Yoga, Iyengar Yoga is truly one of the reasons I have come to India. B.K.S. Iyengar helped to create this form of yoga so that all people, even people with neurological and other disabilities can benefit from the practice. I have been studying it for the last year in LA and now I am coming to the source.
“If he asked me, I’d have to sleep with Prince,” I explained plainly to my husband, Robin in our fifteenth month of marriage. I wasn’t looking for a reaction. I was just stating the obvious. I was new to marriage then and didn’t fully appreciate not saying everything I thought. Read the rest of this entry »
Dear Family and Friends, 30 August 2009
So far, India is warm, colorful, and beautiful. There is chaos and confusion, wealth, and poverty all intermingled in a brew of vibrant garments and backfiring vehicles.
It’s now more than two weeks and we are settled in some ways and in other ways, the shock has worn off and we are now stunned.
Heathrow airport was jam-packed with people going to India and to the Middle East. I already felt like a foreigner. When a woman in a full black Burka passed, Taj’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. Her veil was mask-like and adorned with silver jewels. To him she looked like a Ninja. To me, she looked like yet another person in a faster line than ours.
In total, we had eight very heavy suitcases, three carry-ons, one car seat, two rolling backpacks and one regular backpack. There was also a rolling cooler which contained my medication, a ham sandwich, cold cuts, two kinds of cheese and an Elmo “booboo” pack. Not to mention three grouchy kids, a leather cowboy hat, one guitar and me.
I was in my new teal, floor length cotton Target dress. My mother-in-law washed and pressed for it me before we left as an act of love and perhaps a peace offering. Both of us were too stubborn to apologize for the God-awful fight we’d had a few days back so we were making small gestures to try and repair the damage.
When we first got to India and my kids were obsessed about one stray dog after the next, I gave them a little lecture. “For every dog you see, there are hundreds of people, many are children, who aren’t in school, who don’t have toys and clothes or beds to sleep in. Don’t forget about them, don’t overlook them.”
My then 14-year-old son Addae said, “Mom, it’s just that we feel like we know what to do when we see a dog with a hurt paw or that’s hungry. It’s not that we don’t care about the people, it’s just that we don’t know what to do.”
Many of our friends and family don’t know what to make of our move to India. For 20 years, we lived in the same neighborhood in Los Angeles. We raised our three sons in that house and even birthed the last one on the bathroom floor (but that’s another story.) Our friends and family are trying to figure out why now, why Mumbai, and in many ways, it is still a mystery to us.
The short answer is that Robin, my husband of 23 years, who describes himself as devilishly attractive, stunningly handsome, smart, sexy, charming, witty, and modest, works for a company that was purchased by Reliance, a huge Indian conglomerate that owns a start-up in Mumbai. The company does the same digital restoration Robin did in Southern California, on a mammoth scale. In an attempt to ensure job security, he put his name in the hat to move to India and head the operation here. He liked the idea of helping build a company from the ground up and we were both excited about the prospect of traveling to a new country with our family.
I haven’t ruled out the possibility that we are collectively suffering a mid-life crisis and we decided to move away from everything we built in the last two decades in a desperate attempt to revive a boring and static life. It is also very possible that we have lost our minds.