Mr. Brandolini's Assignment

iv. bold lovers

iv. bold lovers

 I was having something I’d definitely call a wet dream when my darling mother woke me on Monday morning. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive her for that. I’d had Jürgen pressed up against a wall and things were wonderfully hot and heavy and the setting was magnificent: we were in this Turkish palace with lapis lazuli ceilings and tall arches and we had a view that overlooked a market with exotic spices and brilliant fruit, out of which I remember with excellent clarity a particular crate of imported Australian oranges. Yes, I like my dreams to be artistically rich. Why make out in some shady motel room when you can have a domed palace in Istanbul?

 It was the kind of dream I’d been guiltily suppressing for months since our bestfriendhood transformed into what I thought was a one-sided crush. Evidently it was not as one-sided as I’d feared it was.

 Anyway, in the back of my head, with Jürgen’s dreamy tongue in my mouth, I heard my mother saying, ‘Leena wake up, it’s time for yoga class.’

 I could’ve punched something when I realised it was a dream.

 ‘Idunwannagoyoga,’ I slurred.

 ‘You do,’ she said, yanking at the edge of my covers. I hissed at the air. ‘Leena, get up.’

 I got up and briefly thanked the omnipotent God I didn’t believe in that women didn’t ejaculate in their sleep.

 Class was at six-thirty and it was six then. I put on my yoga pants in semi-zombie state and slept in the car on the way. We were a bit late and people were already spreading out their mats and getting into shavasana. Ma liked to be in front and I didn’t, so I ended up setting up camp near a muscly guy who I’d never seen before and was already into step two of his balloon breathing set.

 Fun fact: shav is corpse in Hindi, so basically we were getting into a posture to mimic the dead. Like, how morbid is that.

 I couldn’t close my eyes without thinking of the dream, even as our instructor repeated again and again in his most soothing yoga-teacher voice, stay away from all outside thoughts, clear your mind, focus on your breathing.

 So I focused on my breathing and thought about Jürgen kissing me at the same time. It wasn’t that hard, really. And it’s not as if I was actively thinking about him, he was just there, floating around in my consciousness like some annoying brain bug. It stayed that way throughout the class. I was only slightly distracted by the new guy next to me who was aggressively flexible and was thus coming off as slightly show-offy in a class that was composed of five overweight housewives, one overweight college student, my mother, and one aggressively inflexible middleweight teenage girl. Aka, me.

 At one point we were in a full-split, which means that everyone had their crotch a few inches above the ground and their inner thigh muscles screaming in pain. My hair was brushing the ground and I was furiously stretching, when I glanced to the side and saw that the guy was in a proper split, his forehead touching his mat. He was also producing some rather erotic grunts. He caught my eye, his head upside down on the ground, and he actually smiled. Like, through all the sweat and hair and concentration on his face, he smiled. I had zero control over any of my muscles at that point in time and I did attempt to smile back but I don’t think I could. After a point, I realised I was stuck in the split, and our instructor, Prem, had to come over and help me shuffle back up. The guy was swigging from a Tupperware bottle and he turned back to me when I had recovered.

 ‘It helps to bend your knees a bit when you get back up.’

 His baritone was flavoured with a subtle hint of American accent, though he looked satisfactorily brown and Indiany. But he didn’t roll the R in ‘your’ and his vowels were excessively vowelly, and the eyebrow usage was a definite clincher.