Some promise. Dhara sensed this was high praise from the yogi. She suppressed a proud grin. She would soon know how to fly!
“It takes years to achieve mastery,” Mala said, as if reading her mind.
Not for me, Dhara thought.
That afternoon, they returned to practicing the mountain pose that Mala called tadasana, and virksasana, the tree. Mala was very particular about form; bone, muscle, and sinew must align just so. All the attention to detail began to bore Dhara, but she hid it in her eagerness to please her teacher. Afterward they sat on the ground and did breathing exercises.
“These are the fundamentals, the basis of all poses,” the yogi said as the sun began to slip toward the west. “To deepen that understanding, you now lie quiet as a corpse, in savasana.”
“A corpse?”
“Yes. Practice dying every day, and be ready when death comes.”
Mala stretched out on her deer skin under the open sky. Dhara followed her example.
“Let everything dissolve into stillness. Whatever you learned in practice should penetrate every particle of your being. Your attention flows lightly from your toes to the top of your head, but don’t fall asleep.”
As she lay there, a profound, alert calm filled Dhara. She might never need to sleep again. Every sense was sharper. Her ears pricked at the flap of an eagle’s wings high above. Each cedar and hemlock had its own distinctive scent, like the way each person smells different. The breeze soughing through the trees caressed her skin.
If this is death, I will not fear it when the time comes. Her heart swelled. Mala will see how brave I am.
A whiff of warm, sour animal breath assaulted her nose. Dhara sat up with a gasp and came nose to nose with the white tigress.
She stared into its hard, brilliant blue eyes that were circled with a thin line of black fur. Its whiskers twitched. The animal extended a long red tongue and ran it around its fangs. A long, low rumble echoed up from its cavernous throat. Dhara couldn’t take her eyes from those blue orbs. Next, she would feel those fangs in her neck.
Mala’s laugh broke the spell.
“Leave her, Rani. There’s not much meat on her bones.”
The next day, Mala began to instruct Dhara in trikonasana. Dhara planted her legs wide in the base of the triangle, then bent to one side until one palm rested on the ground and the fingers of her other hand reached for the sky. The pose felt natural, easy, comfortable, but to her surprise, the yogi was not pleased. “No, no. You should bend here, at the groin, not at the waist. And the back, the legs, the body are all on one plane, as if you are standing between two invisible walls.”
Yesterday there was praise, but today the yogi criticized everything. “Keep your arms perfectly straight and vertical, from the palm on the ground to your fingertips pointing at the sky. Not like that! This way!”
So it went all morning.
Mala shook her head when Dhara wobbled and fell. “If you can’t stand stable in these simple poses, you will never learn more complex ones. Look with your inner eye! Make sure of your alignment.”
Dhara didn’t know how to look with her inner eye. Her body was a dark mystery. It was only her second day, and she was sick to death of this. At last she succeeded in holding the pose, although her balance remained shaky.
“Sloppy,” Mala said.
“The ground is uneven,” Dhara burst out in frustration. “There was a pebble under my foot and it hurt. My toes are numb.” She hated whining. She hated yoga. She wanted to be riding her pony alongside her father.
“Do you have the patience and determination for this task?” Mala asked sternly. “A yogi must hold firm no matter how uneven the ground or where it pains her, just as in life she must be centered and calm no matter what challenges she faces.”
Mala stalked away, leaving Dhara shivering and miserable. Is this all yoga was? How could it lead to magical powers? When Asita occupied the cave, is this what had he been doing to master the ability to appear out of thin air, just as he had one day at the altar where Bhrigu was making a sacrifice? No one had seen him walk down the road; one minute he wasn’t there, one minute he was.
All right. She could see how learning to place one’s foot just so and to spread the weight over the whole sole of it helped one stand firm like a mountain, or tree, or triangle. But how that led to appearing and disappearing as Asita had puzzled Dhara.
She flushed. How long had she been doing this? A day. She knew nothing. Nothing except that she wanted to learn what this powerful woman had to teach.
Dhara planted her feet and stood straight. “Look with your inner eye to make sure your alignment is right,” Mala had said. Dhara didn’t know what that meant, but she would learn.
Over the next few weeks, a cycle repeated itself. Mala would shower praise on Dhara’s initial efforts, then pick at her, little things at first but soon condemning everything. A single sarcastic word would almost crush Dhara, but she refused to show the hurt.
She became angry but held it in. Anger inhibited her concentration and made her break the pose, which would draw more harsh criticism. Then shame would replace her anger, and fear replace her shame, making it more and more difficult to follow Mala’s instructions. By lesson’s end, Dhara would plunge into abject humiliation. At night she fell asleep with tears on her cheeks, wishing she was back in the village with her father and with Sakhi.
Sakhi. Some of those nights she wondered if Sakhi would ever forgive her for leaving.
On the very next day, Mala might praise her quick mastery of a new pose, and Dhara would feel reborn and full of new resolve to perfect her practice and please her guru.
One day under a watery sun, Mala showed Dhara a new series of poses, movements that flowed from one asana to the next without stopping.
“That is the sun salutation. Now, repeat it one hundred eight times.”
“Why?”
“We do not leave animals or other offerings at an altar to Shiva. We offer him our practice. The more rounds we do, the more he rewards us with increased physical and mental discipline.”
“But why one hundred and eight?”
“It is a sacred number.”
Dhara had never paid attention when Bhrigu talked about divine geometry. Numbers were a priest’s business. “Why is it sacred?” she asked, hoping the yogi would be distracted by the question and tell her a long tale of Lord Shiva and his adventures.
“When you breathe normally, you will see that you take fifteen breaths every minute. This equates to 10,800 solar and 10,800 lunar breaths a day. Of course, we cannot do that many salutations, so we do one hundred eight, each one symbolizing one hundred breaths. Over time, doing the salutations regularly will help reduce your breaths to ten or five, or even one breath per minute. A highly developed yogi may stop her breath entirely for an hour or more.”
Dhara sighed. What the science of numbers had to do with learning to fly or changing shape or reading minds, as Mala said she would one day be able to do, was a mystery. She was no good at it. And why ever she would want to stop breathing for an hour?
“The number has other meanings as well. One hundred eight nadis form the heart chakra. We will learn more about that soon. Also it is the number of places where pieces of Sati’s body fell to the ground as her grieving husband Shiva carried her to Mount Kailash.”
At last, a story. “What happened to her?”
“Her father Daksha held a great sacrifice, but did not invite Lord Shiva, who scorned the very rituals into which Daksha put so much effort. Moreover, Shiva’s matted hair and his cup made from a Brahmin’s skull repelled Sati’s father. She was so aggrieved at this insult to her husband that she entered into deep meditation, and her tapas burned hotter and hotter until her inner fire consumed her and she died. Grief-stricken Shiva carried her scorched body to his cave on sacred Kailash, in Himalaya’s kingd
om. On the way, one hundred eight fragments of Sati’s charred corpse dropped to the earth, and where each one landed became a tirtha, a door between the worlds of gods and humans.”
“This cave is one of them, isn’t it?” A tingle ran up Dhara’s back.
“Yes.”
“Will I see the gods when they come through the door?”
“You must earn those visions. The journey to atman is long. The sun salutation moves you forward by great strides. Here is a pile of one hundred eight stones. Each time you finish a cycle, move a stone from the pile by your left hand to a pile on your right to keep count.” Without any further word, the yogi went off hunting.
Dhara set her mouth and began, matching breath to motion and concentrating on her form. At first, things went smoothly, but soon it became hard to remember if she had moved a stone or not. She would forget and not know whether to take the pose on her right leg or her left. A sharp, damp wind turned the hot sweat soaking her antariya to cold wetness. Her bare hands and feet went numb.
Utterly exhausted, she moved the last counter from left to right. She stumbled back to the cave after a shivering savasana, skipping the simple breathing exercises Mala had told her to do during sitting meditation. It was too cold to stay out on the rock in the lotus pose. After tossing wood on the embers of the morning’s fire, she curled up on her bed of prickly antelope hide and fell asleep instantly.
Mala’s return awakened her. The yogi was furious and wet from a sudden squall that had covered everything with a thin layer of snow.
“You left my skin on the meditation rock,” she said. “I’ll sleep on your bedding tonight.” The yogi picked up one edge of the hide and tugged so that Dhara rolled off into the warm ashes of the fire she should have been tending. “Go out and get mine, and build a fire to dry it.”
Dhara dragged in the soaked antelope skin and struggled to rekindle the fire with the damp wood and tinder. “Please help me, Mala-ji.”
“Why should I? I don’t need it. I warm myself without it.” Dhara kept struggling until Mala helped, her disapproval palpable, to get it going.
When it came time to sleep, the stinking hide was still wet. The cave’s cold floor was at least dry. Dhara wrapped her antariya around her legs and chest and put on the filthy padded jacket she had been wearing the night she ran away. The day when she could warm herself with her inner heat the way Mala did seemed far away.
She sighed, curled as close to the fire as she dared, and spent a fitful night.
“List the names of the nadis stemming from the heart chakra,” Mala said.
They were sitting on the bare meditation rock underneath the same watery sun that had shone on them the day before. The damp wind blew stronger today. Exhausted from the sleepless night, Dhara wanted only to go back to the warm cave.
“All the nerve channels?” Time did strange things up here, but it had hardly been a week since Mala gave her the teaching; not enough time to manage that. “There are so many of them.”
“I’m not asking for miracles,” Mala snapped. “I’ve told you, when you know all the nerve channels, you are able to enter another’s form, animal or human, because you can see those channels in the body you wish to enter.”
“Ah!” This idea excited Dhara.
“You were to begin with the main channels,” Mala said, “and those branching from the heart chakra.”
“The three main nadis begin at the base of the spine, where Kundalini lies like a serpent, and energy flows from the base to the crown chakra. One heats the vital organs. It is the sun’s energy, and courses from the left testicle to the right nostril. The other channel is like the moon; it cools mind and body and courses from the right testicle to the left nostril.” That was all she could remember.
“Yes?”
“Ah, um, they represent time. The moon’s energy is the past, the sun’s is the future, and Kundalini is the destroyer of time, the eternal present. That is why we observe it in meditation.” Dhara had always mocked Sakhi for being able to remember rituals and chants while remaining helpless with a bow or knife. “It’s useless to know the prayers if you have no deer to offer to Indra on the fire altar,” she used to say, even though she had always been a little jealous of Sakhi’s quick mind. Such a memory would be useful to her now. Her throat tightened. She missed her heart’s sister so much. Did Sakhi miss her?
“Go on.” Mala stared at her, making matters worse.
Dhara swallowed the lump. When she finished her training, she would go back to the village, ready to impress the warriors with her new powers. She would tell Sakhi how much she missed her and loved her for her learning and wisdom. She vowed to devote more time to learning the nadis, but at the moment she knew very little. She cast about frantically for a distracting question.
“Mala-ji, I don’t understand how the nadis travel up a woman’s spine, because we have no testicles… ”
“I told you,” Mala said, irritated. “Shiva and his female aspect Shakti exist in the same body.”
“I thought Sati burned to death.”
“Shakti, not Sati. Shakti is the great divine She, the creative power. Sati was merely one of her forms.”
“Like the Devi?”
“Yes, they are one. Shakti. The Mother. The Devi. All female forms of the divine. In the beginning, the First One created the Other so he would not be alone. Yet the Other was still part of him. Thus in all creation everything has its opposite within it. In every woman, there is a man, just as in every man there is a woman.”
Dhara nodded as if she understood.
“That is Shiva and his Shakti,” Mala continued. “When one knows both the man and woman within, one has the power of both. Do you understand?” Dhara nodded again, though she was still confused. “Now, let’s get back to the nadis. There are seventy-two thousand energy channels. You must begin somewhere, if you are to master your body. You haven’t learned the first hundred and eight. Perhaps you’re too stupid.”
Dhara was tired and missing the stone hearth of her father’s cedar-beamed hall. She would suffer for her ignorance whether she acted meek or not, so she might as well fight. “You don’t know them all, do you?” she challenged the yogi.
Mala’s eyes flashed with contempt. This stare was worse than her anger, worse than the pine bough with which she had twice beaten Dhara.
The yogi didn’t answer her question. “Very well.” Mala’s lips twitched. “No recitation of the nadis. Instead, you will give our bedding a final cleaning before the real snows begin. Pick out every louse, or we’ll be scratching all winter.”
At the mention of lice, Dhara scratched her head, picked out a louse and crushed it between her dirty fingernails, and nodded her sullen assent.
“Do mine first. If you’re not finished by dark, you’ll have to leave your hide outside.” The yogi stood and picked up her bow and quiver. “I’ll catch a hare,” she said over her shoulder as she strode away. “If you’re not done, you’ll go without stew.”
“That would be a blessing,” Dhara muttered.
“What did you say?” The yogi whirled around.
“It would be a blessing to do without your cooking.” Dhara lifted her chin.
Mala’s face became an ugly mask. A red aura pulsed around the yogi. She lowered her head like a bull ready to charge.
Dhara was frozen, nailed to the spot by this red-tinged fury. Not an eagle called or breeze whispered. She gathered her courage and straightened her spine. She fixed what she hoped was a look of equal fury on her face, but she could not summon anything like that red rage.
Suddenly Mala’s laughter filled the clearing and rang off Dhavalagiri’s rocky slopes. A few nearby crows cawed as if enjoying the joke.
The aura disappeared. Mala dropped her bow and strode back. Dhara shrank from the fierce grin on Mala’s face, but the yogi put an arm around her shoulders and
hugged her. “Very good, my girl. Now, get to work. Beat the skins first with the pine branch then scrape them with the serrated bone. I’ll hunt for some garlic, too, to make my cooking taste better.”
Dhara managed a wobbly smile. Mala strode away to the rhythm of a low chant.
The shift from displeasure to rage to laughter was stunning. Dhara was repelled and fascinated at once. She wondered if this path would bring out the same rage in her.
The blizzard
Tilo had became pregnant not long before Bhrigu’s death, which mellowed her shrewish mother-in-law and gave her more freedom. As often as she could, she would make the walk from the fine house of Prem’s family down the path to Sakhi’s. It reminded Sakhi how far away were her dreams of the laughing husband with his mustache and green eyes and the houseful of sons. Sakhi would send Tilo away almost as soon as she arrived, ignoring the hurt in her eyes, and then wish her back as soon as she was gone.
All day Agastya would lie on the straw-filled pallet she once shared with Bhrigu. Sakhi dragged her along to get water from the river, or to gather herbs for the shaman’s wife. In return, Ghosha plied her with potions to heal her grief, to no avail. Sakhi yearned to sit next to the moon goddess Rohini’s rushing waters by herself, just for an hour, but feared what her mother might do in her absence.
Her mother muttered one day that she would take her own life, throw herself off the cliff overhanging the charnel grounds, where for generations the clan threw the corpses of dead enemies, dead animals, and those who were too poor for cremation, as offerings for the vultures. This horrified Sakhi. Such a death would bar her from joining Bhrigu in Indra’s heavenly city.
Their poverty increased. The villagers had never given Bhrigu large gifts for casting their horoscopes or presiding over births, marriages, and deaths, but it had been enough. Without him, Sakhi and her mother were forgotten. There was an occasional brace of pheasants, plucked and gutted, sent by a hunter, or eggs from the chickens kept by the warrior Karna’s wife. Tilo spirited away a bag of exotic dried fruits from the store her mother-in-law had bought off a trader who came over the high pass in late summer. She also brought table scraps from their large meals, if she could save them from the dogs. Prem and his father were hunters. Their dogs ate better than Bhrigu’s family ever had.
The Mountain Goddess Page 7
