Varanasi is where Hindus come to purify themselves. One dip in the sacred Ganges is said to rid you of seven years’ bad karma. It’s also where people come to die. Breathe your last here and you achieve instant moksha, so escaping the cycle of birth and death and going straight to heaven. I didn’t particularly want to die in Varanasi. Nor was I crazy about the idea of submerging myself in a river with one of the highest faecal-coliform counts in the world. My pilgrimage was of the yogic variety. I wanted to experience yoga as it was taught in India, and see how it compared with what I learnt back home.
Yoga is a part of daily life for many Hindus. Its origins as a way of uniting mind, body and soul can be traced back to ancient Hindu texts, some of them 8,000 years old. Certain cities in India have become known for particular styles of yoga. Pune is the home of BKS Iyengar and the Iyengar method, the type I practise in London, which is characterised by its attention to detail in the individual postures or “asanas”. Mysore is famous for the aerobic Ashtanga style. Varanasi is not known for any one particular style, but, as a city where tourists as well as Indians come on spiritual quests, there was, I was told, an abundance of yoga on offer – which is what I was after. With so much good karma around, how could I go wrong?
Quite easily, as it turned out. The city of Varanasi – or Benares as it is also known – was a maze of narrow alleys lined with tiny shops. Every inch of spare wall was painted with signs directing you to restaurants, hotels and yoga venues with names like the Buddha Yoga School and Third Eye Yoga. The names should have been warning enough.
I picked one at random and followed a series of arrows, past lines of men drinking their early morning chai, up a dark stone staircase and into a windowless room with a large, bumpy futon-like mattress covering the floor. The teacher was a woman in her twenties. The students were all tourists, dressed in the baggy trousers people find it in themselves to like when travelling in India. We’d started when somebody’s mobile went off. It was the teacher’s, and she took the call. Ten minutes later, it happened again. It happened so often I wondered if she was instructing two classes, one here and one somewhere else.
After that I decided to get recommendations. Someone told me that Sunil at the Yoga Training Centre offered Kundalini classes, which involved “laughter therapy”. That sounded suitably different from yoga back home, so at eight the next morning I found myself on another lumpy mattress in another shuttered room with several more westerners in bad trousers, plus a couple of local women.
As the class filled up, the two Indian women were ordered off into a side room, which seemed a bit rude until I realised they were the teacher’s wife and mother-in-law. Sunil’s assistant, a young man named Santosh, lit sandalwood incense. “We smell the sandal today,” explained Sunil. “And see all the blue. And eat white – milk curd, rice, ghee.” He got straight to the laughter. “Open mouth, big sound!” he commanded, throwing his arms up and opening wide to reveal a half-rotten, half-gold front tooth and a laugh that, in the West, might have got him struck off on suspicion of harbouring dirty thoughts about his students. Some of his regulars were used to laughing on demand, and produced joyful guffaws. My own chuckle lacked conviction.
