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NAINA WAS EXHAUSTED. Leaving the gallery early, she dragged her body into the old-fashioned cage elevator. She shuttered her eyes and leaned against the metal back as the elevator crept down five floors. Fortunately she did not know the elevator operator and did not feel obligated to make conversation.
The day had been unusually busy, filled with continuous movement, mostly of the mind. It had been like a one long paragraph without commas, semicolons, or periods. Just an endless rambling of thoughts, most of which were pragmatic and dull. Susan was on vacation, so Naina had been running the gallery by herself with a little help from an intern. Oddly, the most challenging part of the day had been writing a grant proposal to get funding for some future projects. She had been working on it for a couple of weeks, without much difficulty as long as she concentrated. Today, however, the sentences would not flow. Like water from a tap on an unfortunate Delhi day, words just sputtered and stopped. Sputtered and stopped. Sputtered and stopped.
And then there were all these arguments with Red Circle’s new treasurer, Melinda, an impeccably dressed, hard-nosed businesswoman who always thought she was right. No, Naina’s budget for the grant was too extravagant. No, they did not need any money for most of the items Naina had listed. No, they did not need to print higher quality brochures. No, they did not need more brochures. No, they did not need more guest curators.
The conversation with Melinda sounded like a never-ending page of No’s without any punctuation. Without any pause to show she was actually thinking before refusing. Melinda, who still retained a Southern accent even after living in New York for almost thirty years, would speak to Naina in a chiding maternal tone, especially elongating her vowels as if she were speaking to a baby whenever she said “No” and “Honey.” She spoke to Naina in the same way she spoke to the twenty-something gallery intern, who in Melinda’s eyes, knew nothing about money except how to spend it. Today, Naina got so furious that she told Melinda her real age and that she had run a household on a fairly tight budget when first moved to America, a foreign country to her at the time.
Eventually, Naina phoned Susan in Italy—even though it was late there and she hated calling—and asked her boss to support her suggestions. Susan sent Melinda an email, and they finally agreed on a number in-between for the grant proposal.
The day was now over, thank goodness, and Naina was able to leave early because of the intern. Naina ambled down the sidewalk, her body feeling heavy and slow, her eyes glazing over. Suddenly, the heel of her sandal got caught in a crack of the pavement, and her body pitched forward.
Her fear almost came true. But she wasn’t even rushing—yet it didn’t stop her from almost falling. She must definitely be getting old. The life of the working woman was so far from her idealized version of it. On days like today, it was just endless, thankless, listless drudgery. A foggy melancholy, echoing a Cesária Évoria song, slowly draped her bulky, flaccid body.
“Weeping Coconuts. That’s it. Weeping Coconuts.” Naina turned to her right, roused by the sound of the words, the title of a powerful Frida Kahlo still life in which the round, tropical fruits are imbued with human-like features and emotions.
On the opposite side of the street was a group of young female gallery assistants dressed in effortlessly chic, severely minimalist designer outfits in all the possible variants of black. One of them must have talking about Kahlo. On their feet were dramatic animal print high heels, accentuating the masterful femininity of their gait. These women were sometimes called gallerinas, a suitable term considering their overarching, levitating youthfulness, sylphlike bodies, and touch-me-not aura of culture and sophistication. Technically, Naina thought she could also be a gallerina, but no one would ever think of using that descriptor for her. She was just a gallery assistant at a small nonprofit gallery. Nothing more.
Her legs ached. She longed to sit down. There was a café down the street. Maybe she could go there and get a cup of coffee.
Naina walked slowly, her eyes on the sidewalk, and heard the insistent click of high heels. She looked up and recognized one of the gallerinas moving toward her. This statuesque young woman in her various hippie-dippie stilettos worked at a medium-sized gallery in her building. Although they had been in the elevator together many times, they had never spoken to each other. Maybe they had exchanged smiles—if one could call the faintest stretching of lips a smile.
“Hi,” the young woman said, smiling brightly and extending her beautifully manicured hand. “My name is Lisa. I work at Myrna Weber’s. You work at Red Circle, right?”
“Yes,” Naina said, hesitating. What could this beautifully dressed, extraordinarily poised young woman possibly want from her?
“I saw your show with the Hindu goddesses and really loved it. It was really amazing. You were one of the curators, right?”
“Yes, the executive director and I worked on it together,” Naina said, brightening up.
“I have a huge interest in Hinduism, particularly as it relates to women. I want to do some research on it for an essay I’m writing and I’m hoping you could suggest some books I might read.”
“Sure,” Naina said, smiling. “Would you like to get a cup of coffee down the street and talk? I really need to sit down.”
Lisa turned out to be very nice and had a genuine interest in Hinduism. And surprisingly, she was very respectful to her, like a pupil might be to a teacher. Now, Naina felt important, valuable, and knowledgeable, her age briefly feeling like an asset.
“So do you want to return to the art world after you finish graduate school?”
“I’m not sure,” Lisa answered, looking much younger with her long, straight hair tied in a high ponytail. “Maybe the art world, maybe academia. Or maybe something else. But I’m not thinking about that yet. I haven’t even started graduate school. I’ve got plenty of time to figure it out.”
Of course she did. Lisa had plenty of time. Plenty of time. Soaring mountains and endless rivers of time. If only everyone was so fortunate.
––––––––
THE COFFEE MADE Naina restless, so instead of going straight home, as she had originally planned, she decided to take a short walk. It was a nice quiet day in Chelsea.
She passed by James Cohan Gallery and through the lofty glass doors saw a headless sculpture dressed in a jacket made of brightly patterned, exotic-looking fabric. She felt pleased she could identify the artist. The headless piece was made by Yinka Shonibare, a British-Nigerian artist who made theatrical works commenting on colonialism and post-colonialism. He must have a new show up. Naina wrote a reminder in her taupe-colored notebook to go and see it. She had to keep current.
She kept walking, writing a couple of more reminders in her notebook, until she reached Metro Pictures Gallery where she knew a big show by the famous photographer Cindy Sherman had just opened. Peeping through the glazed façade, she saw large photographs of well-dressed women in elegant settings. She had read a book on Sherman the year before and recognized the trademark theatrical quality of the artist, known for photographing herself in various female guises. Something about Sherman’s work reminded her of Frida Kahlo, something she couldn’t put her finger on. There was also something different about these Sherman photographs from those she had seen earlier.
Naina said a quick hello to a woman she had once met with Susan at an after-party following an opening as she stepped into Metro Pictures, one of the largest and most prestigious galleries in Chelsea. She fixated on the photographs. The women in these works seemed older than the others, seeping with a quiet desperation, like blood that keeps trickling, drop by drop, drop by drop, drop by drop, from a dirty maroon wound that refuses to heal. She took in the photographs, one by one, until the distance between her and those women dissolved.
Naina’s heart beat faster as she stood rooted in front of a photograph of a woman in a red dress. She held a chunk of her hair below her left ear. Did she look like one of these women, only less elegant and less affluent? Is that how Jai saw her? Did Jai see her like the woman in the red dress, the creases in her face popping out despite all the makeup, the fan in her hand ridiculous as if she were living in a bygone era?
The lady in the photograph was so ugly. She had these hideous brownish-black blemishes on her right forearm. Her dress needed to be fully long-sleeved so that those blotches could be disguised. They were too obvious. And her stare. Her stare was so pointed it was almost rude. No, not almost rude. It was rude. Absolutely rude.
Naina wanted to move away but couldn’t. She twisted the chunk of hair between her fingers.
The upturned eyes of the woman in the red dress were brown and crystallized like topaz, but there seemed to be a tiny glimmer of molten dreams and desires from a long time ago trapped inside the frozen, stony eyes.
Perhaps that’s how Amaya saw her too. Naina felt even more tremulous. She twisted the hair in her fingers faster and faster, again and again. A small, invisible space grew between her and the woman in the red dress.
Things had not been going so smoothly between her and Amaya lately. Though she had made a great effort to maintain her composure around Jai, even going as far as being so friendly with him that it made bile rise to her chest, Amaya remained suspicious, with her penetrating gaze as she repeatedly asked questions. Someday, sometime soon, Naina knew she would be found out. Amaya would know what a debauched mother she really had.
Did Naina really look like that woman in the picture? Like someone with a sad, mysterious past, something so deeply embedded in her being, that she couldn’t hide it despite that nice red dress, red lipstick, and seeming sangfroid? She bit down hard on her lip until she could feel her teeth marks on it.
Had her broken heart so altered her that the color of her soul was now the greenish-brown of a withering plant? An ugly, dismal hue that seeped into her body, muddying her almond-colored eyes, discoloring her olive-colored skin, and stealing the shine from her black hair? Is that what Amaya saw? Is that what Amaya meant when she said something fundamental had changed about her?
Amaya had been haranguing her with the same never-ending questions. Mom, why are you behaving so oddly around Jai? Why do you seem uneasy? Why do you seem aloof and—almost—surly around him? Oh no, no, no, Naina kept insisting at first. None of this was true. She felt fine around Jai. Amaya was just imagining things. Except, maybe, like Naina had told Amaya before, she was worried about embarrassing her daughter by seeming distressed and not together in front of her daughter’s boyfriend. After all, no man wants to see his girlfriend’s mother as being crazy, Naina had said, hearing herself titter, and how ridiculous that sounded.
Jai was a wonderful man and she, as her mother, was glad he made her happy, she assured Amaya, feeling a spasm in her ribs.
Still, Amaya didn’t look convinced.
Her daughter never brought up the spider comment again. How unusual for someone like Amaya. Maybe even being a psychologist did not make you immune to focusing on what you wanted to believe and ignoring the rest.
Naina was alone in the main exhibition area of Metro Pictures. So much space. Just for her and these photographs of women who looked as real as she.
When was something real and when was it not? Did one ever know for sure? Did anyone know anything for sure? Did these women with their vacant, searching eyes also once believe, like she did, that they had all the answers?
Naina tightly entwined a large chunk of her hair on top of her head and continued to study the woman in the red dress. The woman wore dangling earrings that looked as if they never dangled. The woman had a hand fan that looked as if it never moved.
After a while, Naina revisited an old concern of hers with Amaya. While Naina said she obviously thought highly of Jai, she was slightly worried Amaya might be acting too hasty. Maybe that’s what her daughter was noticing. At Amaya’s age, it was crucial to keep all her options open. Sometimes, the ideal partner may not be who you believe it is, so it was important to keep exploring. When she had said that, Amaya looked at her incredulously for a minute and then laughed, a hard, sardonic, humorless laugh.
The red-dressed woman’s mouth was tightly set. She seemed like she hadn’t laughed in years.
And then, in a fit of desperation, Naina had brought up their age difference. Jai was eleven years older than Amaya. That was a lot. She just didn’t want her daughter—if she were to marry Jai—to become a young widow like herself. Or be stuck with an aging, ailing man while she was still in her prime.
“Really, Mom?” Amaya said, widening her eyes and laughing that harsh laugh again. “You can’t be serious. You’ve known how old he is for a long time, but it’s never been a problem for you before. Now suddenly you expect me to believe it’s a problem?”
One time, when the two of them were sitting in a quiet section of a household goods store swathed by comforters and pillows, Naina blurted out, “Remember what you told me about Jai’s fear of spiders and how he spoke disparagingly about women, linking them with spiders . . . that’s kind of . . .”
Amaya jerked her body back, almost imperceptibly, against a pink, puffy down comforter, and her upper lip clamped down on her lower lip. “No, I haven’t forgotten . . . I don’t need to be reminded. It was egregious, but he just said it once, and many people say awful things occasionally. He truly is very much a feminist and I appreciate that.” Amaya let out a stream of air. “Still . . . maybe there’s something gnarled beneath those words of Jai’s, there might be. Human beings are complex creatures. Not just black-and-white. It’s foolish to kneel at the altar of the ideal. But I think you already know that . . .”
Naina turned her face away, not wanting her daughter to know how many rings of truth her words contained, each gripping her mother in firm, pinching circles.
Naina swept her gaze across Sherman’s not-black-and-white photos of women seemingly kneeling, as Amaya had put it, at the altar of the ideal as they haughtily posed in various positions. She wondered what they really thought of perfection . . .
“I think I have an inkling about what the problem might be,” Amaya had said on a recent autumnal evening when the scarlet moon hung low to the ground, ballooning away like an unmarried woman brazenly walking the earth with a baby in her belly. Her eyes were intent and sharp, her fingers touching in a reverse steeple on her lap. “But please, seriously, please . . . don’t be offended or . . . embarrassed.”
Naina felt a chill of nervousness go through her and bent her head. “Amaya, for God’s sake . . .”
Her daughter deliberately inhaled a spate of air. “I think you might be heartbroken, I think you fell in love with someone, and, for whatever reason, it didn’t work out. Maybe he hurt you. Maybe Jai reminds you of him. Maybe seeing me and Jai together reminds you of something you’ve lost.”
Amaya had spoken in that low, self-assured voice that suggested she already knew the answer. The all-knowing voice of a therapist or parent. Naina was dumbfounded. How close Amaya was coming to the truth. Yet so far.
Even amid the silent sobs from the pictures enveloping the gallery, Naina could hear Amaya’s voice ringing in her head. The kind of omniscience Naina could not envision herself—or any of the older women in the photographs—possessing, regardless of any glossy veneer.
But then, all of a sudden, in that madly bright night, Amaya’s voice softened and became pliable, like cotton balls. “Did he hurt you a lot, Ma?”
Ma? Amaya almost never called her Ma. Only in exceptionally intimate moments. Fleetingly, Naina had felt overcome by a surge of emotions that she wanted to tell her daughter everything. About how she had fallen in love with Jai, how he had led her on, and how she had tried to kiss him. An urge greater than herself pushed her to confess and beg for forgiveness. And she couldn’t let her daughter be hurt by this duplicitous man. After everything, it was her duty to rescue her. After all, she was her mother.
But she hadn’t been able to summon up the courage. She didn’t know if she could bear it. She could lose her daughter forever. Never hear her tinkling laughter again. That tinkling laughter, like the sound of wind chimes, as she went higher and higher on the swing. Never hear anyone call her Ma again. Never squeeze her soft hands again. The thought itself sent her into a bout of panic. She didn’t know if she could ever confess.
So she had remained frozen, like the woman in the red dress in front of her. She had vehemently denied being in love with anyone and said Amaya was just dreaming. Being a therapist might make her inclined to constructing creative narratives. No, there had been no man in her life. No man had hurt her. And no man was going to hurt Amaya either. Ever.
And then, all of a sudden, big, blubbery tears rained down her face. Amaya reached over and hugged her, and Naina kept saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you” like a fervent prayer.
“All right, you don’t have to tell me, Ma,” Amaya said as she gently rocked her.
––––––––
“SO DID YOU like Eat Pray Love?” Mara asked as they walked toward the yoga studio.
“No, I can’t say I did. I thought Liz was whiny and irritating.”
Mara looked surprised. “Really? I thought you would love it considering you seem to be starting some kind of spiritual journey.”
“I didn’t feel much of a connection to her,” Naina said, the thought of her starting some kind of spiritual journey sounding odd. “Liz’s tone was so glib. The book felt a bit light and superficial even though it’s supposedly about a deep topic . . . finding of the self. C’mon, who wakes up one day and thinks about telling God ‘I’m a big fan of your work’?”
Mara vehemently disagreed, saying the book had touched her soul in a way few books had.
“I want to go to India one day too,” Mara said, adjusting her bindi, a miniscule version of the Hindu God Shiva, on her forehead. “I can’t wait to feel the power of its spirituality.”
Naina smiled, not wanting to tell Mara, yet again, that she had never felt this mysterious spirituality in India that Westerners went on about. To her, it was a country with an ancient civilization, a colonial past, and a tumultuous present. And of course, the place where she had grown up, the place that was now both home and not home.
“Don’t you want to feel the spirituality of the Sistine Chapel?” Naina had always longed to go to Rome. She remembered Sister Maria, a gentle four-feet-five-inch nun from Kerala, going into paroxysms of ecstasy every time she spoke about the Sistine Chapel at her school in Delhi. Of course, Sister Maria had never been outside of India, but she had a book about the chapel she excitedly shared with all her students.
“No, it’s not the same,” Mara insisted. “Christianity just doesn’t have the soul of Eastern religions. It’s all about sin, rules, and commandments.”
“But Hinduism isn’t just mysticism you know,” Naina said. “It has all kinds of rules and rituals too. You have to fast during certain days of the Navratras, wear red sindoor in your hair if you’re a married woman, wipe it off if you’re a widow etc., etc. Not that I’m a very good Hindu just like you’re not exactly Mother Mary.”
As they walked, Naina and Mara continued debating Hinduism versus Christianity. Recently, Naina had been spending much more time with Mara, often discussing the larger questions of life. Mara’s take was, in Naina’s opinion, informed by a feel-good, new-agey spirituality where every problem could be solved, every dream achieved, every doubt annihilated. Somehow, everything could be all good and the divine was just waiting for you if you were willing to reach out to it. It was a vision Naina could not quite buy, but she did like hearing about it. A vision of unfailing optimism. A balm she desperately craved. A uniquely American salve.
Sometimes Naina would wonder what Alannah, the eternal skeptic, might say, but they hardly saw Alannah these days. She had fallen head over heels in love with a man called Damien, a British journalist who worked for the The London Times in New York. They had met online, on Alannah’s tenth blind date. When Naina had met Damien, she was taken aback. She hadn’t expected to see a lanky, highly refined gentleman—almost like a character from a Merchant Ivory period film—doting on her straight-shooting, Italian-American friend. And equally interesting was the change in Alannah. Her face was now flushed with a radiant glow and she behaved in coquettish and feminine ways—ways Naina had never imagined her friend capable of. She had also never seen Alannah so happy, evoking in her a potent wistfulness. A feeling that tasted like those small, bitter, mouth-burning gin and tonics that her friend Reena’s father used to sometimes sneak to them. “Cheers, girls,” he would say in his perfect English, enunciated even more perfectly. “Here’s to some poor colonial chap stuck in some tiny flat in cold, dreary Manchester, dreaming of the days when there was sun, the Gymkhana Club, and the swagger of the Raj.”
––––––––
IT WAS MARA who insisted that Naina try kundalini yoga, a type of yoga Naina had never heard of. Mara said it cleared psychological and artistic blocks and made a person very creative. Apparently, it was practiced in India by a small, select group of people, and therefore was not well-known in India. But Yogi Bhajan, a Sikh who became a master of the science (Mara constantly referred to it as a science) at the age of sixteen, moved to the US in 1969 and openly taught its closely guarded secrets. The kundalini energy, imagined as a coiled and dormant serpent at the base of the spine, was awakened by a series of exercises, breathing techniques and chanting.
“It’s not about explanations,” Mara said in her melodious, sing-songy voice that sounded like relaxing bedtime music as the two of them approached the yoga studio on a Sunday morning. “It’s about the experience. You’ll see when you try it.”
Naina could see a glass door with the word Shakti in big gold letters arranged in a circle, glittering in the sun. She started to feel nervous. She had not done yoga since eighth grade and had not liked it at all then.
“Mara, I’m middle-aged and haven’t done yoga in over thirty-five years. I will make a complete fool of myself. People will laugh at the Indian woman who can’t do yoga.”
“Naina, honey, this is yoga, it’s not about judging,” Mara said, tying her long, blonde hair into a loose knot with a tie-dye scrunchie. “Yoga will meet you where you are. Everybody can do yoga, just differently. Promise me you won’t compare yourself to anyone else?”
The interior of Shakti was an enticing combination of serenity and sumptuousness. Two walls were decorated with thangkas, colorful and intricate paintings depicting Buddha and his entourage on silky fabrics, and on the floor were two mattresses covered in a gleaming orange fabric. And there were turquoise-colored cushions with lots of paisleys. A young clean-shaven man, dressed in khaki shorts and a white shirt proclaiming, “I AM,” lay sprawled on a mattress, reading a book.
On one wall was a shelf with books on Hinduism, Sufism, and yoga, and another shelf contained books with names like Be, The Spiritual Way of Letting Go of Anxiety, and Invite Your Inner Bliss. On the bottom shelf, tucked between a book of poems by Rumi and Introduction to Kundalini Yoga, was Mara’s book The Creative Goddess Within protruding outward. At the front desk, dressed in a peach-colored kurti and loose white pants, was an oval-faced, blonde-haired woman who called herself Sat Kaur.
Naina had brought black sweatpants she normally used at the gym and a pink T-shirt from Banana Republic to change into and didn’t know what to make of any of this. Even though there were sandalwood incense sticks, books on Hinduism, and several of Zakir Hussain’s CDs, the place didn’t quite feel Indian, yet she couldn’t exactly say why. Even Sat Kaur did not quite seem Indian. But where she was from, Naina couldn’t figure out either. (Only later did she find out she was previously known as Jean Holbourn and had traveled extensively in India, including to the Sikhs’ holiest site in Amritsar—where Naina had never been.)
She overheard a couple of people praising the benefits of yoga and thought of Harish, religiously going for his jog in an oversized polo shirt three times a week. He had little regard for yoga, describing it as quackery. “I don’t understand these Americans sometimes,” he said to her one time. “They have the best, most advanced modern medicine in the world, and they want to practice all this bogus yoga and ayurveda. They are so gullible, you know. Some sadhus, corrupt people that they are, tell them some rubbish and they believe it.”
“We have to be quiet here,” Mara whispered in her ear. “We’re early so I’m going to browse the books. Do you want to?”
Naina shook her head, standing in a quiet corner, her eyes vaguely on the luminous turquoise cushions with paisleys.
As for herself, Naina didn’t know what to believe. All she knew was that she was stooping under a mound of mostly invisible troubles and needed some peace. And some answers, if possible. She remembered the woman in the red dress in Cindy Sherman’s photograph. Frozen. Unmoving. Standing under bricks from a long-gone past. What should Naina do? Stand still or move? If she moved, how to move? In which direction?
She looked around her, hearing Jai’s voice in her head, compressed like a tight fist, condemning all yoga in America as “shameless highway robbery.” He said Americans had stolen yoga from Indians and then “crushed it into palatable glitter” to do what Americans liked to do best—make money. “In every single place in the US, it’s completely commodified now. Everyone is in it just for the money. That’s it.”
His words had fallen like hot bricks. One thudding after the next. No pauses for queries or dilemmas. No lulls for nuances or distinctions.
Yes, Naina had once loved Jai’s air of confidence—as if few uncertainties ever touched him—but now she wasn’t so sure. Didn’t wise people question, doubt, differentiate, regret, and even change their mind?
“You can buy yoga tank tops, yoga botanics, yoga ropes, yoga toe stretchers, and get a yoga butt,” she could hear him saying. “All of them sell all of this junk and much more rubbish. It’s ridiculous. Fake hippies.”
Jai hated all kinds of hippies as well. So many of his views were so hard and intransigent. In this way, they were different from each other. How could she not have seen that before? He thought Florida was just one ugly Disneyland; vegetarianism was against the inherent carnivorous nature of human beings; and Ecuador was indisputably the most beautiful country in the world.
“Look at you, Naina.” She imagined Jai teasing her, his voice pleasurably tickling as if it were a thread of raw silk. “You’re reading about Buddhism and God knows what else, and you’re about to do yoga for the first time since eighth grade. What are you, the Indian answer to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg forty years later?”
As she heard Jai’s fictitious words in her head, Naina silently laughed as Mara picked up a book titled The Real Me. She began to see herself as comical, as one of those fifties or sixties seekers who traveled to places like India or China to find themselves, or to find answers or whatever else they were looking for—one of those many troubled or curious souls who turned to the East to learn about concepts like impermanence and inner peace, concepts she had never been taught. But she was an Indian in New York, in the twenty-first century, looking toward the East for answers by reading books on Buddhism by white people and going to learn yoga from a white person. “That is totally, utterly absurd,” she could hear Jai saying in a voice as hard as concrete. Maybe it was funny and absurd, but it wasn’t completely senseless. Surely, people from the East weren’t the only ones who had the authority to teach yoga and Buddhism—as long as Westerners did it respectfully and Asians had equal opportunities to teach these practices?
“From now on, you know what I’m going to call you . . . an Indian flower child,” she pictured Jai saying. And then, his voice, which still had the power to make her organs do a haphazard tango, would become harsher as his disdain toward anything associated with hippies would gush forth, like dirty, muddy water from a pipe in a slum.
The yoga studio itself was minimal with unadorned white walls and blonde-wood floors. Green-and-blue mats, neatly rolled-up, and folded Mexican blankets lay at one end of the room. A large round metal object—a musical instrument, she later learned, called a gong and used for deep relaxation—stood next to the platform in front, framed by a thangka painting. The studio emanated a greater calm than Naina had expected and she slowly took in the big empty space, yet unoccupied except for the two of them. Mara quickly got into a cross-legged pose and shut her eyes, while Naina’s gaze soon became fixed on the thangka painting hanging on the wall.
The elaborately patterned Tibetan Buddhist painting, meant to represent a mandala, was deep red with a trademark circle. Naina loved circles. They had no beginnings and no ends. No birth and no death. No sides. Both whole and a hole. Full and empty simultaneously. Like the Earth and the shape of its annual orbit around the sun. All curves like a voluptuous woman.
Naina lowered her gaze slightly to Buddha sitting on his throne, meditating peacefully as the hustle-bustle of design and pattern in the thangka continued around him. Her eyes kept moving until they finally rested for a few seconds on the dot on Buddha’s forehead, and her head felt quieter than usual, like a momentary pause at a dinner party when someone says something unexpectedly profound or unexpectedly stupid.
Soon, a tall man with a symmetrical Nordic-looking face, as if all his features had been carefully sculpted, entered the studio. He was dressed in a kurta pajama—the kind that Harish would wear to bed, in his early years in America, before switching to shorts and a T-shirt. Naina’s heart tightened. Harish might not have been the most open-minded man around, but there had never been any sharpness about him. His edges were soft if not pliable.
The man, whose name was Nick, sat cross-legged on the platform in the front, fiddling with a music system. Three more people walked into the studio: a studious-looking boy with a goatee and wearing a T-shirt with an image of Jim Morrison; an older woman with big hoop earrings and bright red lipstick, who had the air of someone quick to explode; and an exceptionally short woman with a soft, angelic face, who seemed as if she had just returned from the Peace Corps or some other do-good mission.
As everyone confidently sat on their mats and placed Mexican blankets next to them, Naina started to feel awkward, like an interloper among people who were well versed in a game she didn’t quite know how to play.
“This is one of my favorite sets because it not only cleans out the toxins in our body that we get from so much of the bad food in this country, but also the mind, things that we can’t see, that are buried in our subconscious,” Nick said in a voice that burst with sweetness, like too much sugar in tea. “That horrible thing that your Aunt Ethel said to you when you were five, that bad grade that made your poppa wanna kill you, and that terrible prom date. Remember that? Or have you forgotten? Nothing is ever forgotten, guys, nothing. Just as your body needs to digest the food you eat, so does your mind need to digest and process your thoughts. So, are we ready to rock n roll?”
“Yes,” the class said enthusiastically. Naina was quiet.
The set was not easy. They had to squat on their toes in frog pose, raise their buttocks with their hands and feet on the floor in downward dog, and lift their upper bodies as they lay on their stomachs in cobra pose. Naina could barely concentrate as the postures felt weird, their silly-sounding American names felt weird, and Nick’s slangy accent and analogies felt weird. And the fact that everyone else so gracefully did the asanas, particularly someone called Dana who made downward dog look like some sort of cool contemporary dance posture, made Naina even more self-conscious about her fumbling attempt at yoga. What would everyone think? And then there loomed the specter of Jai laughing at her in her head, a harsh, grating laugh that resounded in her ears.
She felt a yearning outstretch its palms inside her heart. The yoga class felt so unfamiliar, yet somewhat familiar. She wished she had someone with whom she could relate, someone who could help her make sense of the experience, someone with whom she could laugh about the whole thing, someone reasonably close to her age, someone who had grown up around kurta pajamas, someone who instinctively knew how to pronounce words like Shakti and Sat Nam, someone who would crack up at Nick’s pronunciation of Shiva, someone who had had a yoga teacher like Mrs. Chandrashekhar growing up, someone who would automatically know lotus pose’s Sanskrit name was padmasana. Obviously, such a person would have to be an Indian who grew up in India, and the fact that she no longer had any Indian friends suddenly bothered her.
Lightheaded from the almost seventy-five minutes of yoga she had done, Naina quickly lay on her mat and closed her eyes when the time came for deep relaxation. She heard the rippling sounds of the gong, and briefly opened her eyes to see Nick striking the instrument. The sounds of the gong swelled and swelled and swelled until they sounded like operatic thunderstorms. Gradually, her mind slowed down until she heard nothing but soft murmurs in her head.
And when she finally opened her eyes, she heard a whisper from the ocean floor of her mind. Do it. Tell Amaya the truth. Regardless of the cost. Because it’s the right thing to do.
She quickly tucked the thought in the back of a mental drawer and slowly got up and rolled her mat.