up like the frog in the well. I have not seen anything." An Indian parable tells of the frog in
the well who wants to visit the frog by the ocean; the frog in the well gets his wish, and when he sees the ocean his head explodes. Nagarathna seemed tempted by the possibility.
5
"Leave your shoes at the door!" a voice cried, and the throng that had gathered at the top of a staircase in a loft building on the corner of Broadway and Houston surged forward. People kicked off their strappy silver sandals and their Birkenstocks,and shuffled under a lintel hung with a garland of roses to entera room where the air was scented with incense, and Indian music
emanated from a pair of speakers. It was a hot Sunday afternoon in late July, and New York's Ashtanga community had gathered to celebrate Pattabhi Jois's eighty-fifth birthday, which he was spending in New York, a stop on a four-month, round-the-world teaching tour. About a hundred and fifty people were squeezed into the room, with the same number jostling outside: men with close-shaven heads or piled dreadlocks and no body fat and excellent posture; and young downtown women in spaghetti-strap tops or colorful saris, with glittering bindis affixed to their foreheads. They all sat down on the floor to await Jois's arrival, tucking their legs under them without creaks or complaints about bad backs.
Some assumed the lotus position and started meditating--a challenging task, given the hubbub of excited chatter and the occasional ringing of a cell phone. Jessie from Mysore was there, having returned from India the previous week, with no clue as to what she was going to do now. ("The first thing I did was cry for two days," she said.) Gwyneth Paltrow was in attendance, in a
long white skirt and skinny white tank top, gesturing to her friends to come join her near the altar, on which sat a statue of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, draped with blossoms.
Jois eventually ambled in and sat cross-legged on the floor opposite a white-robed Indian priest, who began a series of Sanskrit invocations. For two hours, the priest chanted and lit incense and threw offerings of rice and coconut and ghee into a holy flame, while the assembled bowed their heads in prayer or angled for a better view of Jois. The man in front of me sat in the lotus position atop a thick computer textbook, thus achieving a kind of assisted levitation. The priest burned some camphor on a tray to symbolize the evaporation of the ego in the fire of knowledge; then Jois's grandson held the flame aloft and walked among the crowd. A thicket of urgent, slender white arms rose up and reached for the fire; the devotees dipped their hands into the flame, and then made a motion as if to wipe their fingers over their faces and heads, symbolizing the burning of their egos.
After the ceremony, everyone filed across Broadway for Jois's birthday party, which was held in the Skylight Ballroom of the Puck Building, with its panoramic views of downtown Manhattan. The event felt like a cross between a state visit of a foreign dignitary and an afternoon at the Lilith Fair: Jois sat at the head of the room as if on a throne while his friends and students
waited in line to greet him and give him bouquets and garlands and boxes of chocolates. (Brahmin rules about food preparation don't seem to prevent the eating of candy, though Jois's doctors have warned him against it.) The guru showed no signs of jet lag, despite having arrived from France the day before: he glowed with
pleasure as innumerable attractive young women dropped to their knees and kissed his feet, then rose up to put their arms around him, while he kissed them and embraced their waists and occasionally let his hands slip lower to give their bottoms a fond, two-palmed pat. Jois and his family didn't stay long, but, before they left,
an enormous chocolate cake bearing dozens of candles was brought in, and everyone sang "Happy Birthday."
The conventional wisdom about the current Western enthusiasm for yoga is that it answers to an absence in contemporary American culture, in which material things are valued at the expense of the spiritual. That argument has merit, and yet it doesn't explain why there's been a surge of yoga, rather than, say, a surge in attendance at early-morning Mass. Part of the explanation might be that as yoga has become popular in the American mainstream it has shed much of its spiritual meaning. The yoga teacher at your local health club might light a candle, but she doesn't instruct you on vegetarianism or sexual restraint. The yoga boom, in many respects, is an extension of the health boom of the past two decades: for efficiency-oriented Americans, a workout that can double as a spiritual exercise, and even triple as a substitute for going to the shrink, is understandably appealing. It's a particularly American paradox that an Indian philosophy based on the dissolution of the self should mesh so perfectly with the ingrained Western tradition of individualism and self-improvement.
Ashtanga, though, seems to attract those who require more rigor from their practice, both of the body and of the soul. Even those who are initially drawn by the physical exercise often start taking classes in chanting and meditating, and begin to save up for a ticket to Mysore. Whether the sweating Ashtangis who came to Jois's classes each morning in the Puck Building were doing
it for God or for Narcissus, their practice was conducted at a Manhattan pace: After an hour and a half of yoga, Jois instructed the class to assume a resting posture. You're supposed to lie
still for at least five or ten minutes, meditating, but within thirty seconds mats were being rolled up and feet were padding across the hardwood floor to the exit. Inner serenity was all very well, but the obligations of the working world could not
wait for the next life.
6
When he is asked about yoga, Jois doesn't dwell on God or the possibility of enlightenment. Instead, he talks about how yoga is good for maintaining physical health. He seems to regard
the global spread of his discipline as only to be expected, given its efficacy. There's much about the popularity of Ashtanga, though, that Jois doesn't like, and the thing that he seems to like the least is other people making money from his system. Jois has a particular animus against Beryl Bender Birch, the author of the popular book "Power Yoga," a very accessible guide that
is based upon the Ashtanga series. "Only money-making," Jois told me sternly. (In reply, Birch says, "My objective was to bring this system to mainstream America, to a lot of people
who wouldn't otherwise have been comfortable trying yoga. As far as I can see, we have all benefitted from it.")
Jois has become strict over the years about issuing his stamp of approval to teachers: worldwide, there are only a handful of fully certified Ashtanga teachers who have studied with Jois for at least six years; and his grandson Rangaswamy is said to be the world's foremost practitioner and the only person to whom
Jois is currently teaching the final, most difficult postures.
In recent years, disciples of Jois have noticed a deterioration in his health; he suffers from mild diabetes, and when he fell ill last year after a trip to Australia friends advised him against
travelling.
Jois has decisively spurned this advice, undertaking the current global circuit, which will pass through Boulder, Encinitas, Hawaii, and Australia before returning to India in October. He
and his family fly first class, but he does not eat airplane food. Rather than staying in a hotel in New York, they have been loaned a house in the Village, where Saraswathi, Jois's daughter, can
cook the rice and dahl they've brought with them. Every morning for a month, Jois is teaching two classes at the Puck Building, with the help of his son Manju, who now lives here, and Rangaswamy.
The classes are the biggest he has ever taught--it's the yogic equivalent of the Beatles at Shea Stadium.
He is enjoying being a tourist, too: he went to see "Cirque du Soleil" at the imax theatre, and has been doing a lot of shopping. One afternoon, I joined Jois and his family on an outing to Chinatown. Rangaswamy, who is on his first trip to America, kept darting into shoe shops, eying the Rockports hungrily; he was wearing a new pair of Nikes he'd acquired the previous day, at Niketown. Saraswathi looked suspiciously at the wares in the jewelry-shop windows, her own fingers and toes and wrists heavy with gold. "Indian gold much better," Jois said, holding
up his hands to display his own collection of jewels and rings.
Jois stumped along Canal Street in his silk short-sleeved shirt and his dhoti, stopping every so often at a stall to look at the goods. He made everyone stop at a leather store where he seemed tempted by a fake studded Versace belt, even though he has never worn anything with belt loops. Then he pawed through heaps of trashy watches, bargaining and joking in his pidgin English with the shopkeepers in theirs. ("Is guarantee?" Jois asked about a six-dollar watch. "Guarantee one hour," the storekeeper retorted.)
After scoping out several watch stores and haggling with half a dozen shopkeepers and weighing the merits of fake leather versus fake silver, Jois bought ten watches at six dollars each, gifts for the folks back home.
Now he was on a roll, and we went into a luggage store. I'd been warned that Jois is the Imelda Marcos of suitcases--he has twenty-five of them at home. One in particular caught his eye, a rigid silver monster, which he rolled around and looked at from all angles, before bargaining the shopkeeper down to forty-five dollars. He walked out of the store looking pleased with himself, while Rangaswamy carried the behemoth behind him. Perhaps Jois's suitcase obsession had some symbolic meaning--a wish to stay on
the move, mentally and physically--although the purchase would also serve a practical purpose, because there were gifts from the yoga students to carry home, and much more shopping to be
done. He'd been to K mart on Astor Place the previous day, but was disappointed. "In California, K mart is much better," he said. "In Hawaii, much better."
7
On my last night in Mysore, I went to take a final look at the palace. Once a week, the building is lit up by thousands of light bulbs, which diagram its dimensions, and at that time the grounds are a favorite resort for local families, who come to take the air and promenade and escape the power cuts in their own homes. While I was walking, I came upon Ajay, one of the local
kids who hung around Jois's yoga shala, and his friend Deepak.
They were cruising the palace much like aimless teen-agers in any American city except that they didn't have a mall to go to or any money to spend at a mall if there had been one. Ajay was fourteen, only about five feet tall, and weighed around eighty pounds. Deepak was sixteen and more sober, but hardly any bigger. They looked as if they had never had enough to eat in their lives.
We sat down on the ground, and they told me how much they liked the Western yoga students, and how much the students had helped them: one had given Deepak a Walkman, another had bought books for Ajay and paid for him to take a computer-programming course. I asked them what they wanted to do when they left school,
and they told me they wanted to be yoga teachers. It seemed like a grand ambition, given Jois's example. But, they told me, they wouldn't want to teach just Western students. Poor people needed yoga, too. "We don't want to forget where we came from and what we were before we started practicing yoga," Ajay said.
"Before, we just went around, not doing anything. But the yoga students told us that you have to work, you have to concentrate. That when you become yogis whatever you want you will have."
Ajay and Deepak invited me to their homes--they wanted to show me photographs of themselves doing yoga--and so we got into
an auto rickshaw and drove to an impoverished corner of town.
The air was smoky and thick with the smell of burning cow dung, and we ducked into the home that Ajay shared with his grandmother: two dark, sparsely furnished rooms, each barely as big as a walk-in closet, and no better ventilated. Ajay's home didn't have electricity, so he lit a candle, and then dug out a photograph album. We squatted on the floor and looked through the pictures of the two wiry boys folding themselves into yoga postures or posing alongside well-known Western yoga teachers. Ajay couldn't have been prouder if the pictures had shown him with his arm around Gwyneth Paltrow.
Ajay and Deepak were very young, and as well as being friendly they were on the make--hoping that I would be among the yoga students who could afford to help them out. Whether they would stick with the yoga, let alone ever attain samadhi, was questionable. But when they said that yoga had transformed their lives I believed
them. Whether the transformation had come about through the power of the poses, or because of the material goods the Western students had given them, or because of the ambitions that the Western students had inspired in them, I didn't know--and it didn't really seem
to matter, since Ajay and Deepak were a walking argument for the yogic contention that betterment of the body and of the soul can be one and the same thing. "We think God sent us the yoga students," Deepak told me, and I believed him when he said that, too.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/08/14/the-yoga-bums
http://rebeccamead.com/
