Yoga on Copacabana, conducted by a Brazilian beauty (Travel with MP Prabhakaran)

(This is Chapter 6 from Mr. Prabhakaran’s book, An Indian Goes Around the World – I: Capitalism Comes to Mao’s Mausoleum, which we have been serializing in this space. Chapter 7, “A Cow’s Picture on a Beijing Billboard Confuses a Hindu,” will appear next week. Read the series every Monday. – Editor)

The one thing I enjoyed most during the few days I stayed at Rio de Janeiro was the jogging I did on Copacabana Beach every morning. The beauty of the beach certainly had a lot to do with it. And the beauty of scantily-clad women, most of them just basking in the morning sun and some playing volleyball, had something to do with it, too. But what made my mornings most memorable were the conversations I had with total strangers and some of the spectacles I witnessed, which had nothing to do with the semi-nude women.

One morning, it was a coconut vendor on the beach who caught my attention. I stopped and watched the way he made a hole to insert a straw into the coconut, before he handed it to a young couple. He did it crudely by plunging a pointed iron rod into the coconut. I wished he had watched how they do it in Mumbai. Coconut vendors on the sidewalks of Mumbai, most of them lungi-clad Muslims from Kerala, do it with a machete. They do it in style. They do it so artistically that passersby often stop to watch it.

The couple threw away the straw and started drinking the milk straight from the coconut. That gave me an excuse to initiate a conversation with them. “That’s how most people in my home state in India drink it,” I told them. “They don’t use straws either.”

“Which state in India are you talking about?” the woman asked.

When I said “Kerala,” she nearly dropped the coconut. “You are from Kerala!” she exclaimed. “I am from Dublin and I work as a nurse. There are many nurses from Kerala working with me at my hospital. I heard a lot about that place. One day we are going to visit your state.”

“It’s a place worth visiting,” I told her. “Don’t be discouraged by the appearance of the people from Kerala you have met. They may look ugly. But the place is beautiful. By the way, Kerala gets its name not from the nurses it has exported, but from what you are holding in your hand.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

I explained: “In Malayalam, the language of Kerala, the word for coconut is kera. Kerala means the land of kera. From one end of the state to the other, you can see coconut palms everywhere.”

“How interesting,” she said. “None of my Kerala friends told me this.”

“They will, one day,” I told her. “Right now, they are busy making money.” I asked her whether she was enjoying her visit to Rio.

“Enjoying is an understatement,” she said. “I had been here just three months ago. It was such an unforgettable experience that I was feeling guilty enjoying it all by myself. I was impatient to come back and relive the experience with my boyfriend by my side.” She gave a pinch on her boyfriend’s cheek. He grinned from ear to ear.

“You are a lucky young man,” I told him.

Before I took leave of the young Irish couple, I advised them to make it a point to visit Kovalam Beach while in Kerala. “It will be another unforgettable experience,” I said, and resumed my jogging.

Esophagus Kissing

          On another morning, it was a different kind of scene that made me stop my jogging. A man was sitting on a bench, videotaping a teenage couple a few yards away, rolling on the sand and making love, while his friend sat by his side and lustily watched it. The lovemaking had reached the stage of esophagus kissing and the couple was unaware of being videotaped.

          “You must preserve it for posterity,” I told the man.

He liked my remark. When I told him that I was from New York, he opened up. “This is November,” he said. “This is the third time I am visiting this place since September 11. The place helps me get over the trauma I suffered on that day.”

On that day, when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York, he was at work, at his Morgan Stanley office in Tower One. He was one of those who miraculously survived while many of his co-workers perished. Since then, he had been on disability leave. His disability allowances would continue until his therapist certified him fit to go back to work. “Since September 11, I have been enjoying every moment of my life with a vengeance,” he said. From the way he was savoring the scene on Copacabana, I could tell he was.

          On yet another morning, I stopped to watch a karate class. The class was conducted not by an Oriental, but a Brazilian. It had 20 students, men and women, young and old, some very old. The very old, I noticed, were of Japanese and Chinese descent. Their dedication and concentration would make any jogger stop and watch. I was delightfully watching their performance when another jogger stopped and walked toward me. He was bare-chested, maybe in his sixties. “Don’t you have such things in your country?” he asked, smilingly.

          “Which country?” I said, also smilingly.

          “India, of course,” he said, “there is no mistaking of it.”

          A native of Germany, he had been living in Rio de Janeiro for well over a decade. He had been to India several times, he said, and gave me a long list of the places he had visited. “I loved the Pink City,” he said.

          I told him, shamefacedly, that I hadn’t seen as much of India as he did. “The Pink City is one of the places I always wanted to visit,” I said, “but haven’t got down to doing it yet.”

          The Pink City is the nickname given to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, one of the states in India. It was a princely state until the country gained independence from Britain, in 1947. Jaipur was founded in 1727 by the state’s then ruler, Maharaja Jai Singh II. It got the nickname, the Pink City, because of the pink color of most of its buildings. A pink wash periodically given to those buildings still preserves that color. The maharaja himself planned and oversaw the building of the city. Jaipur literally means the city of victory, but it got its name from the man who founded it, Jai.

          After sharing a bit of history of the city with the German, I told him I was originally from Kerala, “now living in New York.”

“Kerala is one of the places I always wanted to visit but never got down to doing it,” he said, mimicking what I had said vis-à-vis Jaipur. But he said it without an iota of sarcasm, and I liked it. We chatted for a while, exchanged our addresses and went our separate ways.

Chess Player Who Admires Vishwanathan Anand

On the following day, I had a more enjoyable conversation, with another total stranger. An elderly jogger, he looked back while overtaking me and shouted, “I am sure you can do faster than that.”

I laughed. He slowed down to keep pace with me. I knew he wanted to talk. “Do you know Vishwanathan Anand?” he asked.

“I will answer that question in a minute,” I said. “But before that, you could answer this question: How can you be so sure that I am not a Bangladeshi or a Pakistani?”

“That would have been my third and fourth guesses,” he replied. “Not even the second. My second guess would be that you are a Sri Lankan.”

“I am really impressed,” I told him.

          He was a widely-traveled Brazilian and an avid chess player. He said he had participated in many international chess tournaments and played against many world champions, including Kasparov and Karpov. “I always lose to these guys in the first round itself,” he added. “But that doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that I never had a chance to play against this child prodigy from India, Vishwanathan Anand. I hope it happens one day before I die.”

          “I hope so, too,” I told him. “And I pray to God that it happens soon.”

          I really wanted it to happen soon. Vishwanathan Anand earned a reputation as a child prodigy in the world of chess when he started winning major titles at the age of 15. Though not a child anymore (he was born in 1969), I knew he would be around to enjoy many more decades of fame. The lovable Brazilian I had just met appeared to be in his late sixties or early seventies. That was the reason behind my prayer that his wish to play against the Indian chess champion be answered soon.

●

I had many heart-warming experiences like these during my sojourn at Rio de Janeiro. But the one experience I will cherish forever came on the last day. As usual, the day began with my morning jog. It came to a sudden stop when I saw a group of people practicing yoga on the beach. “India meets Brazil on the sands of Copacabana,” I said to myself. I watched them with pride and admiration.

It was an unusually bright day. The yoga students and their young, attractive teacher were in the lotus position, in deep meditation. The morning Brazilian sun that fell on their faces made them look blissful. I cursed myself, again, for not having my camera with me when I needed it most. This was not the first time during my travels around the world that I found myself without my camera when presented with a rare photo opportunity.

According to the brochure handed out by an aide to the yoga teacher, the beach session was conducted by Uni-Yoga, a private yoga school with branches all over Rio de Janeiro.

When the teacher and her disciples were still in meditation, I engaged the aide, who spoke a little English, in a brief conversation. He told me his name, which sounded like Iago. I asked him whether the teacher was from India. (She looked strikingly Indian. Could pass for a pretty Maharashtrian.) He said no. She was Brazilian-Indian, the local variant of American-Indians.

Then he asked me whether I was from India. “Your face shows it,” he said, when I told him yes. “What is your name?” he asked.

I said it, of course, with my usual words of caution: “It is too long. You won’t be able to pronounce it.”

I was to learn in a few seconds that those cautionary words, usually reserved for foreigners, were not necessary in the case of this foreigner. I had to say my name only once, and he repeated it after me, with the right emphasis on each syllable: “Pra bha ka ran.”

With the next question, he not only struck me as a person of intellectual curiosity, but also endeared himself to me: “What does your name mean?”

Pointing to the sun, I said: “It means him.”

“Oh, you are Surya!” he exclaimed, using the Sanskrit word for the sun.

That nearly floored me. I felt ashamed of myself for having underestimated him. I apologized. He dismissed my apology with a childlike smile.

Shortcut to Nirvana

By then, the class had come out of the meditative posture. The aide rushed to the yoga teacher and said something. From the admiring way the teacher looked at me, I figured that what he did say something good.

Suddenly, I began to get nervous. “What, if the teacher thinks that, being Indian, I may know a lot about yoga? What, if she thinks that it would be a treat for her students if an Indian demonstrated a few yogic postures to them? What, if she requests me to do it?” Thoughts like these crossed my mind in rapid succession. Not wanting to embarrass me, India and that venerable discipline called yoga, I waved goodbye to the teacher and her aide and resumed my jogging.

More thoughts crossed my mind as I ran: “Do the yoga teacher and her aide know that this Indian knew very little yoga and that what little he knew was self-taught? More important, do they know that long ago, this Indian had found a shortcut to nirvana, which is three pegs of whiskey?”

I ran faster. But I made sure that my feet were firmly on the ground and that my head was far below the clouds. The young Brazilian aide to the yoga teacher had taught me the importance that.

(To be continued)

(M.P. Prabhakaran can be reached at [email protected])

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