Hell-Bent (34 page)

I awake the morning of the competition and begin backbending almost immediately. My computer is playing Michael Jackson’s “Stranger in Moscow” on infinite repeat. I inhale and stretch backwards. The world goes wavy. I rise, inhale again, and pushing again, slowly let my upper deltoids relax. I do this again and again, passing each time slowly in front of the hotel emergency exit plan framed on the door.

When I stand straight from my final backbend, body opened, thin stream of sweat covering my skin, I’m fully awake. I look out at my hotel window at my view—some gigantic white-concrete parking garage. It is shimmering in the pollution-enhanced L.A. morning light, and I decide it is the most beautiful parking garage I have ever seen.

Strolling into the green room, I stiffen from all the nervous energy on display. Yogis in handstands; yogis off by themselves, stretching out on headphones. And just a few feet away, the cavernous ballroom and audience staring in darkness. We queue in a giant line, each one stepping up and off through the stage door in their turn. As we wait, we listen. There is the regular calling of names and the announcing of time. There are occasional jokes from the MC. But mostly there is silence. As we get closer to the speakers by the stage door, the huge amounts of gain from the various microphones in the room provide a diagetic soundtrack to the event, as if the energy into the room has been made audible. The line inches forward, three minutes at a time.

And then I am standing in the doorway, staring out. Then I am kissing Mary Jarvis’s hand. After that, it is only scattered memories.

I remember trying to do like Courtney and project my love. I remember giving myself several vicious reprimands not to look awkwardly and terribly at my ankles. Not to hunch my upper back. Just to smile and let everyone in that great big room know how grateful I was to be there.

Then all of a sudden: “Start please.” Had I bowed?

And smiling, I turned to announce my first posture, Standing Head to Knee.

I remember jiggling all over the place like I had just jumped out of an ice bath. I remember thinking to myself proudly that I’d remembered to breathe, and immediately realizing that—
shit!
—if you are thinking about thinking about breathing, you are not in the present moment.

But crazily, I was already in the second phase of the posture at that point. And my head was slowly lowering. I could see my little toes squirming to keep my balance, but I couldn’t feel a damn thing. The lights were so white. My lower body was so absent. It was as if I had softly pressed a mute button on it. My brain was alive, but my body completely detached. This, I decided, wasn’t good. I was supposed to be in meditation, not some closed-captioned version of my own life. Especially because my standing leg wasn’t straight at all! And with that, all of a sudden the world rushed back in. My lower body unmuted itself. I was at war. My standing knee straightened, my knee locked. I heard the burst shutter on the high-res camera purr like someone shuffling a deck of cards. My face was flush and hot and pressed up against my lifted leg. Which meant I had completed the posture. Who knows how long it had been there? My lower body was now not just unmuted, but on the verge of populist revolution, every cell ranting in its own bug-eyed outrage. And so I came out, took a huge breath, and turned to say:

“Standing Bow Pulling.”

The rest of the routine just flowed. In floor bow, my back arched up like the ceiling itself had reached down and pulled my legs taut. I don’t think I did a thing. Rabbit, Stretching, I barely remember those when I do my routine on a normal day, but onstage as far as I’m concerned, they didn’t even happen. Neither did Pigeon. Not for even a second. None of it is there. Nothing is, in fact, until, as if dropped abruptly back into this world, all of sudden I found myself motionless, levitating perfectly parallel to the stage in one of the best Peacocks of my life. I wasn’t remotely tired, I was humming and smiling and thinking of Courtney thinking about expressing joy for all the people watching. I rose from the Peacock. I bowed. I thought of
all the other competitors behind me, and I almost sprinted off the stage, giddy with the realization that although I didn’t win, I didn’t come in last.

At the end of the day, all the competitors are invited back onstage for a group photo. As the front of the second level, I am standing on my knees, back straight. Much to my surprise, Bikram and Rajashree plunk down right in front of me during the group photo. They both stare out into the live feed of the international simulcast. The room explodes into a frenzy of pictures. My knees are killing me, but I keep smiling. Bikram is yammering away—“Do I look good in my suit? Do I look like a gangster?”—in a free flow of nonsense chatter that continues for two or three straight minutes.

Rajashree without flinching from the camera or breaking her smile, speaks like a ventriloquist to him: “The world is watching us.”

Bikram ignores her, continuing to free-associate about gangsters. Then suddenly he is finished. “Is that enough?” he asks the room as he stands. “I think that is enough.” He waits for Rajashree to rise next to him, and together they walk offstage, drifting apart as soon as they are back in the audience. Although he has been on best behavior all weekend, the farther apart they get, the more Rajashree seems to relax.

Stranger in Moscow

Three months later, I am at the international competition, in another hotel wasteland: more competitors scampering barefoot over carpets, more vendors selling even slimmer yoga gear, more free samples of coconut water. This time I am not competing. And this time there is another Bikram in attendance.

Instead of the restrained, humane Bikram of nationals, content to play sidekick as Rajashree ran the show, at internationals, Bikram is determined to be front and center. The result is a sustained and unpleasant tantrum.

The weekend kicks off a little after 11:30 A.M., at the Los Angeles Airport Radisson, when a young man from Australia comes out, bows before the judges, and promptly falls out of his first posture. At this point, everything is
set. The great room is dark and silent, the stage lit by three beams of white. Great energy and expense have been spent to transform the vast hotel conference room into a more regal venue. With its overblown chandeliers, its seating for the press, its elegant stage—dripping with flags and live-action video-projection screens—the room looks the part. The elaborate rigging for the international simulcast, with monster camera atop derricklike tripod, feels impressive. The audience is hyperalert in its stillness, projecting collective silence as a badge of respect. There are ushers, MCs, programs, and heaps of third-party vendors. But despite it all, the event reeks of the amateur. A multimillion-dollar operation with the soul of a high school musical. I am trying to figure out exactly why, when Bikram shouts into the silence.

“Need to move the X! Need to come forward!”

Apparently, the spot where competitors perform is too far recessed for Bikram’s liking. A competitor—on deck and nervous—stands awkwardly on the edge of the stage, unsure what is going on. Then to make sure things get changed, Bikram stands up, cutting through the lighting to start ordering people around. It is perhaps 11:45 A.M. The now-terrified contestant is ordered onstage to perform a few postures on the now-moved X. He dutifully complies, and when everything has been adjusted to Bikram’s whim, the competition proceeds. The competitor retreats offstage and waits to be called officially.

This moment more than any other defines the rest of the weekend in my eyes. But it is only the beginning.

Soon after, a woman from Canada does an extremely difficult handstand variation—Lotus Scorpion—that is not found in Bishnu Ghosh’s ninety-one postures. With the room still in silence, Bikram shouts “Wrong!” at the judges. “Should be zero points.”

Another contestant, one of Bikram’s favorite students, falls out of his posture before holding it. There is no stillness. No grace, no gut-check moment, no demonstration of control. And almost to emphasize the fact that it is his show, and that he can therefore bend it into his reality, Bikram exclaims loud enough for the judges to hear: “Very good posture. Perfect. Just like it should be done.”

His restlessness grows as the competition proceeds. The outbursts become more juvenile. Corresponding rumors of his fickleness sweep through the audience. Contestants might be disqualified for performing a posture on their fingertips instead of their palms. Others because they entered or exited a posture in an as-of-yet undefined improper manner. There are more outbursts. All prompted by Bikram’s burning urgency to inject himself into the scene. My lasting image of the morning is not a performer onstage, but rather Bikram in an ink black suit with a red tie, standing up just as a contestant is walking off. He is furious about god knows what, trying to track down exactly who or what is responsible for failing to carry out a request. “At least he confess,” I hear him tell a circle of aides, trying, I think, to be hushed, but instead appearing even more teeth-clenchingly angry. “From now on, nothing moves here without my sign. Nothing without my okay. Like check signing. Get it?”

Finally, when the competition is over and all the beautiful asanas have been performed (and they are beautiful, as always, still and majestic, representing years of dedication), the judges file out of the room to tally the scores and discuss in private. In the meantime, photos of Bikram with various celebrities flash in a slideshow on the stage. Soon a chatter of well-intentioned awkward exchanges fills the room: “You looked so beautiful up there.” “I love your outfit.” Conversations so sincere and superficial that for the most part, they are dead on arrival.

After an extended break where we’re all given plenty of time to peruse the vendors and collect free samples of various soaps and supplements, the judges file back in. Rajashree takes the stage to announce the winners. There is suspense; there is applause. A runner-up shrieks just like it’s a beauty contest; the female first-place winner looks completely stunned. Then Bikram charges the stage.

With Rajashree frozen, looking like she is trying to increase her smile from 1,000 watts to spontaneous combustion, Bikram strides to the front. “I learn just now, no cash prize for shopping.” He pulls out his wallet. “So I look into my wallet and find some cash. For winners, one thousand dollars. I think I give it to each of them.” He laughs and waits for applause.
Which is tiny. He points at the first-, second-, and third-place female champions, all of whom are Asian. “Can you believe all three have triangle eyes?” There are titters. “And man”—he points now to an Asian male, just in case we didn’t get it—“has triangle eyes too.” More titters. Feeding off these weak laughs, Bikram continues on, stomping over the awards ceremony, rearranging the contestants around the stage, demanding they assume poses for pictures, and generally asserting his ability to do anything he wants anywhere he wants. There are still some people, the most loyal loyalists, who are laughing at these antics. One of them is sitting in front of me, snickering—and I can see him giddy as he rises to his feet to take a picture of Bikram with the winners and their slender scalene eyes. But I’d like to think most people in the room, like me, are past sad with the sudden devolution of the event, well into what Bikram fears most, boredom.

The next day there is a judges’ meeting. It is held in another well-carpeted hotel room, with low ceilings and accordion partitions compressed to open an awkward array of adjoining rooms. The judges’ meeting is ostensibly for training judges for future competitions. Competitors and coaches, however, are also invited, as obviously an understanding of how postures will be judged is crucial for training. To further both these ends, the room is full of flat-screen TVs running loops of competitors performing routines as demos for discussion.

We, the die-hards who are interested in this sort of thing, sit fifty deep in folding chairs arranged around a mini-stage.

The meeting begins by attempting to tackle the issue of how variations will be judged. There is no set procedure. At the moment, it is every judge for themselves. The hope is to create a more consistent system. It is not a small issue. The Olympics are the driving force, and if the competition is ever to get there, it must be something more than just a Bikram Yoga competition. It must be open to all lineages, all styles, and they must be able to receive a score.

Soon, as with all large group discussions led by a highly tolerant moderator, the discussion gets lost. The specific tangent has to do with how to score a non-Bikram posture like Lotus Scorpion. Should contestants submit
the name of their postures in advance, so judges can determine a score? Should they be limited to a predetermined list? Should it be left to the individual judge’s discretion? The conversation winds in and out politely, different yogis standing up, sharing their view, sitting down. Nothing is recorded, and good ideas are lost with bad ones. It reminds me of a hundred dysfunctional staff meetings I’ve tried to sleep through during my professional life.

Then Bikram intervenes. He has been sitting anxiously in the front row, but now he stands up. “No. No. No. We must have borderlines.” Suddenly the moderator is sitting down and Bikram is bouncing from foot to foot in his place. “We must have borderlines, and to compete you must accept them. This is the way we do. You like it, you welcome. You do not, good-bye.”

A teacher seizes on the pause after that last statement, “What about other yoga communities? How do they participate? What about the Olympics?”

Bikram stares at her. “Who cares? I control ninety-eight-point-five percent of yoga in this world.”

He says this in front of everyone, and unlike most of what Bikram says, it is easy to tell if he is joking. Because he is not. He is defiant. And in his defiance, he repeats it again. “Ninety-eight-point-five percent of yoga is Bikram Yoga.”

It’s a moronic statement. One of millions he’s rattled off in the last forty years, and as always, the sensible people in the room decide they don’t have the energy to argue. And so they ignore it. The difference here is this particular moronic statement directly undercuts something every single person in that room has worked for. Something they have poured their weekends, vacations, cash, and passion into. Something embedded in the mission statement of the competition they just participated in. And yet, as always, not a single person raises their hand to mention that this isn’t true. That,
No, Boss, you don’t control 98.5 percent of yoga.
That,
The real figure is just under 8 percent.
And that,
Actually, Boss, that is a delusional and destructive statement that will guarantee your wife’s goal of the Olympics goes unanswered.