Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga

  ‘Do you know where the Taj Lands End is?’ she started to say, but the driver lurched out into the traffic before she could finish. He hurtled through the other rickshaws and cars and taxis as though he was the manic orb bouncing off the obstacles in a pinball machine, honking the whole way whether anyone was in front of them or not.

  ‘Please, slow down,’ Annie gasped, but the driver, sitting with one leg under his bum, seemed not to hear. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘I’m not in a hurry.’

  But he was.

  It had taken her half an hour to walk to the mobile-phone shop but it took fewer than five terrifying minutes to get back. She was so frightened as they barrelled along the sea face, driving the wrong way into oncoming traffic, that she actually considered throwing herself out the side.

  When the driver lurched to a halt outside the hotel gates, she could not get out quickly enough, not even stopping to debate the fare, which at one hundred rupees was three times as much as it should have been.

  She just could not wait to get away from the heat, the noise, the dirt, the dust, and the fear of meeting a grisly end on a dusty Mumbai street, where starving dogs would lick at her corpse and Hugh, driving past, would fail to recognise her, dressed as she was in such an unfamiliar way.

  Inside the hotel she clocked up another first, going straight to the lobby bar, sinking into a dark velvet sofa and ordering a double gin and tonic.

  While she waited for it to arrive, her temperature lowering with each breath, she messaged Hugh that she now had a local number, then messaged Pinto the same thing, adding that she would see him tomorrow morning at the usual time.

  From Hugh, she got no response. This rankled. She was tiring of the lack of response from the people who were supposedly closest to her.

  But from Pinto came the following: Thunk U. She took another long sip of her drink, grateful that, despite his lack of education, he still knew about manners.

  She was cooler now, more comfortable, although her skin felt scorched and her hair was filthy from her outdoor excursion. The mere thought of washing and drying it exhausted her.

  Annie leaned back on the velvet sofa in the bar, sipped her drink again and spotted the salon on the mezzanine floor. Damn Hugh. If he wasn’t even going to bother answering her texts she would get her hair done again and charge it to the room. This time, when the hairdresser asked Annie if she would like a cut and colour she said yes.

  ‘It is very nice for me to work with hair so fair,’ the hairdresser, Miti, said. ‘Shall we do some highlights? I think you could be more blonde. I would be more blonde if I were you.’

  It was funny to think of anyone imagining they were her. Would they still if they knew that before she came to Mumbai she spent most of the day staring out the window? That some evenings she started thinking of going to bed at six o’clock in the hope that she would sleep and dream about her mother? That she cried over the loss of a dog whose big claim to fame was that he could eat the crotch out of a pair of clean underpants in less than a minute?

  ‘More blonde would be very nice with this pink colour of your top, yes, ma’am?’ The hairdresser was smiling hopefully at Annie’s reflection in the mirror.

  Annie did not think she had bought anything pale pink ever before, for herself anyway. Eleanor had made Daisy a pink gingham dress when she was little, doing the smocking herself. Daisy had loved it and been all but surgically removed from it when it grew so tight that the little pearl buttons down her back popped off, one by one, over the course of a single day.

  Annie’s wardrobe at home was filled with brown, navy and neutrals. This simple cool top would be it for her on the pink front. There was really no sense in colouring her hair to match one tunic that had cost only ten dollars and would probably fall apart the first time she washed it. On the other hand, she looked so dull in the mirror compared to the hairdresser, whose own jet-black hair shone under the salon lights, and whose skin was as dark and smooth as chocolate ganache.

  ‘You know what? I think you might be right,’ she said. ‘Blonde it is: knock yourself out.’

  It wasn’t quite a movie-style transformation, but Annie had to agree that being blonde certainly lifted her looks out of beige and into something brighter. The hairdresser did a lovely job, the highlights a honeyed gold, and the way she had trimmed Annie’s fringe and styled her hair smooth but with a bit of bounce suited her face, took a year or two away from her features.

  ‘This brings out your eyes,’ the hairdresser said, draping Annie’s hair this way and that with her comb. ‘You have very beautiful eyes.’

  She could hardly wait for Hugh to get back from work to show herself off, but when she checked her phone she saw she had missed three calls from him.

  Her heart skipped a beat. Could there be something wrong? One of the children hurt, perhaps or — But no, she had sent them both her itinerary which included contact details for the hotel, and they’d have called her directly if it was a real emergency. They might be slippery when it came to communicating with home, but she was still the portal through what little there was arrived.

  Back in the room the hotel phone was blinking that she had a message.

  It was from Hugh: a piece of machinery had gone missing on its way from Pune. No one seemed to know its whereabouts and, as Hugh was the company’s man on the ground in India, he was being sent to find it.

  He hoped to be back the following day.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Annie,’ he said, before turning to someone else and muttering something she couldn’t hear. From the honking in the background, she assumed he was in a car. ‘I had hoped we’d have more time.’

  For what? she thought, tossing her new smooth blonde hair over her shoulder, trying to smother the irritation she felt. More time for what?

  She wondered why he had bothered bringing her to Mumbai in the first place. If it wasn’t for laughing yoga, Pinto, and the hairdresser, she’d be having the worst trip of her life.

  She called room service and ordered two desserts, one a fresh mango sorbet and the other a chocolate torte. Annie knew from experience that it was impossible to stay irritated when chocolate torte was involved.

  She was licking the last of the silky stuff off the spoon when her aggravation subsided enough for her to remember the morning she had noticed that her husband was sad, even in his sleep. She’d sailed adrift from her own good fortune. She needed to remember why she was lucky.

  Annie thought of Preeti, unconscious in her hospital bed, she thought of the hairdresser who loved her eyes and envied her hair, of Pinto who’d been alone on the streets of this crazy city for more than twenty years, of the ladies on the sand in their saris at Chowpatty Beach doing Heavenly Hirani’s laughing yoga.

  Daisy wasn’t the only one who’d had an easy life: Annie had one too, most of the time. Hugh’s absence was unfortunate, but she needed to keep it in perspective.

  That didn’t exactly stop the irritation, but she thought that perhaps another peeled coconut or two might help her move closer once again to the good fortune she kept forgetting.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘You look very nice today, ma’am,’ Pinto said when he picked her up in the morning.

  She was not wearing the same sweats that she’d sweltered in on other days, but had gone for a pastel-green tunic, the new cotton pants, an orange silk scarf Rhona had given her and the flip-flops she’d brought to wear around the hotel room.

  ‘When in Rome …’ she told Pinto, by way of explaining her attire, but she could tell by his nervous laugh that he didn’t get the reference.

  ‘Your hair is good.’

  ‘Thank you, Pinto, and thank you for your text,’ she said.

  Another nervous laugh. ‘Did I make some mistake?’

  ‘No! Not at all.’

  ‘I am not going to school when I come to Mumbai. I tell you this yesterday, ma’am?’

  ‘No, but I imagined that you didn’t. You taught yourself English?’

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; ‘To speak, yes, but to write takes much longer. It take me ten minutes to write for you,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I certainly got the message, as we like to say.’

  ‘I have something to show you on the way this morning,’ he said as they drove onto the Sea Link. ‘I see it when I come to get you and I think this makes you laugh.’

  They were driving down the marine parade in South Mumbai when Pinto slowed the cab and pointed to his great find. It was a bus parked at the gates of a large building called St Mary’s Primary. The bus was yellow with the word SHCOOL painted across the back and side in big black letters. It did make her laugh.

  ‘It might have taken you a while to learn, but there’s nothing wrong with your spelling,’ she told Pinto.

  ‘I did not go to school, but I did not go to sh-cool either,’ he agreed, pleased that she’d got his joke.

  ‘You sure you don’t want to come and try the yoga today?’

  ‘No, ma’am. I sleep in my car, thank you.’

  ‘You didn’t get a good night’s sleep?’

  ‘Ma’am, I stay now in guesthouse in Colaba, but I share a room with two other taxi drivers. One of them takes a lot of medicines and he is up several times in the night. Other one is very old and he drinks a lot of Kingfisher beer, then when he is drunk he eats his food at sometimes four in the morning. It is hard for me to stay to sleep sometimes.’

  Annie was hardly surprised, in those circumstances. ‘You’re not married, Pinto?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, and I have three children. A big son and a small son and a very tiny baby.’ He fidgeted in his pocket to pull out his phone. ‘My eyes are on the road, ma’am,’ he said, before she could suggest otherwise, but when they stopped at the lights, he scrolled through the images on his camera and passed the phone back to her.

  ‘This is my very tiny baby,’ he said. ‘I just come back from visiting her in Jammu. This is where my wife and childrens live.’

  The photo was of a sleeping fat peach of a girl, with skin much paler than Pinto’s, wrapped up in a pale lemon blanket. She was beautiful and Annie told him so.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.’

  ‘You must miss them so much. When you go to visit, do you fly?’

  ‘No, ma’am, I have never been in a plane. Now it is still three days in the bus and train — Jammu does not get any closer!’

  This morning when they stopped at the lights at the bottom of the hill before turning in towards Chowpatty Beach, a young girl carrying a baby on her hip scratched at the window and made feeding motions with her hand.

  She couldn’t have been much older than thirteen, and the baby was maybe six months.

  Annie started to scramble in her bag for her purse.

  ‘Do not give her money, ma’am,’ Pinto said. ‘She has gold in her teeth this one. She is a rich girl and her family has many investments.’

  ‘But she’s begging, Pinto. And the baby! The money would be for the baby. Surely you must feel sorry for her when you have a baby of your own?’

  ‘The baby is fat, ma’am. The baby does not know about the money. Please do not give anything to this girl. Please do not look at this girl.’

  Annie did not look at the girl; she looked at the baby, and as she did, it smiled, a big happy grin accompanied by the wriggle of the pudgy fingers on one chubby hand.

  Annie laughed, and the baby grinned even more. Maybe Pinto was right, the baby did not know about money. The baby probably didn’t even know it was begging. It was just a baby, wanting what all babies do — to be loved and taken care of.

  ‘I want to take the baby with me,’ she said.

  ‘I know, ma’am — all the madams want to take the baby with them. This is why the baby is here.’

  The madams, as it turned out, were just as predictable as everything else.

  There was so much more she wanted to ask Pinto, but they were already at Wilson College. Annie had barely put her brake foot through the floor the whole drive — she’d hardly noticed the traffic at all.

  ‘I must be getting used to it,’ she said.

  ‘You are very safe with me, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I am down the street catching some winks.’

  She had no doubt about that — ever since he’d told her about taxis being houses she’d spotted locals who shared Hugh’s uncanny ability to fall asleep wherever he lay, only they were in the back of rickshaws or slumped on chairs or park benches. She’d even seen a man sleeping precariously on the concrete railing of a freeway on-ramp.

  ‘GOOD MORNING, EVERYONE,’ SHE SAID, to those gathered under the banyan tree. ‘Lovely to see you all again.’

  ‘Lovely to see you all again,’ echoed Shruti, giving her a high-five.

  Annie relaxed quickly into the yoga, enjoying the slow stretches, cajoling her muscles into going that extra inch before sliding back to being relaxed. The leaning into each other was wonderful. The more she let go, refused to tense, the more she felt supported by the person next to her, Sandeep on one side, as always, and a short but solid woman she had not met before, but whose name she was told was Kirti, on the other.

  She kicked off her flip-flops and tossed them into the middle of the circle the way the other women had, noticing that the other footwear in the pile was mostly tattered sandals, enjoying the feeling of the fine dusty sand beneath her toes.

  This morning, the laughter started early, when the two oldest members of the group, a couple called Pooja and Suraj, forgot what they were doing and let go of each other during a tandem balancing stretch.

  Instead of holding wrists while they squatted to hold each other up, they both plopped back on the sand like shuttlecocks, exhaling with matching puffs of surprise. The laughing school laughed.

  ‘Well then, we may as well take it from here,’ Heavenly Hirani said. ‘I was going to do some sun salutations but it looks like the laughter is ready and waiting for us today.’

  This time she forgot to speak in English, so Annie did her best to follow without verbal instructions.

  The first exercise was obviously a mirror laugh, with each person holding up one hand and looking into it, shaking a finger and laughing. The apology laugh came next, and a variation on the Chinese/Japanese laugh which included blowing out the cheeks and squinting.

  In between, Annie kept laughing because across the circle Shruti did, too, flying into a fresh gale every time she looked at Pooja and Suraj, who were still slapping at each other and blaming the other one for the tip-up.

  The last laugh involved the school forming a human train and Swedish massaging the shoulders of the person in front of them, then turning in the other direction and doing it again.

  By quarter to eight the sun could have fallen out of the sky and light would still have radiated from the north end of Chowpatty Beach.

  After the oms and the hymn, Kirti turned to Annie and said something she couldn’t understand, repeating it over and over.

  ‘What’s she saying?’ Annie turned to ask Sandeep, whom she could usually find right behind her.

  ‘She is saying, “Do you speak Hindi?”’ Sandeep reported.

  No, I just smile and nod, Annie acted out, making Kirti laugh.

  Back under the tree, Priyanka produced a large plastic bag full of spiced nuts and started dishing them out into the open hands of the laughing yoga school.

  Annie thought about pretending to be looking for something in her own purse so she could avoid being given any, but felt ashamed. She loved the company these women provided she told herself as she opened her palms to receive the snacks, and if she got Delhi Belly? Well, it was a price worth paying.

  The nuts were fiery to begin with, and she almost choked on the first mouthful, but after that first burst they proved quite addictive. She ate them all.

  The men sat separately, over on the wall that separated the beach from the pavement, ribbing one of them, Ashor, who had just revealed that he had, as of that day, ‘completed’ fifty years of marriage.

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; Fifty years, thought Annie. Now that was a milestone, although ‘completing’ it didn’t make it sound like much fun, more of a chore. And to look at him, she would have pegged him as one of the younger ones in the group, but if he’d been married half a century he was probably closer to seventy.

  It occurred to her then that Heavenly Hirani’s School of Laughing Yoga, while it was ostensibly for everyone, might actually only be popular with old people.

  ‘Is this a senior citizens’ group?’ she asked Shruti.

  ‘Are you a senior citizen?’

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘Everyone else is?’

  ‘I am only sixty-two,’ said Malika.

  ‘I am sixty-three,’ said Priyanka.

  ‘Meera is ninety-three,’ Shruti said, indicating the woman with the walking frame, who had stayed in the shade today. ‘Although she has been ninety-three for a few years now.’

  Annie wasn’t sure how she felt about joining a senior citizens’ group when she was only forty-nine, and her doubt must have registered on her face because Heavenly turned to her and said: ‘You are only as old as you feel, Mrs Hugh. And when you come here, you feel much younger. No need for facelifts at Heavenly Hirani’s School of Laughing Yoga.’

  ‘But where are all the actual young people?’ Annie couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed this before.

  ‘They do not want to do yoga,’ sighed Malika. ‘They want to work in IT and move to America.’ Malika wasn’t married, but had two nephews who had done just that, she said. ‘And my sister is praying fourteen times a day that they will see the light and come home, but I do not think this will happen. They go to a gym and do spin classes where they are now.’

  ‘Not easy coming back to the slum after living in a big fancy apartment in New York, hmm?’ Shruti was shaking her head. ‘Remember how my cousin Tabrez complained every day for six years when he came back?’

  ‘Anyone would think the slum is a bad place to live,’ said Priyanka, and they all laughed.

  ‘But isn’t the slum a bad place to live?’ Annie was confused.