Chapter 5: Sunaina

Sunaina teaches yoga the way some people pray — with complete conviction and zero apology.

She is: thirty-four, originally from Rishikesh (which she mentions exactly once and never again, as if the mention itself is sufficient credential), tall in the way that yoga teachers are tall (not necessarily in height but in presence — the presence that comes from a spine that has been trained to elongate, from shoulders that have been taught to drop, from a neck that carries a head the way a temple carries a dome: effortlessly, inevitably). Her voice is the kind of voice that enters your nervous system before it enters your ears — low, steady, the frequency of a singing bowl, the frequency that tells your amygdala: nothing is threatening you right now, you can put down the weapons.

I need that voice. I need it the way a person with insomnia needs darkness — desperately, specifically, with the awareness that the thing I need is also the thing I've been avoiding. Because Sunaina's voice says "breathe" and my body says "I've been breathing for fifty years" and Sunaina's voice says "no, you haven't — you've been surviving, which is not the same thing" and my body knows: she's right.

This is my fourth week at Seaside Fitness. The yoga class meets every day at 6 PM in Studio A, which is smaller than Studio B (where Zumba happens) and smells different — not of disinfectant and sweat but of agarbatti and something I can't identify, something herbal, something that Sunaina brings in a small brass pot and lights before every class. The smoke curls upward in thin grey ribbons, finding the ceiling, finding the corners, finding the parts of the room that need: softening.

"Today," Sunaina says, sitting cross-legged at the front of the room with the stillness of a person who has made peace with stillness, "we're working on hip openers. And before you groan" — she pauses, because three people have already groaned, the groaning being the universal response to hip openers, which are: the exercises that your body resists with the ferocity of a cat resisting a bath — "before you groan, remember this. Your hips store everything. Every argument you didn't finish. Every emotion you swallowed instead of expressing. Every time you said 'theek hai' when it wasn't theek. Your hips are: filing cabinets. And today, we're cleaning out the files."

I look at Vandana, who mouths "told you she's incredible." I look at Jaya, who is already in position, her face arranged in the expression of someone who has cleaned out many files and is prepared to clean out more.

The class begins. Sunaina moves us through warm-up — cat-cow, the spinal undulation that makes you feel simultaneously like a sixty-year-old woman and a five-year-old child, the contradiction being: the point, because yoga is about holding contradictions in your body the way you hold them in your life. Then: pigeon pose.

Pigeon pose is: the pose where your hip flexor meets its maker. You bring one knee forward, extend the other leg back, and lower your torso toward the floor, and what happens next is: everything. Everything that your hips have been storing — every argument, every swallowed emotion, every "theek hai" — rises to the surface like gas bubbles in a heating pot, and you either release it or you: break.

I release it.

I don't mean to cry. I haven't cried since the third week in Mumbai, when I'd unpacked the last box from Lucknow and found Karan's baby shoes — tiny white shoes with blue straps, the shoes he'd worn on his first steps, the steps that had happened in the Lucknow flat when he was eleven months old and Harsh had been at work and I'd been the only witness, the only person who saw Karan Khanna take his first steps across a marble floor toward a woman who was: his entire world.

Those shoes had broken me. Temporarily — I'd cried for twenty minutes, then made dal, then watched two episodes of Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, and the combination of tears, turmeric, and laugh tracks had produced: recovery. Temporary recovery. The kind that gets you through the night.

But pigeon pose breaks me differently. This is not the sudden break of discovery (finding baby shoes). This is the slow break of release — the release that your body performs when your body has been given permission to put down what it's been carrying. And what my body has been carrying is: twenty-seven years of "theek hai."

Theek hai, Harsh, we'll move to Lucknow even though my career is in Mumbai.

Theek hai, Harsh, I'll learn to make your mother's dal the way she makes it.

Theek hai, Harsh, we don't need to talk about what happened at that party.

Theek hai, Harsh. Theek hai. Theek hai. Theek hai.

The tears come silently, which is the way they come in yoga — silently, because the room is quiet and the crying is private even though it's happening in public, and the privacy-in-public being: one of yoga's gifts, because everyone is in their own pose, their own pain, their own pigeon, and nobody is watching you except Sunaina, who sees everything.

She walks to me. I feel her presence before I feel her hands — the presence that good yoga teachers have, the presence that says: I am here, I see you, I am not going to fix you because you are not broken, I am going to hold space for you, which is a phrase I used to find: ridiculous (hold space? What does that even mean? Space holds itself) but which I now understand is: the most generous thing one human can do for another. To be present without agenda. To witness without judgement.

Her hands touch my lower back. The touch is: warm, steady, the pressure exactly right — not too firm (which would say: I'm trying to fix you) and not too light (which would say: I'm afraid to touch you). The pressure that says: you are here. Your body is here. Whatever you're feeling is: allowed.

"Bas," she whispers. Just that. One word. Enough. Or: just this. Or: it's okay. The word that means all of those things and none of those things, the word that your mother says when you're crying as a child and she doesn't know why you're crying but she knows that the why doesn't matter, what matters is: the holding.

I breathe. The breathing that Sunaina has been teaching me — deep, diaphragmatic, the breathing that fills your belly before it fills your lungs, the breathing that humans are born doing and then unlearn when they learn to: hold in, suck up, be strong, don't cry, theek hai.

The class continues. We move through the hip-opening sequence — pigeon, lizard, happy baby (the pose where you lie on your back holding your feet like an infant, the pose that is: undignified and perfect). By the end, my hips feel: open. Not painlessly — the opening of things that have been closed for decades is never painless — but open. The file cabinets have been: emptied. Or at least: opened. The files are still there. But the cabinets are no longer locked.

After class, Sunaina catches me at the door.

"First time?" she asks.

"First time what?"

"First time crying in pigeon."

"Is it that obvious?"

"It happens to everyone. Usually around week three or four. The body starts trusting the practice, and when the body trusts, the body releases." She looks at me with eyes that are: dark, deep, the kind of eyes that have seen many women cry in pigeon pose and have never made any of them feel: ashamed. "You've been carrying a lot."

"Is that also obvious?"

"Your shoulders. They're up here." She touches her own ears. "They should be here." She drops her hands to a neutral position. "Shoulders tell the whole story. Yours say: I've been protecting myself for a very long time."

I want to say something clever. Something that demonstrates that I'm fine, that the crying was an anomaly, that I am: handling things. But instead I say: "Twenty-seven years."

She nods. No surprise. No pity. Just: acknowledgement. The acknowledgement that comes from a woman who has spent her career watching bodies tell stories that mouths won't.

"Come tomorrow," she says. "Same time. We'll work on shoulders."

"I'll be here."

"Good." She pauses. "And Mar?"

"Yes?"

"The tears are not weakness. The tears are: the practice working."

I walk out of Seaside Fitness into the Mumbai evening. The air is warm and salt-tinged. Carter Road is busy with evening walkers — couples, families, solo joggers, the entire spectrum of human life passing by at varying speeds. A chaiwala has set up his cart near the promenade. The smell of boiling chai — cardamom, ginger, the particular sweetness of condensed milk that some chaiwalas use and that purists despise but that tastes like: childhood, like Lucknow mornings, like the before-time — reaches me.

I buy a cup. Fifteen rupees. The chai burns my tongue in the specific way that street chai does — too hot, too sweet, too much ginger, perfect. I stand on Carter Road drinking fifteen-rupee chai with mascara tracks on my cheeks and hip flexors that feel like they've been: reborn.

The sun is setting over the Arabian Sea. The colours are: excessive, the way Mumbai sunsets always are — orange bleeding into pink bleeding into purple, the colours having no restraint, no moderation, the colours being: everything, all at once, the way this city is everything, all at once.

I finish the chai. I throw the paper cup in the bin. I walk home.

Tomorrow, we work on shoulders.