sweet raj, gentle raj

During our first week in Hawaii we had the pleasure of spending many hours in class and in lecture with Rajashree, Bikram’s wife. We were, all of us, immediately smitten. Tanned and delicate, she floats when she walks and wears flowers in her hair. I can only describe her as half angel, half coquette. She’s very measured…very soft…and a wee bit flirtatious and girly. And she giggles…a lot. Her laughter, like everything else about her, is refined. Its sounds like a distant windchime…”tee hee hee hee…tee hee hee”

Bikram is an alarm clock,
Rajashree, a lullaby.

As we eased into our training, it was Rajashree graciously pleading with us to “take care of ourselves”and not “push too much”. She spoke to us in her lyrical and lilting Indian accent about our gastrointestinal systems and repeatedly let us know that we might find ourselves gassy and/or constipated. She said ‘gassy’ and ‘constipated’ in the comforting way a mother might…someone who’s love for you is greater than the blatant discomfort of such words. She cared, that Rajashree. She knew how painful a urinary tract infection could be. She was the sort of person you wanted holding your ponytail up while you vomited, nearby during a pelvic exam, or standing bedside when you came out of your coma.

Sweet Raj
Gentle Raj

After her daily thirty minute monologue about diareha, irritable bowel syndrome, or how we might find ourselves victim to month long menstrual cycles…she would talk to us about yoga and love and compassion and acceptance and joy. Listening to her speak is like having someone brush your hair. Hypnotic and soothing. Tingly. She’d lead us through challenging, but bearable, yoga classes and finish by reading us Hindu scriptures or sublime Rumi-esque poems. We’d lie there in pools of our own sweat, entranced, while Rajashree slowly brushed our collective hair.

Sweet Raj
Gentle Raj

It was with great distress that we watched her leave. A few people grabbed her ankles or clung to the hem of her floor length skirts until she finally shook free and headed off to the airport. We were being left alone with 'dad'…someone we knew couldn't be counted on to feed us dinner or put us to bed at night...someone who wouldn’t even think to ask if we’d had a bowel movement that day…..and, worst of all, he was a talker.
Suffice it to say, it was hard to see her go.

But we control nothing here…especially the arrivals and departures of saints. So we stood on the sidewalk waving long after her car had pulled away…eventually our arms tired and we turned around and went back inside.

Sweet Raj
Gentle Raj

You can imagine, therefore, the wave of excitement that ran through the student body when news of her impending return hit the halls of the Ilikai. She was coming back!
Christmas was coming early this year!!!
This morning we would all be reunited in the 8:30 a.m. class!
I set my alarm early so as to be my best for Raj. I fixed my hair and dabbed on lip gloss before slipping in to the shakti shorts I’d pressed the night before and lay prepared on the edge of my bed. I couldn’t wait to see her…sweet Raj, gentle Raj.

I always fall in love too fast.
You should really get to know a person first…..

The class was a massacre. A blood bath. An exercise in misery. The heat was catastrophic, immeasurable. Rajashree held the first backbend (at the inflexible hour of precisely 8:43 in the morning) for a stretch of time so significant that four students celebrated birthdays before we were allowed to release the pose. We even had time to sing to them…not as a group, but individually. She tormented a room of 300 plus people without blinking an eye or a breaking a sweat. All the while steady and calm as a tree. Turns out, Raj is a sociopath. Who knew?

People were dropping like flies…vomiting inside the room…balled up into the fetal position and crying on their mats.
I spent at least half the class in a state of hysterical blindness.
But, while I could no longer see, I could still hear…and what I heard will haunt me all the days of my life…
The giggle. The “tee hee hee”.
Every few minutes our well manicured instructor (in head to toe pink) would acknowledge the concentration camp revival being played out in the room. And then she would giggle.

“Oh my!” she’d say in her honeyed, melodious accent, “look at all dees crying! Tee hee hee. Tee hee hee”
Or
“My friends, so much the vomiting! Tee hee hee. Tee hee hee.”
Or
“Someone in the back left corner just lapsed into kidney failure! Tee hee hee. Tee hee hee. You guys!!! You’re getting slimmer, I can see!”

In the few quiet intermissions between dry heaving and sobs you could hear the subdued symphony of our hearts breaking. Not her. Please, God, not her too.

Et tu Rajashree?

I passed the delicate dominatrix in the lobby after lunch. She was standing near the elevators, posture perfect, heavy braid hanging down her back, cool as a cucumber…I tried to think of a way back in time--back to our old relationship--but I’m pretty regular these days. My bowels work fine. Things are different now and I have no choice but to move on.
I guess I just have to accept this new Raj.

Frightening Raj
Scary Raj

She’s teaching class again tomorrow. I’m going to go, but I’m not ironing my outfit again.
And I might put on some lip balm, but there will be no gloss. There will be no gloss.