Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga

  But now here she was — perfectly coiffed and manicured, lightly tanned and nicely turned out — in Mumbai, one of the largest cities in the world and no doubt a hotbed of fabulous life-changing experiences, but all she wanted to do was stay in her room, a room that could have been anywhere, that could have been in her house at home.

  Nut up, Ben would have said if he was there, although probably not to her face.

  ‘Don’t be so pathetic,’ Daisy — always a harsher critic — would have had no trouble spitting out.

  Her children would be disgusted with her, and, although she was disappointed that they hadn’t answered her emails, she did not like the thought of letting them down. She wanted them to be proud of her. She wanted them to be so proud of her that they would be desperate to slip back into her life and stay there forever.

  ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘You’ll be here anyway at 6.15 in the morning?’

  ‘Yes, madam. I start at seven so I will come in early.’

  ‘Oh, no, please, you don’t have to do that for me.’

  ‘Of course not. But I would very much like to.’

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning, there was Valren in the silvery morning light waiting for her. He’d already called a taxi, he said, one with air-conditioning and seatbelts, and within minutes a smart modern blue-and-grey taxi — a ‘cool cab’ Valren called it — was pulling up in front of her.

  It did not look as though it had been taken to by angry giants. It looked as though it had only just been cleaned and polished.

  Valren leaned in towards the window and asked the driver to take Annie to Chowpatty Beach, opposite Wilson College.

  ‘I should wait and bring the madam back?’ the driver asked, in crystal-clear English.

  Valren turned to Annie. ‘I think this is a good idea for you?’

  Annie looked at the driver. From what she could see he was about thirty, pleasant looking, wearing a crisp pale-blue shirt.

  ‘Yes, thank you, I think this is good for me, too.’

  She slid into the back seat, and clipped herself easily into the seatbelt. The seat coverings in this taxi were clean and a plain dark grey.

  She turned and waved to Valren, who was smiling and waving back as though he’d just launched an ocean liner.

  The taxi driver made his way smoothly down the driveway, past the security point, and out of the hotel compound, picking up speed as he drove along the boulevard beside the sea.

  Annie gripped the cab’s door handle even though the streets around the hotel were all but deserted this early in the morning, a far cry from when she’d arrived five days earlier and had barely seen the asphalt for the cars and bikes and people.

  Now, a trickle of morning walkers and joggers pounded the uneven road but not even the marauding dogs were awake yet. No horns beeped, no trucks headed straight for them, and the only automated rickshaws she could see were lined up at the side of the road, not hurtling down the middle of it.

  Despite this lack of other traffic, panic clawed at her. The driver wasn’t speeding, and he wasn’t half dead and hacking up a lung either, but he wasn’t exactly crawling along and Annie needed to crawl. As he sped up, so did her heart rate. What was to stop him from taking her into the depths of Mumbai and dismembering her, or gang-raping her or selling her to slave traders?

  She was sure she read that that happened in India. Or Africa. If she turned, she could still see the Taj tower behind her; it wasn’t too late to ask him to take her back. She could say she felt ill.

  But then he looked at her in the rear-vision mirror and smiled, and it was such a shy, lovely smile that she found it hard to believe he would do her harm.

  ‘Do you want ceiling, ma’am?’

  It didn’t have garish daisies like the one the day before, but she was happy enough with it.

  ‘Ceiling?’

  ‘Seeee-ling,’ he repeated more slowly.

  ‘Ceiling? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Sea Link, ma’am. Sea Link. Is bridge to South Mumbai. Over the seas.’ Of course! The graceful slice of modern engineering she could see from the hotel. ‘It cost fifty-five rupees,’ the driver said, ‘or I can take you the long way. May be some cheaper, but Sea Link is quicker.’

  ‘Yes, please, Sea Link. Thank you.’

  They were at a wide open intersection now and there was more traffic, not all of it on the correct side of the road, but the honking was sedate, the general atmosphere far from fraught.

  An empty bus had stopped in the middle of the road for no apparent reason, the rest of the traffic just pouring around it as though it were a boulder in a stream.

  They were in the dusty suburban shopping area she recognised from the day she arrived, with the far side of the slum she could see from the hotel sprouting behind a higgledy-piggledy fence on her right. It had taken them this long just to get around to the back side of where she was staying.

  She strained her eyes and thought she could see the heights of the Sea Link behind a tangle of elevated freeway up ahead, then her eyes slid down the fence and onto the grimy road edge, where an entire family was sleeping on what would be a footpath in any other city, laid out in a row, all five of them.

  Annie bit her lip. What she had thought were flags hanging from the fence palings were clothes: a little boy’s singlet, a little girl’s shabby dress, a T-shirt.

  The taxi driver looked idly in their direction, unmoved, before edging out into the traffic, despite the light remaining red, and putting his foot down, veering into a pot-holed coil of awful tarmac that soon emerged onto a wide empty road.

  ‘Sea Link,’ he said pointing ahead to the tollbooths; she fished the money out of her purse to pay the toll.

  She had lost track completely of what the money was worth, but knew fifty-five rupees to be far less than the cost of a glass of wine. She’d given the taxi driver too much the day before, she knew that now, but at least in this taxi she was actually going somewhere.

  And, if she could relax her brake foot enough, keep it from shooting through the floor, it was rather beautiful driving over the bridge so early. The sun was a tiny golden ball rising behind them, the light a lustrous silvery-grey. To her right was the same stretch of sea she could see from the hotel, far less murky from this angle; to her left, the seaside slum she had noticed perched on rocks on the peninsula, with its coloured fishing boats bobbing in front of them.

  Somehow, the rickety slum buildings managed to look pretty in the morning glow — their different peeling pastels oddly coordinated. Martha Stewart would probably find them ‘inspiring’, Annie thought. She’d probably bring out a range of slum crockery based on the quaint paint jobs, with matching napkins referencing the bobbing boats.

  Annie checked herself. She liked Martha Stewart. She would probably buy that slum crockery. And anyway, if rising sunlight turning a shantytown into a work of art wasn’t inspiring, what was?

  The orange ball of the sun was growing bigger, getting higher, glowing through the morning haze — smog, Annie supposed, but atmospheric all the same. Its tangerine flare played peekaboo with the unfinished high-rises as they drove off the Sea Link and headed down the peninsula proper, throwing strange shadows onto the lower residential buildings in front, burning in staccato slices like forest fires behind the concrete skeletons.

  The taxi soon veered away from the sea front and plunged into a built-up business area, the only traffic here a slew of other taxis in front of them and a single cow being cajoled the wrong way up the road by a wizened old man in an off-the-shoulder toga.

  ‘Jaslok Hospital,’ the taxi driver said, pointing to a modern building as they passed. ‘Because if you go there, it is better to jas lok, not go in!’

  Annie laughed and was rewarded with another of his shy, lovely smiles.

  ‘Is very good hospital,’ he added, ‘but cost you arm and a leg.’

  This man is definitely not going to dismember me, she thought, and anyway,
she was too old for the slave traders. They wouldn’t want her.

  Her fingers, cramped from gripping the door handle and her seatbelt, started to relax as they drove through a smarter residential area past the hospital, although there was still the odd cow being fed a bunch of grass, even in this part of town.

  ‘Is good luck,’ the driver said. ‘You pay to feed cow and is good luck for you, good luck for cow, and good luck for this mans who owns the cow.’

  Eventually, they emerged onto some sort of flyover, headed downhill, turned a wide corner towards the west and were disgorged onto a tree-lined parade parallel to a golden sandy beach.

  ‘Chowpatty,’ the driver said. ‘I take you to Wilson College.’ He stopped a couple of blocks further down outside a Victorian Gothic building not unlike Hogwarts. ‘You go to funny yoga?’

  ‘Laughing yoga, yes.’

  She started to open the door.

  ‘Oh, no, ma’am,’ the driver said. ‘I take you closer.’

  He executed a careful U-turn and parked beneath a tree by an opening in the low concrete wall that separated the footpath (there actually was one) from the beach.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ she asked.

  ‘Ma’am, I have never been to funny yoga, but I think that, yes, this is the right place.’

  Annie looked at the vast, all-but-empty beach and heard Daisy’s voice echoing in her head: ‘Don’t be pathetic, Mum.’

  Teenage girls seemed to master the art of withering to perfection. Daisy at twenty-two had yet to outgrow it.

  ‘You’ll stay right here?’ she asked the driver.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Right here.’ He held up a newspaper. ‘I catch up on all the briberies and corruptions.’

  Annie got out of the car but turned back to him. ‘I never even asked your name,’ she said.

  ‘Pinto, ma’am.’

  ‘Thank you for getting me here, Pinto. My name is Annie.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘I’m really not sure about this laughing yoga business, so if I can’t find it, I’ll be right back.’

  ‘I look out for you, ma’am.’

  CHOWPATTY BEACH, WITH THE SUN licking at its golden edges and the city behind her, was truly something else to behold, Annie thought, as she walked gingerly onto the sand.

  A group of young men were playing cricket closer to the water, which shimmered in the early morning light. A bedraggled family sat in front of a dumpster near the cricketers eating something they seemed to be cooking on the sand, as single runners criss-crossed the sand around them. In the opposite direction, a scraggly bunch of men were swinging their arms back and forth and bending to touch their toes. There did not appear to be anyone Heavenly among them, but perhaps Heavenly wasn’t there yet. Annie was early.

  She started to walk in their direction, sweating already, and not just because of the heat in the rising sun. The closer she got to the scraggly men, the more she could see of the beach that stretched towards the skyscrapers to the south.

  The city seemed to go on forever. She had driven half an hour through its canyons coming from the north, and now there appeared to be just as much of it if not more to the south and east. Twenty-four million people — and she was nothing more in this vast landscape than a tiny grain of sand.

  She glanced back towards the road.

  Apart from the old guys, the runners, the cricketers and the bedraggled family, there was no one there. Anything could happen to her and only Valren would know where she was. And Pinto. Two men about whom she knew nothing except they were gifted with lovely smiles.

  A shiver ran up her sweaty spine. Here she was on a vast Mumbai city beach all on her own in the early hours of the morning because a waiter at her hotel had told her to. So what if he had the sort of earnestness that made her want to adopt him and had talked of almost being a priest?

  She hadn’t told Hugh where she was going or anyone else at the hotel. Well, there was the parking valet yesterday, but would he remember? Was he even working today if she never came back and the police had to find her?

  Maybe there was no laughing yoga. Maybe Valren was part of a gang and he was hiding in the shadows getting ready to pounce on her, rob her and leave her for dead. Lives were worth nothing in India, after all. Everyone knew that. How could she have been so stupid?

  Just then, she heard clapping. She spun around to see a kaleidoscope of colour streaming out from beneath the leafy trees back beside the road; a collection of women in bright saris and tunics, and men in colourful, casual summer clothes.

  A woman in front, dressed in a lime-green tunic and matching trousers with a turquoise scarf slung over both shoulders, was leading the troupe across the sand, clapping vigorously and chanting ‘Ha ha ha! He he he!’

  They looked like a gang, but not of the pouncing variety. The woman looked like a Heavenly, and they looked like students of a laughing yoga school.

  Annie peered back into the trees from whence they had emerged. She must have walked right past them. And now, standing there, looking at her and pointing at the chanting clappers, was Pinto. He wasn’t going to rob her and kill her. She had to stop thinking the worst of everyone. Pinto was going to look out for her, just like he said. She was right to trust him. Her instincts were good — it was just a long time since she had put them to the test to quite this degree. If ever.

  Chapter Eight

  Annie abandoned the old men swinging their arms, walked away from the skyscrapers yawning into the neverland beyond, and headed towards the colourful clappers.

  As she neared them, a plump woman in a bright-pink sari spotted her and stopped clapping to beckon her forwards.

  ‘Ha ha ha, he he he,’ she said, pulling Annie into the loose circle they had formed around the lime-green-and-turquoise-clad woman.

  ‘Ha ha ha, he he he. Ha ha ha, he he he.’ Her friend in pink nudged her to join in, and, even though she felt silly, she did, albeit quietly.

  The supposed Heavenly could have been sixty or eighty or even ninety, Annie thought. She had that same ageless smoothness that she’d seen in the woman in silver the day before. Her body was small and lean, her hair long and dark grey with streaks of lighter grey, caught up in a loose bun at the nape of her neck. Her soft unlined face shone with pleasure as she stretched her mouth into the laughing chant and clapped.

  She walked slowly around the inside of the circle peering into each face, stopping for a fraction longer to look at Annie. It was like having a bright torch shine on her — she wanted to turn away, but at the same time she craved the light.

  Heavenly’s eyes seemed to dance with laughter all on their own. Annie had never seen such eyes. They were like tiny little circuses.

  Finally, Heavenly stopped her chanting, moved back into the centre of the circle, lifted both arms high in the air and dropped them suddenly to her sides with a loud exhale. She did the same thing again, and again.

  Everyone in the group followed suit, then broke into a round of applause as Heavenly bowed, then called to Annie.

  ‘I think you must be Mrs Hugh Jordan,’ she said. ‘Welcome to our School of Laughing Yoga.’

  ‘Welcome, welcome, welcome,’ the group echoed. ‘And welcome some more,’ someone added.

  Heavenly walked back towards Annie and took her hand, holding it in both of hers as though they were best friends and had been forever. ‘I am Heavenly Hirani,’ she said.

  Annie thought of her mother, the softness of that hand, a hand that had held hers so many times over so many years, a hand that had stroked her fevered brow, or her cheek, or gently flicked her hair away from her face. A hand she would never feel again.

  Perhaps there was something about the skin on the palms of kind old women everywhere that felt the same. The muscles in her body tensed as she battled to contain herself. Here she was at forty-nine wanting her mother! But if Heavenly noticed her struggle to stay composed, she didn’t let it show.

  ‘Let me explain what we will be d
oing this morning,’ she said. ‘I want you to stand in the circle between Kamalijit and Shruti, over there.’ She let go of Annie to point at two plump middle-aged, almost identical, women standing nearby.

  Kamalijit wore a gold sari, Shruti a purple floral one. They both waved, their grins stretching from ear to ear beneath identical spectacles, red dots in the centre of their foreheads.

  ‘To begin with we will do some regular exercises,’ Heavenly continued. ‘All you need to do is follow what I do. This is just simple yoga, to move the body, to get the juices flowing, hey? Not for us the difficult poses, not for us the no-pain-no-gain, OK? Because to be truly happy you do not need to be a pretzel, you just need to walk without creaking. Am I right, everyone?’

  ‘You are right, you are right, you are right,’ they chanted, a titter running around the circle.

  Heavenly turned back to Annie.

  ‘After this simple yoga, we will do our laughing exercises. Do not worry, I will not leave you to do those on your own, either; I will take you through, step by step, little by little, as well.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Annie, ‘although I’m not sure that —’

  Heavenly grabbed her hand again and squeezed it with a ferocity that belied her age and size.

  ‘You do not need to worry about being sure right now,’ she said. ‘You need to laugh, that is all. Just laugh. We will help you. Now, Mrs Hugh Jordan, go and stand between these lovely ladies.’

  ‘Actually, it’s Annie,’ she said. ‘My name.’

  ‘And a beautiful name, too,’ Heavenly agreed. ‘Now move. First we start with cheerfulness exercise. How are you, how are you, how are you?’ she chanted to her merry gang of followers.

  ‘Very well, very well, very well!’ the group chanted back.