Yoga Bitch

by Suzanne Morrison

  Class is going to suck today. I can just feel it.

  April 24

  Jessica and I were hanging out on the veranda last night, still talking about Indra and Lou, when a man in an expensive-looking business suit showed up from behind the house. He loitered around the temple, looking down at the pool, poking around the grounds, until Jessica and I asked him what he was doing. Turns out he’s Su’s uncle, in town from Jakarta. He owns the property we’re on.

  He was chubby and sweating in his dark suit. The rectangular lenses of his glasses were smudged.

  “You’re here to do yoga, right?” he said, smiling, resting one foot on our bottom step, a hand in his pocket. He spoke with an Australian accent. “You westerners love yoga.”

  Jessica nodded and I said, “Sometimes.”

  Jessica scowled at me. “Suzanne! Stop that. You’re on the path.”

  “I think I’m sitting on the path,” I said. I looked at Su’s uncle. “I need a break from yoga.”

  He laughed. “When I needed a break from the hocus-pocus of Bali, I moved to Jakarta.” He gestured at Jessica’s blue mat, laid out across the tiled veranda. “What you do is athletic, at least, so it’s good for your body. There’s a there there. But we Balinese, our yoga is just bells and incense and offerings to spirits,” he said. “We’re like children, playing an imaginary game. Though it is good for the economy—so long as you love the Balinese for our superstitions, we will all eat! But some of us have moved on.”

  Jessica gave me a look like this conversation was my fault. But I wanted to know what he meant by that. I like the bells and incense. I like the feeling of playacting. I could do that all day, just don’t talk to me about God, or money. I can’t take it anymore. So I asked him what he meant, and next thing, Su’s uncle is giving us a lecture on the cyclical nature of humankind. When she heard the word cycle, Jessica perked right up. But I don’t think he gave her what she wanted.

  He said that human desire is cyclical. He drew a clock in the air with his finger and pointed to the top of the circle, where the 12 would be on a clock. “This is the beginning of a civilized people,” he said, slowly moving his finger past one o’clock and two o’clock, and so on. “As you move forward, you accumulate comforts. You struggle for possessions and power and money and land. Your people have been there already.” He landed on the 6. “Now you are here, moving up and away from the material world.” He moved his hand clockwise toward the 12. “You have everything you could possibly ever need, and you have it because you’ve been taking it from the rest of us for hundreds of years. And you are unhappy still!”

  He pointed to one o’clock. “This is where the rest of us are. We want what you have, and we have the one thing you want.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “God,” he said. “We have God, but we would rather have your big cars and houses and your women who will make lots of money while I stay at home!” He laughed.

  Jessica rolled her eyes at me. “I’m going upstairs,” she said.

  “You don’t want to hear more about the cycle?”

  She snorted in reply. Su’s uncle left shortly after that, off to poke around Baerbel and Marcy’s place.

  GOD. SOMETIMES I think there might be a god out there, and that every once in a while he tunes in to see what we’re up to, and have a good laugh at how we like to dress him up in various costumes. Robes, thorny crowns, yarmulkes and curls, saris and butt-hugging yoga pants. Male, female, a genderless reincarnation factory; a Mother Earth or a withholding Father Christmas. I would think it would amuse the hell out of him. That we’re all idolaters, worshiping figments of our own creation who bear no resemblance to him.

  Maybe he’s sitting in some alternate dimension somewhere, saying, “Shit, I didn’t even create the world! I was just cooking my dinner, not paying attention to the heat, and suddenly there was this big bang and a few hours later, a bunch of dinosaurs …”

  April 25

  Indra was very sweet to me today, checking in throughout class, calling me Suzanne M. instead of Suzie. But then Lou asked me to demonstrate my Wheel for the class so that he could talk about how to teach backbends. So I did, and afterwards SuZen said that it looked as if my spine was made out of rubber. Which was very nice of her to say, really.

  But Indra swiftly jumped in to say that while I have a flexible spine, it’s by no means extraordinarily flexible. There’s really nothing special about my spine.

  Which is true, but Jesus! I wouldn’t have been surprised if Indra had followed that up with “And also, Suzanne has fat thighs and ugly hair.”

  I kind of hate her today.

  She showed us her Wheel just for good measure, and it was breathtaking. The woman has nothing to prove. She is superior to us all. So why must she remind me so frequently?

  Every time Lou adjusts my hips in class, I think of Indra attending this very same retreat, like me, and Lou’s wife where Indra is now. I wonder if Lou adjusted Indra’s hips with his wife looking on, or if he knew his intentions weren’t yogic and left Indra alone. I wonder if Indra dreamed of Lou at night, and if in her dreams he would occasionally show up with his nose grown into a long elephant trunk, like Ganesha, and if that long trunk would find its way under her sarong from time to time. Not that I’ve had a dream like that. I mean—not yet, but given my propensity for filthy-mindedness, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

  IT’S PRETTY FREAKING hard to think about the yoga class I have to teach when there are fireworks exploding every five minutes.

  Next week is Nyepi, the Balinese New Year, and the fireworks are a part of the preparation. I think they’re supposed to scare bad spirits away or something.

  It’s certainly working on our Mop Ghost. So that’s good.

  The Balinese calendar is ridiculously complicated, but according to Jessica, the year renews itself approximately every nine or ten months. One year is about the length of the gestation of a human baby. Jessica delivered an exultant vagina monologue in response to this piece of information. The wisdom of the Ancient Yoni!

  All over the village and in town there are monsters in various stages of production. These are the ooga-oogas. I love that name so much, I want to find every opportunity to say it. Ooga-ooga. Some of these monsters are enormous, at least fifteen feet tall, and trapped in bamboo scaffolding the men climb over to build their chicken-wire heads, or to place huge strips of papier-mâché over their faces.

  The ooga-oogas are supposed to be scary enough to frighten away bad spirits camping out on the island. They are the main attraction on New Year’s. At one time, after they paraded the ooga-oogas through town, they burned them in the cemetery. Now, Lou said, they parade them through town and then sell them to German tourists.

  April 26

  We are so obnoxious in anatomy. SuZen has completely lost control of us. We pass notes and talk out of turn. We crack up and tickle each other when we’re supposed to be feeling our partner’s iliopsoas and adductors.

  We’re engaging in just the sort of behavior that would have had my mother shrieking from the front seat of the car, “I don’t want to police you! Don’t make me be a policewoman!”

  In class this morning, Jessica kicked me in the occipital while I spotted her in handstand. We both cried. I blame Indra.

  Everything Indra does bugs me now. I mean, I love her, I guess, but I’m sick of being told what to do. I’m sick of her calling me Sister Suzanne. I’m sick of clinging to her apron strings. It’s time to cut the freakin’ cord, already.

  Later

  Solipsism is boring.

  I am boring.

  My navel is boring.

  Today I wonder: Is this all just ritualized narcissism dolled up to look like a system of virtues, an inner science, a path to God?

  Also, would Jessica like to step out into the night in search of dessert?

  She would!

  That is the opposite of boring.

  April 27

  Baerbel an
d I just had a great laugh about her unabridged Upanishads.

  Wow, that sounds so lame, doesn’t it?

  Well, anyway, we were talking about how Baerbel showed Indra a lesson in the Upanishads about how to woo a woman, and Indra was not amused. The lesson goes something like this:

  Step one: Tell the woman you want to go to bed with her. If she says yes, then go to! If she says no, proceed to step two.

  Step two: Bring the woman presents. If she now says yes, then go to! If she says no, proceed to step three.

  Step three: Bring her a big stick. Beat her with this stick until she says yes, and then, go to!

  Ah, religion. It’s the greatest.

  Baerbel says that Indra didn’t even want to talk about this lesson. She said that Indra seemed uncomfortable and unwilling to consider that there might be something wrong in the Upanishads.

  I love it. Makes me think of Lot’s wife—both before she’s turned into a pillar of salt, when Lot offers up his daughters to the angel-raping men of Sodom and Gomorrah, and after her salt-self has commingled with the sands, when her daughters get Lot drunk and have sex with him. As Baerbel put it, it’s good to have these stories in our holy books, to remind us that they were written by humans. Filthy-minded, morally ambiguous humans.

  Evening

  Baerbel and I went out for lunch, and she forced me to eat some green leaves and rice before ordering dessert. I told her that I was making up for lost time. She told me I was practicing jalayoga, which is union with food.

  I told her that jalayoga sounded very romantic, and that she was more than welcome to share my killer brownie with me. She thanked me and we asked for another spoon.

  April 29

  Nyepi, the Balinese New Year

  We’ll be let out of class early today in order to prepare for the holiday. We have tomorrow off. The entire island has the day off, in fact, because after the New Year’s celebration tonight, the island, by custom, becomes as still and silent as a ghost town. Which means that you can’t make any loud noises or use any electricity, and you can’t leave your house all day. Apparently you will be fined if you’re caught out of your house or turning your lights on.

  It’s all part of the plan. Tonight the parade will scare all the bad spirits off the island. The ooga-oogas are sort of like Bali’s nuclear weapons in their ongoing war against the spirits—the ooga-oogas will rid the island of every spirit, from the small, pesky ones who inhabit blenders and animate mops, to the cruel, angry devils who break our minds and sicken our loved ones, who engender violence and worry and heartache.

  The ooga-oogas must be noisy and awful-looking, capable of inspiring such terror that the spirits will flee the island en masse so as not to piss themselves from fright. At midnight, the lights must be out and everyone at home, and then you huddle down for twenty-four hours so that the spirits think that everybody has deserted the island. If there’s nobody here, then there’s no point in possessing our “abandoned” blenders and mops, so the spirits don’t come back until they start to figure out that they’ve been duped.

  I love it. Tricking the tricksters!

  After Midnight

  I’m still digesting the night, both literally and figuratively.

  The parade of ooga-oogas wasn’t like a parade at home, where people line the streets and are held to the curb by barriers and policemen on horseback. In my American imagination, the ooga-oogas were on floats, maybe with Junior Miss Ubud waving at us in her offering crown of gold-boxed chicken and fruit. But such a sterile, safe parade is not for the Balinese. By the time the moon rose in the sky, downtown Ubud looked like someone had dropped a twelve-ton bag of rats in the center of it. People swarmed the shadowy streets, standing around as if to block the parade from passing through, perching on fenceposts and ledges: thousands of Balinese people and the tourists who love them.

  Jessica and I pushed our way through the crowd until we found a relatively empty spot in the middle of the street. Soon, through the half-lit gloom at the end of the road we could make out the first collection of gamelan musicians approaching.

  Each ooga-ooga was preceded by its very own gamelan marching band. The musicians were all male, in matching shirts of orange, red, or blue; they almost looked like soccer jerseys, as if eventually they would be setting aside their instruments to play a match. The sound was deafening. These pieces of music weren’t the whimsical, transcendent sounds we often hear floating out of the wantilan in the evening. They were battle sounds, armor rattling, steel being sharpened. I was surprised to feel the music throbbing anxiously in my chest; I was nervous and wanted to run away from it.

  But when the first ooga-oogas came marching into view, I relaxed. They were adorable. Baby monsters built into bamboo palanquins carried by young boys in blue jerseys, each with a swath of black fabric tied around his forehead. The scariest of the boys’ monsters looked like a school project, papier-mâché painted a matte emerald green with black scales drawn on, its head like Puff the Magic Dragon, but with giant teardrops of tomato-red blood dribbling down its neck.

  We turned to watch the boys continue down the street, until an explosion of fireworks behind us jolted us to attention. The little boys were done. Now it was the men’s turn.

  At the end of the street, a creature seemed to be called up from the shadows by the din of its own orchestra. Enormous, at least fifteen feet tall, with the body of a dog and the face of Rangda, a creature with a tongue of fire and black thatch hair. Its front legs moved as if to swipe the crowd with its razor claws. Its jaws opened and closed, each time setting off an explosion of firecrackers. It sat atop a giant bamboo grid, in which at least a dozen men in orange jerseys stood, acting as the monster’s many-legged throne. They gave the monster its dance, running it into the crowd, dipping and bowing as a group to make the monster do the same.

  The parade became interactive. The monsters and the men in their grids moved so quickly, in a sweeping motion, that they were upon us before we realized that we needed to run. They shuddered, pitching forward suddenly only to halt, shake, and twitch into their next thrust onward. I’m still not sure what would have happened if we had failed to get out of the way. It seemed certain that we would be trampled, and so we ran.

  After that first rush of adrenaline, I caught my breath and looked at Jessica. “Forget the Macy’s Day Parade,” I said. “This is the Macy’s Day Parade on acid.”

  The final monster loomed from halfway down the street, a female form rising above the one-story buildings from the largest grid full of men. She swept through the crowd, painted red, her shapely legs squatting in a menacing sort of Horse pose, her breasts pointing straight ahead between her flying arms, the blood-red nipples standing out like bullets. Her hair was orange straw and red rope, and it flew around her face as she dipped and swerved and shuddered toward us like a bloodsucking Raggedy Ann doll. She pinched her black talons together in sharp, bloody mudras. This one would scare the worst of the spirits away.

  She was mesmerizing, perched atop her grid, dipping and running and swooping forward, threatening to trample anyone who failed to get out of her way. Her long hair swept the street as if to lash the faces in the crowd with knotted red ropes that looked like barbed wire. Beneath her, her minions sweated and wailed as her hair flew about her face, as she smiled through her fangs. Her orchestra played for her, and the men made her dance.

  In the space of a breath, before she was on top of us, I thought of what I was going home to. I noticed how that world has fallen away from me, but now seems to be creeping in, the way the spirits must creep back to the island when they start to notice they’ve been duped, that nothing has really changed. But then the monster’s hair whipped across our faces and there was no more time for thought. So we ran, at first laughing as we ran, but when we looked back she was on our heels, so we ran faster.

  We ran until we had lost the parade and recovered our senses. We slowed as we approached the Bali Buddha and turned to look at each other, gig
gling sheepishly. We were kids so caught up in a scary game we’d forgotten it wasn’t real.

  Jess and I had decided to celebrate New Year’s on our own, at the Bali Buddha, over wine and desserts. But when we got there I looked up and saw Jason and Lara leaning over the balcony, trying to yell something down at us, but they were laughing so hard they couldn’t speak.

  When we stepped onto the balcony, Jason threw his arms around us. “You looked terrified, like you were being chased by monsters, not puppets!” he said. “Silly girls.”

  Jessica and I were so busy making excuses for ourselves that it took me a minute to look around and notice that Jason was leading us toward a round table overflowing with dessert plates, shot glasses, and candy wrappers. Littered with beer cans and bottles of wine both empty and full. And seated around this table were all of our yogamates: Baerbel offering a hunk of chocolate cake to Marcy, Marcy pouring herself a fresh glass of red wine; Lara gesturing to the waiter to pass round the Sambuca shots he had brought on his tray; Jason borrowing said waiter’s lighter in order to set each shot on fire.

  My yogamates were going to have to do a lot of karma yoga to make up for this night.

  I don’t normally like doing shots, but tonight I drank sugary liqueurs with my yogamates as if to drain an ocean’s worth with a thimble. We toasted everything we could think of to toast, but mainly we drank to fuel the gossip. Somehow we started referring to each other as Brother Jason and Sister Jessica, as in, “Brother Jason, will you please light my shot on fire?” Or “Sister Marcy, will you please elaborate on your theory that Indra has secret conversations with crystals, and that they tell her she’s enlightened?”

  Jason complained that it’s hard for him to concentrate in anatomy class when SuZen asks Indra to take her clothes off. We did a shot to ease his pain, and then another after dissecting her conversation with Jessica about paying for anatomy class, and another when we fell into hysterics over how horrible anatomy class is, and then someone got going about how Indra said that we, like, always have to keep our hips facing forward like headlights in Pigeon pose, and how she seriously doesn’t understand that when she criticizes us for not having our hips facing forward like headlights, she’s a serious hypocrite, because in Pigeon pose her hips do not face forward like headlights and it’s just so annoying and frustrating and …