Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  By the light of a single smoking oil lamp, she lines up in neat rows with the other Seekers – this being the politic term for people who have travelled to the ashram for spiritual guidance. Sasha learns that to refer to them, or herself, by any other name – guest, visitor, student, tourist – will cause an awkward lull in conversation, then a polite correction. ‘Actually, I consider myself a Seeker.’

  Sasha finds this awkward, if not downright embarrassing. She’s not here to drink Kool-Aid.

  The Seekers are western, mostly, and comfortable – resin jewellery and pyjamas in cotton and silk, wrapped in colourful shawls against the pre-dawn chill. There are a few Indian faces dotted here and there; older women for the most part, with rolls of fat peeking out through the gaps in their saris as testament to lovely lives.

  Sasha kicks off her sandals and takes her preferred spot in the back row, tucks her heels underneath her sit bones and touches her palms and forehead to the cool tiled floor. Then, moving in unison with the group, she shifts and crosses her legs in the lotus pose, hands on knees, and closes her eyes.

  The first yoga of the day, before breakfast, before tea, an exercise in hunger and haggardness. This is the first of a half-dozen classes that takes place in the temple throughout the day, and the hardest. Sasha loves her practice, thought that she was an experienced yogi, that her days of finding new and surprising foibles in her body were behind her; however, this routine, devised and disseminated by the guru, kicks her ass comprehensively.

  Nine poses, repeated seven times, until Sasha’s thighs tremble and arms threaten to detach at the shoulder. By the end of the first class, she feels that a competent chef could whisk her apart without breaking a sweat – skim the muscles from her bones without spilling a drop of marrow. Yoga all day long, with a rotating stable of yogis. The first moment of enlightenment of her spiritual retreat: there is such a thing as too much yoga.

  A surprise, although it shouldn’t have been, is that none of the instructors is Indian. Now that she thinks about it, she’s never been part of a class led by anyone who learned the discipline east of Brooklyn. Back in New York, before settling on her practice, she’d tried several yoga studios run by young blondes made entirely of thigh-gaps and shade before she’d been bounced out for not taking her form seriously enough. People were militant about it. Talk about Ashtanga in a Bikram part of Manhattan and you could get stomped.

  In the ashram she finds a different breed of yogi: Europeans and southern Californians who, after decades of practice, are hardened, brown and wiry, and have developed bodies like something woven out of wicker at a folk-art exhibition.

  She is younger, by a good decade or two, than most Seekers, putting their median age at a half a century, and still she struggles to keep up with them. There is a point, towards the end of the first session of each day, when the pain in her shoulders, her shaking legs, the vicious, uncharitable thoughts about the instructor, all at once snap clear and clean, and her mind becomes still, and while everything still hurts, it doesn’t seem to matter so much.

  Afterwards, feeling wrung-out and clean, Sasha reflects that the guru of this ashram has bottled something special with her yoga practice. For the first few days, Sasha looks forward to meeting her, but she is never around. Sasha keeps turning up to class and feeling slighted by her absence. When she plucks up the courage to ask the instructor when the guru might lead a class herself, the instructor laughs, explains to Sasha, the way she might to a child, that the guru rarely leads classes herself anymore. As a master of the discipline, she is too busy with matters of higher spirituality, and, besides, spends at least half the year in Paris, or LA, or Mumbai, working with select private students.

  Sasha, who a year ago could have cared less about yoga, finds she is unexpectedly crushed. Every yogi she speaks to here has breathless tales about some miracle of peace and healing the guru’s guidance brought to their life. To think she would miss out on that makes her feel moribund. She is not getting enough out of this to justify the cost. As the days grow hotter, she finds she has less and less patience, and more and more time to kill.

  In between the residential dormitories is a large open-air dining hall where the community comes together to eat and, alongside that, the plaza paved in ancient granite serves as a public space. The Seekers are free to requisition it as they see fit and, depending on the day, there is equal chance of a concert, a play or a tai chi class unfolding in the centre of the ashram.

  Seekers are encouraged to explore their creativity here. There is no judgement, and shame is a rare resource – but one Sasha finds she prizes. She does not care for the tai chi, the reiki, the reading and cleansing of auras. Someone standing in the centre of the ashram, closing their eyes and serenely waving their arms about, in commune with some higher plane, strikes her as so gruesomely embarrassing that she averts her eyes and scurries past. For the most part, she keeps to herself, and keeps busy.

  Each day, after the morning devotion, Sasha starts her seva, chores that everyone who comes to the ashram is required to perform. For two hours after the morning meditation, she sweeps the floor of the meditation hall with a broom of bundled twigs, then drops to her hands and knees to scrub it with a sponge. Even so early in the morning, the pre-monsoon heat lingers in the stone hall. Fat drops of sweat bead on her forehead and drip onto the floor to mix with the soapy water.

  While she works, the staff of the ashram hovers discreetly, just out of sight. When Sasha is done, wringing out her sponge with an exhausted flourish to go on to the morning meal, the ashram staff swoops in to redo her half-assed effort.

  Something else she didn’t expect at the ashram – servants. A couple dozen men and women with dark skin and crisp white shirts oversee the day-to-day maintenance of the compound. Somewhere, not far away, the real labour is getting done; every time a meal is cooked, a toilet is scrubbed, it’s a townie doing it. They are recruited from the fishing villages that dot the nearby coast – most of them barely out of their teens, young men and women, the latter often bringing babies with them, who toddle after them as they work.

  Sasha’s work, her seva, is pointless, but that is the whole point of it. She understands that this service is designed to prove to the community – and to herself – that she is dedicated to the journey. It’s intended to bolster her humility. That doesn’t mean she can’t hate every minute of it. Fate and fury have already humbled her just fine – that is why she is here in the first place. No matter how hard she works, how fiercely she concentrates on mindfulness, her breathing, she is unable to stop brooding on the fact that she’s flown across the world, and spent an awful lot of money, to do the same sort of menial work she’d done to put herself through college.

  Despite her best intentions there is a niggling thought: at the ashram, living humbly does not come cheap.

  After her seva, exhausted and sleep-deprived, she is able to slump into one of the plastic chairs in the dining hall, slightly dazed and glowing with exertion, the sweat drying her soaked clothing stiff. The sun rises through the open walls to hush the muted glow of the hurricane lamps.

  She is often the first to breakfast. She likes to sit at one end of the long benches that run the length of the dining tables while the hall fills with Seekers, trooping in after their own seva. Then a townie, carrying a huge silver bucket, files down the rows of benches, delivering scoops of mushed lentils, and another follows with rice. Starved Seekers gorge themselves and then sit, stunned, before the rest of the day’s classes start.

  Everybody is there for the same reasons: to open their minds, their hearts, to try to become better people, but they are all from wildly different backgrounds. She likes to listen to the babble of a dozen languages all echoing through the airless hall, clamouring for supremacy. It is nice to be around so many people.

  Sasha is shy the first few nights, when seekers gather in the hall to nibble on fruit and sip mineral water from metal flasks, but she finally makes herself courageous and goes ove
r to strike up a conversation. At the sound of her voice, the group falls silent and smiles uneasily until Sasha begins to edge off. One woman, French, darkly mutters something about Americans.

  Fine. Sasha does not need to be friends with that woman. She resolves to avoid her, is excited to make a show of doing so the next time she sees her, but the opportunity never comes up. The woman seems to have left the ashram.

  In fact, many people leave, after a few days or weeks. People seem to find whatever it was they were looking for here, click, just like that, and they move on. Or they wash out – every so often someone gasps during yoga, trembles, and then collapses into their mat. Once or twice there are tears, and on one particularly grim morning a Seeker loses control of her bowels as she sinks into cobra pose. The class pauses, Seekers on nearby mats flinching away as the instructor quietly escorts the woman out. The smell lingers in the temple all through the morning, but Sasha never sees the woman again.

  Sasha recognises faces in the dining hall for a few weeks at a time, and then they vanish. The only familiar people are the villagers who clean her bungalow and the only constant her yoga – which keeps her body bouncing between such extremes of agony and euphoria that there is no room for her mind to foment. The idea of leaving the ashram is anathema to her. She does not like to quit.

  There are some who have. Now and again some wrinkled, dreadlocked, alarmingly tanned hippy wanders out of the forest, commandeers a motorbike and goes whizzing off through the gate.

  These are the other, permanent residents of the ashram, who live here indefinitely, most of them descended from the founders in the sixties. They rarely come into the temple, but live throughout the rainforest, in homesteads and smallholdings scattered like seeds in the jungle – reached by serpentine paths cut by hand through the vegetation.

  There is little change from day to day. Sasha grows more flexible, sleeps better. And then one day she wakes up to a weird, furtive energy in the ashram. The rumours reach her at the midday meal – the guru has returned from abroad, is in residence at the ashram. Seekers are moving faster about the place, through their work, pushing themselves harder in their practice.

  Several days later, during the first yoga session of the day while the group melts into balasana – the child’s pose, with arms stretched out and forehead resting in a pool of one’s own sweat – the yogi quietly slips out. Someone up the front hums a note, and the rest of the group pick it up in a ragged harmony.

  Sasha tries to match it, loses the note, so slumps in silence, legs tucked under her, forehead on the floor. This is the best part of the practice; the ending, when she can stop and feel her heart rattling her ribcage like prison bars, her pulse flickering at her temples, the backs of her eyelids. When she opens her eyes and sits up, the guru sits before them.

  The guru is petite, salted black hair tied up in a tight bun, her sari pooled around her. For several minutes she gazes calmly at the Seekers while each of them comes to the end of their own chanting, waiting patiently for the last of the stragglers until the room is wreathed in a hush so pure you can hear the oil wicking up the lamp, the complaint of diesel engines on the far-away highway, the creaking of the bones of the Seekers as they draw up, cross their legs, settle into the lotus position. Once the stillness is complete, the room is sunk into a sense of unreality by the under-slept, unfed Seekers leaning forward in strained attention.

  The guru stares for a long moment into the air above the class, and then, in a voice so commanding it startles Sasha a little, she says, ‘Begin. Marjaryasana.’

  While the other instructors have demonstrated the poses as they proceed through the sequences, the guru does not. Instead, she walks between the rows. Every once in a while she stops, stoops down to silently correct a Seeker’s technique with a touch.

  As Sasha hears her approaching from the rear of the temple, she stiffens. She does not want to be corrected, to be singled out for her imperfect technique. As they shift into downward dog, her shoulders, already taxed from weeks without a rest, shiver, threaten to give way. The guru’s footsteps approach, pass her by, her bare feet padding inches from Sasha’s head, a chain of bells around her ankle chiming with each step.

  Now and again, the guru speaks: ‘Breath, body, mind – there is no difference between the three. Once you understand this you will become invincible.’

  And: ‘Do you know how Michelangelo made his masterpiece? He was given a lump of marble and took away everything that wasn’t David. This is what the yoga is for. Take away every part of you that isn’t David.’

  And: ‘Some of you may be hurting. Good! Cherish the pain. The yoga is meant to hurt. To suffer is to burn up bad karma, toxins in the mind and body. Rejoice in your pain, because it is making you a better person.’

  And so on. It is on the tenth platitude, and the fourth repetition of the poses, that Sasha’s shoulder shudders and quits. She crashes face-first to the mat, where she lies gasping and humiliated. She closes her eyes, blinks back her tears, and when she opens them the guru is kneeling by her side.

  She leans in, very close, and says in a voice no one else in the temple can catch, ‘You can do more. Trust your body.’

  Sasha feels, for the first time in as long as she can remember, that she has been seen for who she really is. Even as she shuffles out of the temple, she’s carried by a kind of tingling, lightness.

  This feeling doesn’t last long. Her shoulder is strained, needs rest, and without yoga to distract her she has nothing to keep her occupied beyond her loneliness. She takes up a guided meditation the guru leads in the afternoons, after the day’s yoga is finished, but each time she tries to visualise an ocean, a candle flame, an inner light, it inevitably twists into some shadow from New York.

  Whatever it is that happens to people to make them satisfied with their time at the ashram is not happening to her. Whatever it is, whatever quantum shift is to be found in the lacunae between scrubbing toilets and endless yoga classes, has not hit her yet.

  If she thinks about it for too long she begins to despair that whatever ephemeral thing she hoped to find that would make her feel better cannot be found in this community. She does not feel enlightened. When she really thinks about it, she is bored. There is something here that she is not getting, some frequency everyone else seems tuned into that she cannot attain. She resolves to speak to the guru, to ask her what she’s doing wrong, why she feels so out of sorts here.

  One afternoon, after meditation, she waits behind in the temple as the other Seekers file out. The last few cast flickering glances back to her, and she feels shame, the way she once did waiting after class for extra attention from her teachers. In this place full of studiously relaxed people, she realises this is deeply uncool, even as she walks up and interrupts the guru as she is gathering herself to leave.

  ‘Hi!’

  The guru looks up, and her eyes make Sasha take an involuntary step back. There’s something a little unnerving about the expression on her face – a face that is, in itself, surprising. She is younger than Sasha had surmised from afar – tiny, five-foot-nothing, she holds herself perfectly upright with the unforgiving posture Sasha knows well from the older Eastern-European tyrants of her childhood – but the guru’s face is soft and unlined, a couple of wrinkles that bracket her mouth are the only clue her face moves at all. The expression is stern, but her eyes are soft green, and they don’t meet Sasha’s, not exactly, but seem to focus somewhere just behind her head.

  Sasha finds herself at a loss about what to say. The guru gently says, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hi.’ Sasha had a preamble mapped out in her head, but finds her sentences scattering before her. ‘Hi. I am . . . I’m Sasha.’

  ‘Sasha.’ The guru takes the word on her tongue as though it were an unwanted canapé foisted on her – equal parts relish and boredom. ‘Sasha, you are new here.’

  Face to face, the guru’s voice is less sonorous than in class, barely more than a murmur – and her accent is softer, a
slight French backbeat that laces her diction. The inflection is neither statement nor question, but somewhere in between, and Sasha doesn’t know how to respond. She nods. The guru nods back. ‘What do you need?’

  The question is so vast, so existentially slippery, that in order to answer it Sasha launches into a rambling monologue about her trouble sleeping, her trouble meditating, that she doesn’t really understand why she is here, except for the big reason she came in the first place, which she is just about to blurt out when the guru holds up a palm and Sasha stops, mid-confession.

  ‘You will find what you are looking for. You are surrounded by souls who are searching, just like you. Make yourself open to them. What you are doing is brave, and it is right. What you seek will find you.’ The guru stands, and slips a hand into Sasha’s, and she feels the guru’s soft fingers brush against her calluses with no more force than it would take to walk through a spiderweb.

  ‘Know that you are seen,’ the guru says. ‘I see you.’

  And then a whisper of silk and incense and she is gone. Sasha stands alone in the temple, her palm tingling. She realises it’s been months since anyone has touched her, not since New York.

  Something of an epiphany; she has nothing to fill her hours. All her life she has had something to do, even if only brunch. At the ashram, her days are empty after the classes finish. The evenings are interminable; a desert she must trudge through every night. Without a drink, even – drugs and alcohol have no place in the ashram. No wifi, no AC, no phone coverage. It’s awful having so much room to think. She takes to jogging, around and around the ashram’s clearing, and when that becomes unbearable, off through the jungle. During the hottest part of the day, when everyone else is napping in the shade, she straps on her sneakers and trudges off along one of the dirt tracks leading into the forest.

  The jungle thickens quickly. Overhead, tropical vines spread out and twist about each other to create a canopy that seasons the sun into harmless dappled light. Sasha soon loses orientation, although she’s glad of the shade; it must be ten degrees cooler in here. She starts to enjoy herself, starts to dawdle, stopping to run a hand down the vines that snake from above, tunes out to listen for a moment to the birdsong that echoes through the trees, stops paying attention, just wanders.