Hell-Bent (26 page)

As the first posture concludes, Esak sprints in. He brings only a single towel and wears only a modest pair of black shorts. The towel goes on the floor to serve as a mat. Naturally no water. His minimalism is more impressive because almost immediately his postures separate themselves. In a room of the best of the best, he is visibly stronger, visibly stiller, radiating amidst the radiating yogis. As the demonstration enters some of the more dramatic postures, Janis leans into me and points at Esak while he is balancing on one leg: “That is the master.” Then, “You think he comes to Riga to teach if I pay?”

By the ten-minute mark, Bikram is clearly lagging. Soon the lagging turns into lollygagging, then a dramatic collapse onto his back to sit out a few postures. When he returns from his rest, the mask of seriousness falls right off. Like many an underperforming student, he begins to act out. First joking into the headset, moaning about his back pain, then pulling out a bright red Coke bottle and swilling while others bend. Finally, chattering all the while, he gives up on the postures and scampers up to his throne, where he basks in the cold air vents that pump on his head. It’s behavior that is antithetical to everything he teaches. A friend comes over to me and says, “Uhhhh. Just so embarrassing. The man cannot stand not to be the center of attention for even a second.” The demonstration continues, and Bikram
eventually descends from the throne to join back in—but he has definitely moved from being a demonstrator in earnest to class clown.

The advanced series ends with a series of abdominal contractions collectively known as nauli. They are not actually postures, instead belonging to the class of hatha exercises known as kryias or purification rituals. In nauli, each band of the abdomen is isolated separately while the rest are relaxed, churning the stomach, creating an oddly hypnotic pattern not unlike a sidewise version of a bellydancer’s ripples.

To perform nauli properly, you must be able to variably relax and contract muscles that are typically either interconnected or under involuntary control. It is an example of the mind controlling body at its best, right up there with reversing persistalsis and slowing the heart rate. It is also not taught in the modern Bikram studio, largely because nobody really knows how to do it. As we approach nauli, Emmy asks the advanced practitioners if anyone is capable. “Come on, who has a good nauli? Esak?” Several people attempt it, some approximating the motion, but nothing even verging on the impressive. In response, Emmy clucks a few times and summons Bikram. “All right. You’ve had your fun. Now, get up and show them nauli,” she prods. “How else will they know what it looks like?” But Bikram is dead to the world, long since collapsed and on his back. He waves her off several times without rising. Too exhausted even to think of a quip. But Emmy continues pushing, and the room begins cheering, so he finally pushes himself upright and wobbles to the center.

Bikram takes a moment to gather himself together, places both hands firmly on his pelvis, and suddenly his abdomen disappears. His gut has contracted to a single braid. The rest of his torso is sucked in so tightly, it looks like it has been shrink-wrapped. It is an eerie and ugly position, completely unnatural, nothing you would ever see in a gym class, nothing you could imagine human flesh doing without CGI. It is everything that hatha yoga represented, as it emerged from the jungle, every mystery that Bikram as yoga master should possess.

He churns the braid several times. The room explodes in applause. His face is a contortion of exhaustion and concentration, and when he exhales he stumbles directly toward the door, headband bobbing. Halfway there,
his knees give out, and a loyal aide rushes to his side to prop him up. Together they walk to the fresh air outside. Emmy calls after him, “What? You can’t stay in here and just breathe with us? Such a hurry.”

With his exit, the room falls into silence as we watch the rest of the demonstrators lie in final breathing for a few long moments. Then we are told we can exit. As we walk out of the tent, it’s so jarring that I almost miss him. There is Bikram lying down in the cold, right along the side of the tent. The man who disappears immediately into seclusion after every lecture, who acknowledges vulnerability exactly never, has made it a total of ten feet before collapsing. He lies there not even on a towel, totally gassed from his advanced class, eyes closed, brown face a limp pudding, pale fingers by his side taking short quick breaths. One of his aides is crouched next to him, telling him—the great master of prana—to “just breathe.” Streams of his students walk by their guru without noticing him, gossiping, chatting, discussing food options. I wonder whether this means the night lecture will be canceled.

Two hours later, Bikram bounds into the lecture tent reborn. He is wearing all white, topped with a white leather cap. “Operation successful!” He crows, “The patient dead! Doctor very happy. Paid by Blue Cross!” He holds both hands up like Nixon’s victory salute. “Today’s class was very hard for me. I think I kill myself very well. … I also must thank Esak—he gave me the most wonderful massage after class. Without him, who knows, maybe I won’t be here.” We roar with approval. The image of the guru who has obviously not been practicing his own yoga, of the child acting out moronically to hide his lack of abilities is gone. I catch Esak peering in the doorway, beaming. His love for Bikram is enormous. I hear later that he picked Bikram up from his corpse position outside the tent and carried him back to his suite to give him a one-hour full-body massage.

And boy did it work. Bikram is floating, on a yoga-high nonpareil. It derails everything. In a pause, just before the lecture, an aide comes onstage to make announcements, the last of which involves a Bikram Yoga Calendar created by a local studio. “This one is a prototype,” the aide says, flipping through a tiny packet of papers. “I can only assume the images
will be a bit clearer in the final version, but here it is: a calendar! Buy one if you’d like. Support a good cause.”

As he walks offstage, Bikram, eyes lit with energy, leans over and playfully snatches the calendar. “Let me show you something!”

He holds the flimsy packet up. “Let’s have an auction. I will autograph this calendar, just my name.” He looks out at his audience. “I want to auction this calendar, and we give all the money to my guru’s charity in Calcutta. You will buy it.” He looks around the audience eagerly, scanning faces. I try to hide mine. This offer of an optional auction of an absolutely worthless calendar to a room at least two-thirds filled with people who just emptied their bank account to pay for the opportunity to be present, who are returning to a career that pays subsistence wages at best, and who have zero opportunities for advancement within their profession without a bank loan, strikes me as absurd.

But all of a sudden, instead of lecture, we are in an auction.

Bikram stands center stage. “Bidding starts at fifteen dollars.” He looks out at his audience, who like me aren’t entirely sure whether he is joking or not. “Who will pay fifteen dollars for this calendar? A beautiful calendar. A calendar with pictures of my beautiful yoga and my beautiful autograph.”

A sole hand goes up. I distinctly remember thinking, Well, there’s always one.

“Good, good, good. Do I see twenty dollars? Twenty dollars for a beautiful calendar with my signature. This is a first edition! First edition calendar!”

Now a few hands in different parts of the tent. Everyone is still evaluating the situation. Bikram’s enthusiasm, however, is growing on itself. He is getting jumpy. He claps his hands in pure joy at each bid, like playing “auction” is the most fun game in the whole world.

“How about twenty-five dollars?” A few more hands go up. But different hands. A woman next to me bids for the first time.

All of a sudden, we are at thirty-five dollars, and Bikram’s intensity heats up.

“Come on, forty forty forty forty, do I see forty? Yes! Fifty? If you do fifty, I also come out to dinner with you to celebrate your auction win. It will be the best day of your life. Who has fifty?” The bidding now grows
into a frenzy. And Bikram’s energy blossoms too, his body bouncing around the stage like he is on the verge of spontaneous combustion: winking at his offstage aides, winking directly at the audience.

With the offer of dinner, we rise from fifty fast. Now half the room is bidding. Eminently sane people are bidding. And when we rip through one hundred dollars, even for those like myself, who have no intention of humoring the event, it’s hard not to be a little excited. It’s spectacle. It’s a man excelling at what he loves. It’s Bikram bouncing around the stage, pointing at outstretched hands, screaming nonsense enthusiasm into the mic. Soon we are past $150. But then, slow again at two hundred dollars.

“Come on, just a lousy two hundred dollars! Let’s go! We were doing so good!” Bikram says.

Finally a hand shoots up in the back of the room. People stand up to see who it is. I know because I live with him that it’s Janis. Of course Janis would have the two hundred dollars for a worthless calendar he doesn’t want: especially because it just might help his studio-ownership aspirations. But when I, in my turn, stand to look at who this crazy bidder is, it’s not Janis. Instead it’s a man I have never seen before. And he is promptly outbid by a woman on the other side of the room.

Bikram immediately plays off the sexes. “You are going to let a woman beat you? A woman?” And when the woman bids it up to $350, he crows again: “I love women!”

At $350, there is a resurgence. Hands are flying up; new bidders are entering. Bikram is explaining that he likes big numbers.

At $550, something insane awakes within: For the first time, I get an undeniable urge to bid. But too late. The bid is six hundred dollars. I imagine myself at dinner with Bikram, all the questions I could ask him for my book. It seems like a not unreasonable price for access. Then we are at seven hundred dollars. I think how purchasing the calendar would show him that for all my authorial doubts, I am still sincere in my investigation. What better way to show that I’m an honest evaluator than to support his guru’s charity? I sit and watch my hand twitch in curiosity—and realize this is yogic projection at its finest: Bikram has crept into our imaginations, sparking different fantasies perhaps, but somehow still inside each of us.

“Seven hundred fifty dollars? Come on, who will bid seven hundred fifty dollars! You must! There is only one me! There is only one Bikram! Who else could have done this to a calendar!”

Finally at eight hundred dollars, a new type of silence enters the room. There are four bidders locked in a death match, and the reality of the situation has sunk in for the rest of us. In place of the frenzy from $350 to $800, there is an exhausted, uncomfortable mood in the room: that familiar postcoital instinct, where we’re all hoping to flee so we can evaluate what exactly happened in the privacy of our own thoughts.

What’s amazing is how quickly Bikram feels this change in mood. His crowing stops. Instead of driving the price upward, he switches from salesman to mediator. He calls the top four bidders up to the stage and announces that they will make a deal. Instead of one copy, he will give all four of them signed copies, and instead of a dinner one on one, they will all go out to dinner together. Never mind that this undermines most of what made the calendar desirable in the first place, the four caucus as directed. In the pause without either Bikram’s enthusiasm or the crowd’s curiosity, a visible case of buyer’s remorse sets in. They return uneasy to offer a collective two thousand dollars as a group. The auction ends. Bikram reminds us he is amazing and unique.

We step out into the calm San Diego night. My friend Anna finds me. “Did you see how happy he was? Did you get that! It was amazing, watching him do what he does best. I mean, would that even have occurred to you? Auctioning something? And if it did occur to you, would it have brought you joy? It’s crazy, but I think watching that made me love him even more.”

Janis will win his bet, eventually achieving the brass ring of the naturally pudgy: visible abdominal muscles. He strides around our room with his shirt off. But it comes at a cost. Yoga is no longer just an adventure.

“Is it possible I feel this good?” he bounds in postclass during week eight. “If someone tells me, I don’t believe it!”

Then he looks at me. I feel like he is about to beat his chest like a gorilla. “I love it! We are strong. We are yogi!!!!”

The Joys

The last few days, there are no lectures. Instead we discuss the postures.

Here is the full joy of Bikram. He moves from posture to posture, describing each contraction, exhalation, or quarter inch of torque. He describes the anatomical benefits, braying like a tonic salesman. (“Spine twisting? Good for life, good for health, good for mind, good for sex, good for spirit, good for business!”) He describes his own experiences within the postures, identifying movements that caused him trouble. But mostly he jumps around the stage, adjusting the postures of volunteers.

And with the volunteers he is masterful: cutting the knees out from the valiant and cocky who get up to demonstrate their already perfect poses, ministering softly to the damaged and injured, exhorting the shy to join him onstage. For everyone offering tiny modifications that correct major alignment problems. The effect is of unconscious expertise, not unlike a chess grandmaster walking through an open exhibition match, making moves against twenty simultaneously opponents. At some bodies he is casual, widening a stance, straightening a foot. At others he is brutal, pulling on a ponytail to yank back a neck into a deeper bend. Occasionally he will find himself in front of someone who requires deeper scrutiny. “Banged-up boy,” he will ask a man, “how you hurt shoulder?” Buying time to assess the situation, before pulling the shoulder in question to the exact place it needs to be.

The entire time, Esak stands quietly at the back of the room, scribbling at his notepad. This is the part of Teacher Training he flies out for every year.