The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Baggett

  At long last satsung ended, and we were given a “snack”—a small cup of tea and five grapes or a spoonful of banana chips—before a two-hour yoga class. My stomach rumbled in protest as we practiced downward dogs. I fell asleep during final relaxation, dreaming of eggs and bacon.

  Another bell startled me awake, finally signaling that it was time to head to the open-air dining room for breakfast, five hours after we’d first woken up. I was walking with Chloe and Marta, a Polish woman my own age who looked like a china doll with her wide-set blue eyes and high cheekbones.

  “Hey, Hoooolly! Om shanti!” I turned, hearing the unmistakable giggles of Jen and Amanda. A wave of relief washed over me.

  “Hi, guys,” I said, waving good-bye to my new friends Chloe and Marta, and heading to the stone ledge where my old friends sat waiting for me. “You skipped morning meditation again. Sinners!”

  “We totally slept in. We’re just lowly yogi vacationers, so it’s not like anyone is taking our attendance,” Amanda said happily. She was referring to the fact that teacher trainees were assigned a number and required to check in.

  I grabbed their hands, pulling them down the hill toward the dining hall. “Come on, I’m starving!” A sign posted demanded diners “Eat in silence,” but first a few hundred people chanted out the same two words, “Hare” and “Krishna,” at the top of their lungs. We began both of our two daily meals with that chant, also known as the “Great Mantra,” as an act of devotion and to help purify our hearts and minds before we nourished our bodies.

  We found three empty spots on a bamboo mat running the length of the dining hall’s stone floor. Each spot was set with a plate laid in front of it. Just as we sat, the group chanted “Om” and fell silent, as if someone had unplugged an enormous sound system. The only sound was tin clanking on tin as a yogi on kitchen duty heaped our metal plates with rice.

  “What’s the first thing you’re going to eat when you’re out of the ashram?” I whispered to Jen, sounding to myself like a convict about to get out on bail. It was the girls’ last day of their weeklong yogi vacation. Though it was, of course, my choice to stay at the ashram, I was a little envious that tomorrow they’d be drinking beers on the beach.

  “Silence, pleeeease! Pleeeease eeeat in si-lence!” bellowed the kitchen master, a guy named Vera, wearing wide-legged pants with a silver beard and the soulful eyes of some kind of Indian sage.

  Glancing at Jen from the corner of my eye, I didn’t think it was my imagination that she looked a bit more, well, calm. Her skin glowed a little brighter, and her mouth had softened somehow. The teacher-training program left us zero free time, so I hadn’t been able to find out what had happened after Brian e-mailed her. Had she written him back? Was she okay with everything?

  The girl talk would have to wait. Another guy ladled thin lentil stew over my plate and tossed me two chapatis. Before trying it, I’d thought the simple vegetarian food might be bland, but it was actually delicious. Every morsel was unprocessed, and it’d been so long since I’d eaten only foods without additives that I’d forgotten what “fresh” tasted like. After only a week at the ashram, I felt lighter. And Jen wasn’t the only one whose skin glowed: I’d noticed my own complexion was clearer and brighter. Eliminating meat, preservatives, and caffeine made me look as if a lightbulb had been turned on beneath my skin.

  Then I caught the eye of a woman with straggly blond hair sitting across from me and quickly looked down. Her eyes were puffy, oozy, a deep shade of crimson. Just looking at them made my own eyes burn. Figuring it must be a bad case of pinkeye, I gathered my dishes and went to rinse them at the outdoor sink, extra-careful to scrub my hands.

  “I have to report for my karma yoga now. I guess I’ll see you both at your last supper tonight,” I said reluctantly to Jen and Amanda before heading to the dorms to fulfill my “selfless service.” My teacher-training manual said, “Service purifies the mind and makes us realize the Oneness of all.” Every yogi was given a duty to help keep us humble, remind us to spend time daily giving back, and carry us closer to God. I thought back to what I’d learned in Sunday school, and remembered a verse in the Bible that said: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” Some people were assigned to serve food, some to rake leaves, and some to take attendance.

  My selfless service was cleaning toilets. I’d thought my days of scrubbing toilets other than my own had ended in college, after I’d finished a job as a housekeeper in the dorms. But here I was, a decade later and on the other side of the world, back down on my knees brushing a porcelain bowl. Only this time, I was giving thanks that there was actually a bowl to scrub—it was better than having to wash the cement floor surrounding a hole in the ground buzzing with horseflies like the kind I’d used in Kenya. And I was grateful for something I’d never thought to be thankful for before, running water, so I could fill my bucket in the sink rather than having to walk all the way to the river. I’m not sure if toilet cleaning was purifying for my mind (or any other part of me, for that matter), but it proved that, though complaining about getting stuck with a task worthy of Dirty Jobs might have been easy to do, it wouldn’t make the task go any faster.

  After an hour of selfless service came a lecture on the Bhagavad Gita, followed by a rare hour of free time (to do our homework), an hour-and-a-half lecture on the philosophy of yoga, another two-hour yoga class, dinner, and another satsung (meditation-chanting-lecture) before lights-out at 10:20 p.m.

  Since sitting still was turning out to be more of a challenge than I’d ever imagined, I was itching for my one constant: running. Being in motion always made it easier for me to clear my mind, the steady pace pounding my awareness out of my head and back into my body. Besides, the swamis had said that a strong body led to a strong mind. Though I felt guilty running here because it probably fit less with hatha yoga’s philosophy of easy stretching and more with what our training manual defined as “rajasic, or violent movements that increase adrenaline and stimulate the mind,” technically it wasn’t an act of rebellion.

  Eager to make use of my “free” hour, I threw on a T-shirt and long pants despite the 100 percent humidity to avoid offending the locals with my bare knees, and made my way toward the gates. A guard blocked my path and stared at me skeptically. “Madame, please show your pass.”

  “I’m sorry, my pass?” I said, confused.

  “You need pass from reception.” He gestured toward the brick building to his left, bobbing his head side to side. Not wanting to waste a second, I marched up the steps of the building to request written permission from the Indian woman behind the counter.

  “Why do you need to leave?” she asked.

  “Um, I’d like to go for a walk, please,” I said, fudging the truth a bit. I knew from running in South America and Africa that the locals did not see it as a ladylike activity—or maybe anything that purposefully burned calories wasn’t a pastime of choice in places where so many suffered from food shortages.

  “You better carry a big stick,” warned a female voice with a distinctly American accent. I spun around to see Chloe.

  “A stick? But why?” I asked. She explained that rabid dogs were rampant in the villages and said she’d heard stories of them tearing into students when they went outside.

  “She’s right—and I wouldn’t go by yourself if I were you,” said Marta, who’d walked in with her. Though Chloe and I had instantly shared our personal stories, much the way Shannon and I had on the Inca Trail, Marta’s past had remained more of a mystery to me. So I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t her first time at the ashram: she’d visited last fall. She’d been part of a group of hundreds of students doing a walking meditation when a dog had sneaked up behind her, sunk its teeth into her calf, and darted away. Marta had had to hightail it to a local hospital for rabies shots.

  “Oh, my God! Why did you come back?” I asked after she lifted the leg of her white pants to show me a jagged scar on her otherwise perfect leg.


  “Because I believe I still have a lesson to learn. And that’s why I’m here—to learn,” said Marta. Her and Chloe’s friendship was one of opposites: Chloe was an ashram rebel who called bullshit whenever the swami said our egos threatened to sabotage our spiritual paths (“It’s not my ego that’s making me want to eat instead of meditate. It’s those four hours of yoga I did yesterday!”). Marta, on the other hand, was the embodiment of a devotee, never missing class and spending our only day off sprawled in the grass studying the Bhagavad Gita.

  I couldn’t decide if Marta’s return trip was brave or foolhardy. Still, her story reminded me to keep my mind open to absorbing the ashram’s lessons (which I hoped included more than just “how to fight off rabid animals”).

  “Thanks for the advice, but I think I’ll take my chances—and a stick!” I said, foolhardy myself. Then I accepted the index-card-sized piece of paper from the Indian woman across the counter and hurried back to the exit.

  The truth was, I’d grown accustomed to naysayers worldwide offering all kinds of reasons why I should skip my daily jog. I’d heard every excuse, from male predators to reckless drivers to rockfalls. I pegged their concern as coming more from fear than reality, just as I did my parents’ warnings that I’d be a victim of a terrorist attack by straying so far beyond U.S. borders. If I believed them, almost every place in the world was too dangerous to walk around. But I’d found that one of my favorite ways to explore was on foot. I met more locals, came across unexpected gardens, witnessed dozens of impromptu football games, and discovered other moments of daily life that I never would have had the opportunity to see had I quit jogging. I felt isolated from the rest of India inside those ashram gates. And so far, I’d never run into trouble.

  After handing my pass to the guard, I flew down the stone steps dotted with heaps of moss and stopped at the bottom to select the sturdiest branch I could find on the forest floor. Leaving the ashram, I thought of the story I’d heard of Siddhartha and wondered what he must have felt when escaping from the royal palace to see how the rest of the world lived. With my iPod in one hand and a stick in the other, I was off.

  It was a tropical wonderland, except that there were mountains and lakes instead of beaches and oceans. The dusty earth at the side of the road was speckled with sunlight and shadows from the palm trees that formed a ceiling overhead. The ashram was set on a hill across from a lake and a few miles away from the closest village. The road encircled the lake and led down the hill toward a dam, where small shacks clustered together. I glanced toward the shore. Women in red and yellow saris were scrubbing laundry and laying garments across the flat gray rocks to dry. The hot, moist air filled my lungs. It smelled like moss, cow dung, and burning leaves. I felt my cheeks flush from both my blood pumping and the strength of the sun.

  I cruised down the hill and past a school. Children playing with a bouncy ball inside a gated yard stopped and screamed, “Hellooo!” I grinned and waved as my feet pounded the earth and propelled me forward. I crossed a bridge high above the dam and entered a forest on the other side that felt cool and clean. The path was littered with knee-high ferns. I kept moving forward on the dirt road until I came upon the hodgepodge of wooden shacks painted in shades of brown and peacock blue that I’d noticed during the ride to the ashram.

  Open-air stores sold bananas and cola in glass bottles. Men raised axes to chop wood in front of their homes. Children in bare feet with dirt-smudged faces squealed and ran in circles when they saw me. Women carrying buckets of water on their heads stopped midstep to stare as I met their eyes and smiled, droplets of sweat periodically blinding me.

  Completely caught up in exploring village life outside the ashram walls, I almost didn’t see the dog running toward me from the roadside. His fur was matted with mud and his fangs were bared, frothy white saliva dripping from his jaws. All that blood running through my veins flooded with adrenaline, and my survival instinct took over.

  “Stay back!” I shouted, my voice sounding a few octaves lower than normal and gravelly to my own ears. Oh, man. What had I gotten myself into?

  I began waving the stick in front of me like some kind of machete, willing him to keep his distance and too scared to think about how ridiculous I must have appeared. Why did I ever think a measly stick would be any kind of defense against a rabid animal? My move could go down in some kind of Lonely Planet list called “The Stupidest Things to Do When Traveling.”

  The dog hesitated momentarily before snapping at the stick with his teeth. I slammed the branch on the ground with all the strength I could summon. He cowered, but not for long.

  I should have listened to Marta and stayed put. I’d probably have to go to the hospital for rabies shots. As much as I loved running, it was definitely not worth dying for. When the canine advanced upon me again, a man with skin like copper and a black mustache halted his motorbike, picked up a rock, and hurled it at the dog’s head. The beast let out a howl as the rock struck his skull with a thud. Passersby had gathered across the street to watch how the scene would unfold, much more interested in the foreigner’s debacle than in their chores. Picking up another rock and winding up his arm, the man yelled something I couldn’t understand with such force that the dog retreated slightly.

  Visibly shaking, I backed away from the mutt, keeping my face toward the animal and the stick in front of me in case the beast made any sudden moves.

  “Thank you for saving me!” I said to the man, who was still staring intently at the dog hovering by the roadside. As terrified as I was, it was a moment that filled me with hope. Like the Peruvian priest who had rescued us in the desert in Colca Canyon, it was one of many encounters that reminded me that the world is filled with guardian angels.

  He offered a smile. “It’s okay to go now,” he said, bobbing his head in that now-familiar weeble-wobble way. He was probably in his late twenties, and looked both curious as to why I’d ventured this far into the village and maybe even apologetic for the dog’s attempts to attack. I gingerly moved forward just as the dog crouched low to the ground as if he might pounce, teeth once again bared. Even my savior looked unnerved.

  “He knows you are different. I think maybe it better you go that way,” he said, pointing toward the direction from which I’d come. He didn’t need to tell me twice. Thanking him once again, I walked backward down the road for a good quarter mile. Then I turned and sprinted with everything I had toward the ashram, praying that karma was on my side…but still gripping my stick the whole way back for protection.

  Amanda and Jen sat next to me on my spartan twin bed inside the dorm. Their stuffed backpacks leaned against the wall beside us, an unwelcome reminder that they’d soon be gone, leaving me to navigate the ashram alone.

  “Aww, guys, this is the best present ever!” I joked, clutching the bag of contraband chocolate to my chest, practically on a sugar high from simply smelling the sweet stuff.

  “We knew you couldn’t survive a whole month without dessert,” Amanda said, squeezing my shoulders. I was quickly learning that sometimes it’s life’s little pleasures that can cheer you up the most—and the lack thereof can make each day feel practically torturous.

  “You sure you want to stay here, Hol? You could come to Goa with us and just chill on the beach,” Jen offered. I wondered what it would be like to go almost a month without the two extensions of myself known as Jen and Amanda. It was the first time we’d be separated during the trip. And though I’d never thought about not staying at yoga school just because my friends would rather be at the beach, the fact that I felt so lost without them showed me just how close we’d become. We’d taken care of one another through food poisoning. We’d slept head to toe. We were the first people we talked to in the morning and the last before we fell asleep at night.

  I’d told Jen and Amanda about the afternoon’s dog incident, and I knew they were worried. But I also knew that, God willing, there’d be many more times to relax on the beach during the trip and that now was
not that time for me. Rather, I needed to commit myself to staying and learning. Though to learning what exactly, I still wasn’t sure.

  “That sounds like heaven right now, but the ashram’s Web site clearly states, ‘No refunds,’” I said, declining Jen’s offer.

  “That’s probably because anybody in their right mind would ask for their money back,” Amanda joked.

  I could see from Jen and Amanda’s eyes that they were hesitant to leave me behind in this land of elephant-headed deities, swamis spewing lessons of karma, and rabid dogs. But I could also tell, from how they were already leaning toward the exit, that they were aching to break out of yoga camp. “Well, we’d better get outta here before we catch whatever funky foreign bug is going around. Stay away from the sickies, Hol!” Jen teased.

  It had turned out that the blonde I’d seen with the swollen, devilish red eyes in the dining hall didn’t actually have pinkeye but a supervirus so contagious that almost a third of the students had already caught it. It was painful just to look at, so the infected hid behind sunglasses while everyone else avoided them like the plague. Our teachers didn’t seem too surprised by the outbreak. In fact, they’d said that getting sick was normal: all this healthy living purged toxins in the process of purifying our bodies. The swamis said it was typical to feel bad while our bodies eliminated years of accumulated poisons before we felt better. Just to be safe, I’d already stocked up on rosewater eye drops from the on-site ayurvedic clinic, which were supposed to ward off infection but burned like hell.