WRINKLES
By Sreya Sarkar
(published in Batayan, October 2019 issue)
Whenever Meena passed the Yoga studio on her way to the town library or her son’s favorite burger joint, the nostalgia filled part of her nudged her to drop by and find out what the studio offered. Yet, the right opportunity had not appeared till a good six months had rolled away, distracting her with a myriad of necessary but unstimulating activities. When she finally got to the studio she noticed how different it was from other exercise facilities. She had seen swankier places with clean, modern aesthetics, all steel and concrete, with efficient exercise plans, catering to the young perfectionists who took themselves way too seriously. But they seemed more like military barracks with robot faced soldiers on serious missions, rather than a place to stretch and relax. This place appeared more frowzy and informal. There were a couple of people chatting next to the water cooler with smiles on their faces and they did not seem to be in a rush to go anywhere or get something done immediately. The yoga mats were stacked asymmetrically near the entrance and the foam blocks stood in a precarious pile next to the reception bar. There were signs of casual chaos everywhere yet, it felt warm and friendly.
Meena drew her attention to the classes proposed by the studio. On Monday, there was a one and a half hour of Hatha Yoga. Tuesday was Vinyasa Yoga. Wednesday morning was reserved for power yoga, three separate half-hour classes. Thursday, Ashtanga Yoga, one hour. Friday, Kundalini Yoga. Then there was a generous sprinkling of other specialized classes. Prenatal Yoga for pregnant women; Restorative Yoga for healing and relaxation; Bikram Yoga for the tough ones who really wanted to sweat it out at a hundred and five degrees. There were too many to choose from. Meena sighed, folded the class timetable in half and dropped it in her oversized tote. She grimaced as her hand brushed against the strangest concoction of items imaginable. A half-used packet of tissues, a worn out Chinese take-out menu, her son’s Rubik’s cube which he had been looking for the last few days, a chipped sunglass, and the grocery list that had mysteriously disappeared. She had promised herself to clean out her bag once a month but that opportunity had come, waited and left like the route buses on Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard to Arlington Heights, and Meena had not been able to board any of them. Her eyes traveled to a neat looking black and white photograph of Downtown Boston’s Quincy Market hanging over the reception bar to fetch her a moment of calm.
As she stood twitching her cleft nose in an attempt to decide which class to join, a hand tapped on her shoulders lightly. Meena turned around to find a smiling woman. Her aged face had a smattering of crow’s feet etched around the corner of her eyes. It looked like a face that had enjoyed many a laugh in her life.
“Hi! You look as confused as I did when I first joined the studio."
She had kind, blue eyes.
“There is no best way of choosing, you know. Try all of them and see which one fits you the best.”
“Which class do you take?” asked Meena.
“I practice Hatha yoga and I take a Kundalini class some evenings.”
Meena smiled, a swell of glimmer flowing through her dark brown eyes. “That is helpful, thank you.”
As she waited for the person at the reception to put in her information in the computer system, she caught a flock of women dispersing after a class. Their skins were flushed, their hair messy, sticking up like half-finished waves frozen in a camera shot. They were not overweight but they didn’t look super toned either. They seemed above a certain age, definitely above fifty. Who else could make time to come to a ten a clock class in the morning? Most women her age, were working full time and were unavailable to attend a morning class. These women unlike her generation, were used to free time and did not look guilty about not working conventionally and continuously. There was a softness in their appearance like their bodies had seen better days but were now spent and had settled down to just being, instead of blossoming.
The receptionist suggested that she should start with the mellower classes and then go on to the more intensive ones to give her body time to adjust gradually but Meena did not think that applied to her.
A vain memory elbowed into her mosaic of thoughts, and she let it hover a while before snuffing it out. Many years ago, in her secondary school days, she was a star Yoga student. Whenever her PE teacher wanted to demonstrate a difficult Asana to the class, she would call upon Meena and direct her to bend her limbs and rearrange her torso in complex poses. She was lean and malleable back then, but now her body had changed. Her once shapely hands that had seemed like supple lotus stems had grown fleshy over the years, and her lean middle section had developed a stubborn mom pooch. She had not practiced Yoga in years. But she was still fairly young, she told herself, so she would be able to pick up where she had left. Perhaps an advanced class would be the right one for her, she reflected as she drummed her fingers at the reception bar.
“Is this sequence recommended for all ages?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the class these ladies are coming from?” she asked pointing to the partially dispersed group of women.
“That’s the advanced Hatha Yoga class.”
“I want to join that class.”
The receptionist raised her brows. “Are you sure? Generally, newcomers start with Vinyasa Yoga.”
Meena shot her a convincing smile. “Believe me, I am not new to this.”
______
The Yoga instructor was around the same age as most of the other people in the class. She was thin and delicate and looked more like a next-door granny who enjoyed baking cookies for her grandchildren, than a Yoga expert. When she asked if there was anyone new in the class, Meena raised her hand, and received an open, toothy smile from her.
“Welcome! Have you taken Yoga classes before?”
“Oh, yes. I know Yoga, but I am a bit out of practice. So, I wanted to join your class.”
The instructor’s eyebrows arched up. “That is wonderful. But be careful. It looks deceivingly simple, yet it is not.”
“I have practiced Yoga for many years in India.” Meena need not have shared that but there was an all-knowing smugness in the instructor’s tone which she could not ignore.
A smile stretched the instructor’s lips. “In that case, we can learn so much from the yogini amidst us today,” she told the class.
Meena saw the instructor exchange a knowing look with a few other women, whose lips had also relaxed into indulgent smiles. She bristled silently at the mildly patronizing tone directed towards her. She had thought that the West had finally stopped perceiving people like her coming from an “exotic land” but every now and then, she would come across such remarks that separated her from the rest of the modern World.
Yogini, that’s right!
From across the class, she saw someone wave at her. It was the same lady she had met the day she had signed up. Meena waved back and started the stretch routine with the rest of the class. The temperature was increased and the lights dimmed. The instructor started talking about the importance of breathing right.
“Don’t hurry your body, don’t rush yourself. Take your time and breath…in and out…in and out…like this…”
The class reverberated with well-pronounced sighs.
“Exhale the negative thoughts you have been holding in your minds, and inhale the opportunity to forgive and embrace all.”
The instructor’s orotund voice and unhurried words were surprisingly hypnotic and lured the participating women to follow a slow and steady pace. But, Meena found the speed too languid for her liking. Everyone took too much time getting to the apex of the Asanas and when they did, they held themselves there forever. The several variations of a pose made the class further sluggish. She set herself on a mental cruise control as she performed the poses one by one---the warrior, bridge, child. She heard the rustle of sweatshirts being taken off to be kept by the side of the yoga mats as a few struggled to hold the posture while doing the eagle and the tree poses, but she was perfectly balanced.
“Bring your mind and body together. Don't let your mind wander off without feeling it within your reach,” the instructor reminded them.
Meena tried to follow her but her thoughts kept escaping from her intention of tying it to her body. Involuntarily, she started pondering upon how her life’s direction and pace had made her increasingly restless over the last few years. Managing her young son and her household with minimal involvement of her spouse and no help from anybody else since her family was in a far-away land, had taught her to juggle and multitask but had also depleted her ability to bestow undivided attention to one single task for long. Is it possible to develop ADHD in adulthood? She wondered. Did she need help?
A layer of sweat settled over her upper lip like a freshly sprouted mustache. In a few minutes, she felt her armpits getting sweaty. She paused and glanced at others, most of whom had closed their eyes and seemed to be succeeding in wrapping their minds with their bodies seamlessly. There was a calmness in their bearing in spite of the awkward stretching of their bodies, which Meena found missing in herself right then.
The Asanas were becoming increasingly challenging, and Meena found herself struggling a bit. If only the heat was not dialed up so high, she would feel more comfortable. The sweating intensified and she found herself reaching out for her water bottle.
The class had progressed to doing various forms of pigeon pose and Meena thought she felt a slight snap in her back but ruled out anything serious, for Yoga always made her body pop and crack, in an attempt to expand and adjust to the postures. They came back to the lotus pose in a while and she unwound her body, but a dull pain remained. She was perspiring so profusely through her T-shirt by now, that it was sticking to her curves like it was painted on her. As the instructor mentioned the bow pose, she relaxed. It could be exactly what her back might need. Yet, as she got into position and stretched herself up in the pose, a sharp pain circulated through her body. She continued in the pose for as long as the instructor asked them to, but as she started disengaging, she realized that she could not untangle her hands from her legs.
Sweat poured out of her like a leaking water balloon and she felt close to fainting in a moment.
She croaked softly, almost inaudibly. “I…I think I am stuck!”
The nice lady who had waved at her before saw her in distress and called others. They formed a circle around her and waited for the instructor to approach. Their pink faces were lined with concern along with sweat. Meena’s vision was growing blurry, the faces over her swam around in crooked circles and after a moment they started changing into the shapes of her dear ones. One of them looked like her beloved older sister. Another looked like an old, school teacher she admired. They were advising her to move her limbs but, she could not. She was really stuck.
Then her mother’s face came into focus.
“Continue breathing, and relax!” she said and turned her body gradually.
She massaged her hands and feet and very gently started straightening her. Finally, Meena could lie on her side and her breathing returned to normal. The haze brought about by the shock and pain cleared, and she found herself surrounded by a group of strangers again.
A twinge of embarrassment shot through her as she recovered her senses. A moment ago, the face that had looked like her mother’s, had changed into the instructor’s face and she had read Meena’s thoughts right away.
“It is okay, now. You pushed yourself a bit too far, too fast and that caused the disorientation. Also, your back is a bit weak. It will need some strengthening before you perform the advanced Asanas. You can practice core exercises for a while, before challenging your body again like this, okay?”
Her voice was soft and soothing, that of a mother’s and not of a teacher’s. Meena nodded and tried to sit up but the instructor held her down.
“You should keep lying down. I will come and get you up in some time." She smiled and requested the women to keep an eye on her while she finished the class.
The blue-eyed lady gazed at Meena carefully, looking for signs of discomfort. Her ponytail had moved to a side and looked limp with sweat but her eyes were still sharp and alert.
“I am so sorry for disrupting the class like this,” said Meena in a weak voice.
“Don’t worry about that. We were near the end of the class, anyway.”
Another woman chimed in sympathetically, “And there is no reason to be apologetic, really! We have all been where you are right now. It is not an easy class to endure, for sure.”
As Meena lay there on the floor recuperating, a realization came upon her and filled her with a hushed humility. She had assumed last week as she turned forty, that she had lost most of her arrogance and was well on her path to grown-up humbleness but there had lingered on the last crumbly shell of conceit.
She saw the mature faces and a new kind of appreciation grew in her. The faces exhumed wisdom beyond youth. They reminded her that perhaps after a point of time, the skin does become loose and stretchy but only to accommodate a life lived, to allow the inclusion of happiness and disappointments alike.
Like the age of a tree is determined by the annual rings of its wood growth, for humans, the age rings are the wrinkles and folds of skins collected over time. Each fold represents a devastation the person has undergone. Every wrinkle has a twinkling, funny story behind the hearty laugh that caused it. And here was her skin, still taut and wrinkle-free, but her body and mind felt rigid and frozen. Perhaps she needed a few folds and wrinkles to define what she really was, in person and in soul.
