Suggest You Body Relax

The University of Hyderabad offers a yoga certification course every semester for 1100 rupees, the equivalent of about 30 American dollars.  So naturally, I enrolled, as getting my certification has been a long-time goal of mine, and I am a thrifty, thrifty lady.  The catch?  The course meets at 6 in the morning, in a building that is a thirty minute walk from campus.  Supposedly, CIEE is going to provide us with bikes, but until then, those of us brave yoginis enrolled in the course have decided to make the half hour trek in the dark, through the jungle, at 5:30 in the morning, to the Yoga Center.

Yesterday was our first class.  We were rewarded for our efforts with a nearly thirty minute savasana, a meditative "corpse pose" that allowed us all to catch up on sleep.  Our instructor has a booming voice, rolling his "r"s, extending each word, relishing the way they come off his tongue. that sounds like God, or at least, Indian Morgan Freeman, booming "Suggest you body rrrelax.  Enjooooy the pleeeeasurrre of rrrelaxaation."
So this morning, I dragged myself out of bed, knowing that I would feel much better in a few hours.  I woke up in the dark, dressed, and went downstairs to meet up with my crew.  Only - no one was there.  Assuming they had all left earlier for the 5:30am warm-up class, I cursed those brown-nosing traitors and went to go find a straggler who would hazard the Hyderabad darkness with me in search of yoga. 

I knocked on Rachel's door.  She didn't answer, so, polite neighbor that I am, I walked in.  She was still asleep.

"Rachel, dude, it's 5:30.  Do you still wanna go?" 

She jumped out of bed and got dressed.  We decided to jog so we would make it on time.  The center is over 3 kilometers away, and trying to get anywhere on time on this huge campus is pretty stressful without wheels.  It was a strange run - I felt really nauseous and sluggish, and both of us noticed that there were more motorcylces out than there had been the previous morning.  We heard men chanting and shouting in the distance, and saw many more people prowling about in the distance. 

After our painful first kilometer, we saw a cluster of motorcycles at the intersection where we needed to turn.  It was like a scene from Hell's Angels (with less leather and body fat).  Immediately apprehensive, I checked my watch to see if we were making good time.  And it was weird - the time on my watch was off.  Really off.  And then I realized.

It wasn't 5:30 in the morning.  It was 1:30.

Orientation taught us a lot of useless stuff, but one thing we knew to take seriously was the fact that two young, unaware American girls should not go jogging alone at night.

The jog home was definitely more of a run.  Each passing car seemed to herald our doom, each bush hid a sadistic kidnapper, each rock was a venomous snake.  We finally made it back to Tagore, where the gaurds repeated the confused look they gave us as we headed out.  You know, just two friends wearing high-waisted pants out for a lil' jog at one am in India. 

Not one to be bested by a little mishap (okay, by one of the dumbest mistakes I've ever made), I got up three hours later and did it all over again.  But this time, I made it to yoga, where I suggested kindly to my body that it relax.  After all, it had already had quite a long day.