Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga

  The whole notion of being herself, of sitting at a table on her own, was just too unfamiliar — another drop, in fact, in a sea of unfamiliarity.

  ‘Mrs Hugh Jordan!’ She looked up to see Valren. ‘I am very happy to see you here. Did you go to Heavenly Hirani’s School of Laughing Yoga?’

  ‘Thank you, Valren, I did.’

  ‘How are you, how are you, how are you?’

  ‘Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!’

  They both laughed.

  ‘You were absolutely right,’ she conceded. ‘It was just what I needed. In fact, it really was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.’

  ‘I can tell this from the looking of you, ma’am.’

  He was so genuinely pleased with himself that she felt a sudden urge to write to his aunt in Goa that she should be very proud of him, this inspirational young man, despite him turning his back on the priesthood.

  Instead she glanced at the menu. ‘I think I’ll branch out and have an egg-white omelette today.’

  ‘Oh, but surely you would like to try some Indian food after your laughing yoga?’ Valren said. ‘A dhosa perhaps: I can prepare and bring it for you straight away.’

  ‘Thanks, Valren, but I’m not even sure what a dhosa is.’

  ‘Excellent! This is usually a breakfast food, but for tourists they can eat it anytime. I will bring it to you, and then you can not only find out what it is, but you can like it very much.’

  And with that he walked quickly away, a man with a mission.

  Annie didn’t want a dhosa, whatever it was, but his enthusiasm was, if not infectious, exactly, then at least impossible to deflate.

  Besides, she needed to toughen up. It was hardly a challenge to be sitting in a five-star hotel eating something she hadn’t chosen when she had already caught a cab into the middle of Mumbai and been to laughing yoga with a group of local strangers on a city beach. A week earlier she had not even known that Mumbai was on a coast, let alone that it had beaches where something called laughing yoga might be practised.

  She smiled to herself, thinking of the earlobe-tugging apology laugh. ‘I’m sorry, he he he. I’m sorry, he he he.’

  Just remembering made her feel like she was standing in the sunshine all over again.

  Chapter Ten

  The dhosa turned out to be a stiff sort of a pancake, half of which stood up on the plate like a starched napkin, with a spicy potato mixture in the middle and a collection of chutneys to one side, along with a bowl of a bright-yellow, hot soup.

  A club-sandwich-hold-the-salad it was not, but Valren was so delighted to be introducing her to the delights of the Indian palate that she didn’t feel she could send it away. Knowing that he might be collecting her plate, she didn’t feel as though she could leave it intact either.

  Once he had stopped beaming at her and gone to take someone else’s order, she cut off the tiniest bit of pancake and gingerly lifted it to her mouth.

  It wasn’t fiery hot, which was her fear, but it did have a buttery spiciness that was actually very pleasant. She cut off a bigger bit of the pancake, and dipped it into the least scary-looking chutney, a chunky white one, which turned out to have a punchy coconut flavour.

  The spiciness of the potato stopped just short of being sweet, and the crunch of the pancake complemented the soft mash of the filling.

  She tried dipping another bite into the second chutney, which was mango, and the third one, which was a tangy sort of lime pesto. The bright-yellow soup tasted good, too, but she wasn’t sure what to do with it, so dipped another few mouthfuls of the pancake in it, then ate the rest with a spoon. When Valren came back to clear the table she had all but licked the platter clean. The look on his face was worth the carbs.

  When Valren brought her a cup of masala tea she suspected it came with an added white-sugar hit, to boot. The milky tea with cardamom, anise and cinnamon was not something she had even heard of, let alone contemplated before, but its spicy sweetness promised to become quite addictive.

  As she drank it, she picked up the newspaper again and idly turned the pages, glossing over stories of striking retailers and feuding brothers, but stopping at a headline at the bottom of page five. YOUNG LIFE RUINED BY BANDRA ACID ATTACK the strap read. Below this was a story about a young nursing graduate from Delhi who had arrived at Bandra train station the day before to start her first-ever job at the navy base hospital in South Mumbai. As Preeti Rathi stepped off the train with the uncle who was escorting her, an unknown person threw acid in her face, Annie read, which she also swallowed, causing serious internal injuries as well as burns to her face, neck and arms. Preeti was now in an induced coma in the local hospital, breathing only with assistance.

  Acid attacks were so common in India, the story went on, that a recent law now recognised them as a separate crime punishable by a minimum sentence of fourteen years in prison. This law had changed as a result of general outrage over such violence against women, the paper said, acid victims being solely female, usually young, and, in Preeti’s case, very beautiful. Railway police were hopeful of nabbing the culprit, which Annie thought did not sound as though they were taking it terribly seriously. Preeti’s parents and sister were on their way from Delhi to the Mumbai hospital where she was in intensive care, her uncle too distraught to speak to the media.

  Annie folded the newspaper, a chill running up her spine.

  Laughing yoga aside, this was a very foreign country, and she must not forget that. Her heart ached for the young girl with the ruined life. At twenty-two, she was the same age as her own beautiful Daisy. The thought of her daughter’s face burned off by acid that cost less than a dollar a litre made Annie feel sick.

  She pushed the image out of her mind.

  LATER IN THE AFTERNOON she lolled about the pool, finishing her book, and finally commissioned a foot massage from Babu, the blind masseur, whom she had seen day after day crouched behind the pool boy’s counter, waiting patiently under an umbrella. She didn’t really like foot massages as a rule — or any sort of massage for that matter — but she’d seen Babu from her hotel window one day, tapping his way with his white cane out towards the pool, taking an errant left turn.

  Standing at the window she’d sucked in her breath, desperate that he not fall into the flowerbed or down the stairs beside the garden, but out of nowhere a security guard had appeared, taken him by the elbow, leading him to his perch. She’d liked that the hotel would employ a blind person, and that other people who worked there would look out for him. Then when she found out his name was the impossibly endearing Babu, she buckled and paid the small fee for a fifteen-minute foot rub.

  She reclined in the shade on a sun lounger, relaxing as she watched the tendons in the smooth near-black skin on Babu’s arms as they flexed when he rubbed frangipani cream into her legs.

  He kept his eyes closed, his head turned up and to the side, as though her feet were some sort of instrument he was playing, and his cue from the orchestra was coming somewhere in the distance up above them. She was due a pedicure, so it was just as well he couldn’t see her toes, she thought, as she all but drifted off to sleep.

  In the distance, she could hear the honking of Lands End’s crazy traffic outside the hotel.

  Closer, those pesky crows were making themselves known. The bass in the music playing at the outside bar was turned up a little high, but that didn’t annoy her as much as it normally would. She heard the espresso machine whoosh, and wondered if whoever had ordered a coffee knew about masala tea.

  WHEN HUGH CALLED LATER THAT EVENING to say he’d been caught up in meetings and would probably not get home before nine, she realised that she had been waiting to tell him about her day; it had been such a good one. Deflated, and certainly in no mood to eat on her own for the second time, she opened the potato chips that were in the minibar and which proved so delicious that she ate a second packet as well.

  Hugh got home closer to ten, hot and tired. His day had been hard, he said, and the traf
fic getting back to the hotel horrendous. A donkey had died on the other side of the railway lines and stopped traffic in both directions while the owner beat up the rickshaw driver who’d run into it even though he had only run into it after it had died.

  He couldn’t wait to get into the shower, he said, to wash the dust and dirt of the day off his skin.

  It was almost eleven by the time he slipped into bed next to her, his hair still damp, smelling of the hotel shower-wash, which reminded Annie of the baby soap she’d used on the children when they were little.

  ‘Do you want me to order you something from room service?’ she asked him, but tiredness trumped hunger. He kissed her and fell almost instantly asleep.

  He’d always had that ability. Get Hugh horizontal and he’d be out like a light, no matter if the TV was blaring, lights were blazing and two children were screaming their lungs out. It had irritated her, actually, always, but only because she envied him. Annie was more of a tosser and turner by nature, sometimes awake almost all night, only drifting off to sleep when the alarm was about to go off.

  She sat up in the vast bed with its crisply laundered sheets and turned the TV on. Bollywood movies were playing on nearly every channel, so she tried to watch one, but only half understood it. It seemed to be some sort of take on The Taming of the Shrew, but there were two shrews. It was worth watching for the dancing and the colours alone.

  Annie thought of Heavenly Hirani and the laughter on the beach.

  She had never been anywhere as frightening and foreign as India, but it wasn’t all gang rapes and acid attacks and sleeping husbands and thieving crows. There had been real happiness on that beach. Some of it, albeit briefly, hers.

  She set her alarm for six. She would go to laughing yoga again. Just thinking about it put her in a better mood.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Welcome, welcome, Mrs Hugh Jordan!’ Heavenly Hirani called from the shade of the banyan tree, where she and the school were waiting when Annie arrived the following morning.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ insisted Shruti, who gathered today’s pale-blue spotted sari up and moved over, almost squashing the little man next to her to make room for Annie.

  ‘You came back,’ Shruti said. ‘You like us too much?’

  ‘Just the right amount,’ Annie laughed. ‘Maybe a little more.’

  A very elderly woman in a gold sari — she couldn’t remember if she’d been there the day before or not — was looking at her as though she had never seen a white person before. Annie smiled, and the old woman’s wrinkled face collapsed into a smile of her own, but she turned away, shielding her eyes.

  ‘The last tourist lady who came to our school,’ said Shruti, ‘she was reading that book — you know, the one all the tourist ladies read. Pasta Ponder Hanky Panky.’ She laughed. ‘No, that is not it. What was it called, Priyanka? Italy, India and what was the other place?’

  ‘You mean Eat Pray Love,’ Priyanka answered, rolling her eyes. ‘She’s right. Every tourist lady who has come to laughing yoga is reading this book.’

  ‘Are you?’ Shruti asked Annie.

  As it happened, Annie had read the pasta bit years before, but had lost interest with the pondering bit, and not bothered even proceeding to the hanky panky. She’d been a voracious reader once upon a time, but that had fallen along the wayside with the tennis, the movie-going, the book club. She didn’t even keep in touch with her old work friends anymore. Her world had become so small. No wonder the holes in it felt so impossibly huge.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I have three children and seven grandchildren,’ said Shruti. ‘I do not have time to read a book let alone meditate and get a boyfriend.’ The other women giggled. ‘Besides, my husband would not like it very much if I did! But I do like Julia Roberts,’ she said. ‘Very pretty, you know, with nice big teeth.’

  ‘What about meditation?’ Annie asked. ‘Does anyone here meditate?’

  The women looked sheepishly from one to the other.

  ‘Whoever started the rumour that all Indian people are good at meditating got it wrong,’ said Malika, the youngest of the group, the flexible one Annie had noticed the day before. ‘Most of us are too busy thinking about what we are going to cook for our next meal to seek enlightenment.’

  ‘What about you, Heavenly?’ Annie asked, turning her attention to the teacher, who was sitting next to the very old woman, holding her gnarled hand. ‘Do you meditate?’

  ‘I tried it once or twice,’ Heavenly said, ‘but for me it is too boring.’

  Annie laughed.

  ‘Meditation is a practice to still the mind and promote relaxation,’ Heavenly said, ‘but in my experience most people’s minds are already stuck in the mud and their bodies are stuck right there with them. Better to move both, eh? Now, since we are talking about moving, are we ready to get started?’

  She stood up and started clapping her hands. ‘Ha ha ha, he he he! Ha ha ha, ho ho ho!’

  Heavenly’s morning yoga was more energetic than it had been the previous day. They did their stretches, then the leaning this way and that, then they held hands and stepped back as far as they could while still hanging onto the people on either side.

  Annie had Kamalijit, a vision in turquoise today, on one side, and a boy of about twelve on the other. He kept sneaking looks at her — she was clearly something of a novelty. He was wearing a red-and-blue-striped football shirt — but as with many of the people she had met so far his most striking feature was his smile.

  Stepping back as far as she could and feeling her arms all but being pulled out of her sockets, she turned to see him with his head thrown back, eyes closed, laughing already.

  ‘Are you ready, are you ready, are you ready?’ asked Heavenly from across the circle.

  ‘Yes, we are! Yes, we are! Yes, we are!’ they answered, and the school of laughing yoga ran forwards, still holding hands, now borne aloft, into the middle of the circle where all their bags were stacked. They hooted and hollered, then ran backwards out again, stretching the circle as far as it could go, then raced back in.

  ‘Beautiful and amazing!’ Heavenly crowed.

  ‘Beautiful and amazing!’ the group echoed.

  Beautiful and amazing isn’t the half of it, Annie thought, turning to share a smile with her young friend in the striped top.

  They repeated some of the laughing exercises from the day before, this time with the addition of the peeling-coconuts laugh. Annie had never peeled a coconut before, and couldn’t really imagine how it would be done, but the boy, Sandeep, did her the great favour of peeling her imaginary coconut for her, to save her any embarrassment.

  He was particularly good at the mobile-phone laugh, Annie told him, although Priyanka gave him a run for his money. Shruti, it was agreed, got top marks for her apology laugh because she had extra-large earlobes.

  At one stage Heavenly beckoned the elderly woman in the beautiful gold sari, who was still sitting underneath the banyan tree, to come and join them. She took a long, long time to cross the sand, then stood in the circle for a short while, letting go of her walking frame only once to attempt the peeling-coconut laugh, and in so doing laughing for real so hard that Annie feared for her health.

  After peeling less than one coconut, she turned and started the long, slow journey back to the shade, her bony shoulders shaking with laughter with every tiny step.

  Heavenly certainly had a knack for drawing people in. A slightly ragged father and son who just happened to be passing by on the beach joined them for a while; a sad-looking middle-aged man in suit pants and a shirt and tie drifted in to the circle, then quickly out again. A fat Labrador even flopped down beside the bags in the middle at one stage, panting and drooling as it looked from one laughing human to the next.

  People came and went on their own timetables. Heavenly certainly wasn’t a stickler on that front. As she had said, laughing yoga was for everybody.

  Except Pinto. He had been waiting
in front of the hotel for her at 6.15, her thousand rupees obviously right on the money after all.

  Today, he’d parked his car out of sight, perhaps worried that if he got any closer he could end up doing some unscheduled laughing himself.

  ‘You like this again, ma’am?’ he asked when she climbed back into the car to go back to the hotel.

  ‘Yes, Pinto, I like it a lot. You should try it.’

  ‘Oh, no, ma’am, not for me.’

  ‘You do not like yoga?’

  ‘I do not know, ma’am.’

  ‘You’ve never done it?’

  ‘We do not do so much this yoga where I come from, ma’am.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘Jammu and Kashmir, ma’am.’

  ‘Jammu and Kashmir?’

  ‘This is the name of the state where I am from, ma’am. Most peoples hear only of Kashmir, but this is a valley and Jammu is another part of it also with a city, and the peoples in Mumbai do not care about this anyway.’

  ‘People from Mumbai don’t like people from Jammu and Kashmir?’

  ‘Not so much, ma’am. And people from Jammu and Kashmir is the same.’

  ‘So what brought you here then, Pinto?’

  ‘I come here when I was twelve, ma’am.’

  ‘Twelve!’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. I come to Mumbai because I know that Bollywood is here and I want to be a famous actor.’

  ‘You came with your parents?’

  ‘No, ma’am. With myself. My mum she cries so much when I leave my village that I think she damages her brains.’

  ‘Oh, Pinto, I’m not surprised! Twelve is so young. You were just a little boy. However did you get here?’

  ‘On the bus and on the train, ma’am. It takes a long time from Jammu, from my village. Maybe three days.’