back up blog

1.  clean out your ears I thought I’d misheard him. I must’ve. Maybe it was the language barrier. Surely nobody would say that. Lose the weight. He moved around the swelteringly hot yoga hall adjusting the other women in the room – women who were, I had noticed, twenty, thirty, and forty pounds slimmer than me. Of course I'd noticed that. I wasn’t threatened by it, or upset. I’ve worked hard for the body image I’ve got , and I’m only in the business of doing me. But: other women’s bodies are not invisible, and I do not know in which incarnation of myself I will be evolved so as not to spot the chic with the chaturanga arms or Jessica Alba abs. That’s just how it is. That’s just how it is. 2.  short-term gluttony as a vice There’s not a singular reason why, on my arrival back home, I temporarily stopped being healthful. There’s seldom a single reason for any behaviour, is there? I sat in mama’s She Shed and ate Kit Kats – I cannot name a number (will not) - because I “deserved” a “t

There’s a shift happening, and I didn’t know it was coming until the ground beneath my ever-moving feet was already changing up into a pause. Since leaving India I’ve been working from my parents’ house, because I don’t have anywhere to be until July. Mum and Dad didn’t so much ask me to hang around for a minute as categorically tie me to my mother’s She Shed and say, Laura, we missed you, and we want to look after you as you keep writing this book , so shut up and let us. That means, of course, that they believe in me. And that they love me. I find it tremendously difficult to let myself be loved, and to be helped, but that isn’t the point of this post. Or maybe it is. Maybe all I’m trying to say is that it feels like some healing is going on, but I don't have the words for that yet. I have one word, though. No. Two. In India,   devotion appeared over and over and over again. As did surrender . The man with the incredible mind, the one who took my heart  (and my breath), he said

I need to write about him so that I don’t forget how it happened. (I won’t forget.) We don’t talk much. I find it harder when we do. He tells me he’s on his way, once his visa comes through. That he’ll see me soon. I can wait. I don't have a choice. He is about as intoxicating as you’d imagine a man raised on Western ideals and Hindi literature to be. That is to say, liberal and practical and whip-smart and boundlessly, endlessly, disarmingly romantic about the world. When he walked past my table onto the terrace outside, the day I arrived, my body felt him before my eyes saw him. That is a real thing that happened - but if you said that happened to you I wouldn’t believe it. I’d say that was a way to make the story better. To make a beginning when you worry you already have your end. I watched him through the window as he read The Times of India, his shoulder-length black hair thick and silky like woven cotton, teasing his shirt collar. His hands – his fingers - they hypnotised me

“My name is Laura,” I said, introducing myself to the group. “I haven’t been doing yoga very long, but I am already exactly where I want to be with it: totally in love . So yoga teacher training is my celebration of that.” Three weeks and two days later, I quit. When people ask me why, I tell them about a moment after I’d booked a ticket out of there, when I went to reveal the news of my impending departure to fast friends I’d made. One of them was propped up in her bed, the colour of her teeth and barely able to lift her head she was so drained of energy after three days of puking, shitting, and getting a kidney infection. Beside her stood a girl half-dressed, rubbing cortisone cream into a growing rash on her arm, carefully edging around the tender sunburn she’d gotten from the 40-degree Indian heat wave. On the other side of the bed was a potty-mouthed Canadian with her arse out, waiting for one of us to change the dressing on the sore of her left butt cheek. She’d been ill, too, an