Viola wasn’t really listening. Sunny liked to finish his yoga sessions with what she thought of as a “little sermon.” Words of wisdom from the enlightened, pulled from all over the place—Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism, even Christianity. The Balinese themselves, she had learned, were Hindu. Viola had been under the misapprehension that they were Buddhists. “We’re all the Buddha,” Sunny said. “It sounds preachy in print,” Viola wrote in an email to Bertie, “but actually it’s sort of uplifting. He would have made rather a good vicar.” Who was this new docile version of her mother, Bertie wondered?
Sunny taught at a place called the Bright Way in Ubud. To begin with Viola had avoided the sessions at the Bright Way. She was staying at an outrageously expensive “wellness retreat” hotel a half-hour’s drive away, where they had their own yoga teacher—and where the private, individual classes were held in something called the “yoga bale,” a pleasant airy pavilion constructed from polished teak, situated amongst trees in which birds trilled and cackled in an exotic fashion and insects droned or clacked like wind-up mechanical toys.
At the Bright Way, on the other hand, classes took place in a huge upstairs room that was hot and stuffy, even with all the windows flung open in an effort to catch a breeze. It was quite basic or the product of a “simple ascetic,” depending on your viewpoint—Viola’s or that of the Bright Way’s website.
Despite the size of the room, it was always crowded, mostly with women—athletic young Australians and middle-aged Americans. Most of the latter seemed to be doing what Bertie called “their eat-pray-love shit.”
Sunny qualified as a yoga teacher years ago in India and he was currently teaching on Bali. He was, apparently, a “respected teacher on the international circuit.” He frequently travelled to America and Australia to hold retreats that were always booked up. Everyone was in retreat, it seemed to Viola.
Sunny was all over the Internet if you knew where to look—if you knew who to look for—because although you would have thought that Sun (or even Sunny) might be a good name for someone who did what he was doing, he was known to all and sundry as “Ed.” “Sun Edward Todd,” he said reasonably to Viola, “it’s my name.” And that was only a small part of his transformation. The physique of a dancer, the shaven head, the oriental tattoos, the wash of an Australian accent were all a complete surprise to her. A changeling. And women loved him! They were like groupies, especially the eat-pray-love crowd. Viola hadn’t seen Sunny for nearly ten years and in the interim he had turned into a complete human being. (“Perhaps the two things aren’t unrelated,” Bertie said.)
“Thank you for this practice. Namaste,” Sunny said, bowing with his hands in prayer. There were a lot of murmured thank-yous and Namastes in return. (They took it so seriously!) Sunny leaped up from his lotus pose with alarming fluidity. Viola struggled to her feet, not from a lotus pose, merely a stiff and uncomfortable cross-legged position that reminded her of school assemblies.
Sunny lived in a village quite close to her outrageously expensive hotel yet seemed to have no intention of inviting Viola into his home so she decided, reluctantly, that the only way she was going to get to spend time with him was by coming along to his classes and putting up with the inane adoration of his other “students”—to which he appeared sublimely indifferent—not to mention the hideous physical challenges of the class. She had done yoga before, of course—who hadn’t?—but it had usually taken place in draughty church halls or community centres and had involved not much more than a bit of cautious stretching and then lying down and “visualizing” yourself in a place where you felt “safe and at peace.” This was always a challenge for Viola and while other people (women, always women) were lying on a tropical beach somewhere or in a deckchair in their garden, Viola’s imagination was running around fretfully looking for something—anything—that it could recognize as peaceful and safe.
When Sunny finished his Hindu homily and they’d all Namasted each other to death, the American woman who had occupied the mat next to Viola (“Shirlee with two ‘e’s”) turned to her and said, “Ed’s a wonderful teacher, isn’t he?” The boy who couldn’t be taught anything, Viola thought. “I’m his mother,” she said. How long since Viola had said those words? Not since Sunny was in school, probably.
—Oh—
A sudden horrible memory of the Casualty department at St. James’s hospital in Leeds came back to her. Sunny had just started college and she had thought it must be drugs when the hospital phoned her, but apparently he had been found wandering in the street with blood dripping from his arm from a botched attempt at cutting his wrist. “I’m his mother!” she had yelled at the doctor treating him when he told her that it was best that Sunny didn’t see anyone “just now.”
“Why?” she had asked him when she was finally allowed into his cubicle. Why did he do it? The usual inarticulate shrug. “Don’t know.” When pressed—“Because my life’s shit?”
Did he still have the scar? Was it hidden by the complicated dragon that curled up his arm?
Shirlee with two “e”s laughed and said, “I don’t think of him as having a mother.”
“Everyone has a mother.”
“Not God,” Shirlee said.