The year was 1972, the 1970 Jack Nickolson film, Five Easy Pieces, was finally playing in Tokyo, and Kinokuniya, the famous Japanese bookstore, had ventured into selling groceries, when my girlfriend and I - not long before she became my wife - decided to take up yoga.
We found a studio with a teacher straight out of Kolkata (Calcutta, back then) - Buddhadeb Chaudhuri was his name - and for a year or so we took classes, sometimes as often as four times a week.
Now, yoga and I are not symbiotic, not, by any means, natural or even unnatural friends. I found most of its positions beyond me. My knees, for example, when forced into a lotus or even a half-lotus position, were too high up off the floor, and screamed in such agony that I thought I might tear a cartilage.
Buddhadeb Chaudhuri’s studio, however, was vast - an amazing thing to find in Tokyo - so I was able to secure my own personal part of it, moving in and out of the dozen or so positions he insisted we would master if we just kept at it, without drawing too much attention to myself.
My not-yet-wife was better than me, her body more suited to tying itself in knots, but if you want a visual image of my own sorry efforts, picture a 6’ 2”, 200 pound praying mantis trying to disavow his angularity.
Not a pretty picture, right?
And if you don’t like the praying mantis image, try a Swiss army knife.
Buddhadeb Chaudhuri, though, was a good and patient teacher, who moved among his students with an air of calm assuredness, both in himself and in his belief that every one of us could do it.
And his own yoga abilities were breathtaking. He could stand in front of our class on his left leg, for example, his right one up and casually wrapped around his neck, where his left hand would then rest gently atop that foot. It was like watching a heron, fishing along some isolated shore.
He could do anything that stayed firmly within the realm of physical yoga, this young and friendly teacher of ours… but what he couldn’t do, or at least what he didn’t do, was anything that leaked out of that physicality and into yoga’s spiritual realm.
No real breathing exercises, no mind-emptying techniques like what I had tried to do with Zen during those years, and certainly no attempts at out-of-body experiences… He didn’t believe in any of that and so he didn’t teach it to us. It was a little disappointing, maybe, but I was finding new pain thresholds daily, so would not have been able to calm myself enough to try it anyway.
Now, what our teacher did believe in besides physical yoga - deeply and with all his heart - was dancing and dance music.
While other yogis might try to empty their studios of all sound, or maybe infuse them with a low-volumed Ravi Shankar sitar, once we were moving through our various positions, Buddhadeb would invariably disappear into a side room, put on a tape of, oh… say… Stevie Wonder’s Superstition, The Jackson Five’s version of Rockin’ Robin and Tina Turner singing Proud Mary, then come back out wearing white linen pants and a bright red blazer, to practice his dance moves in front of the room’s ubiquitous mirrors, still barefooted because of the tatami.
You get the picture, right?
There we were, our teeth clenched in pain, grimacing our way through “The Cobra” or “The Lotus” or “The Downward-facing Dog,” while Stevie Wonder’s inimitable voice infused the room with “Very superstitious, writing’s on the wall, very superstitious, ladders bout' to fall,” and our yoga teacher bounced around like his life depended on it, very much like he was ‘Stayin’ Alive’ some five years ahead of John Travolta.
And not only was he good at it, oblivious and perfecting his moves with the unselfconscious sincerity of, say, Kermit the Frog when singing to Miss Piggy, but he wasn’t practicing for the hell of it, for every Saturday night he truly did get the fever, and headed off in one or another of his linen pants and blazer combinations to dance till dawn in the nightclubs of Shinjuku.
He might have worked in a yoga studio instead of a paint store, but every inch of him was Travolta during those nights.
You might think I’m making this up but I promise, I’m not. I even have a witness.
And the thing of it was, Buddhadeb liked both me and my witness a lot, never mind the dismal condition of our yoga, and we liked him.
He invited us to stay after our yoga sessions - his curry was great - he came to our house for dinner a couple of times, and once he pulled me aside to ask in a quiet and earnest and worried voice, if I would allow him to invite my not-yet wife to go to an Andy Williams concert with him. He had two tickets and no one else to ask.
Since it wasn’t up to me to do any ‘allowing’, I said “You better ask her,” and he did and they went.
But Andy Williams! The Moon River guy! The most anti-disco crooner you could think of!
Not long after that, when we got married, Buddhadeb came to our wedding reception in traditional white Bengali clothing to stand in the corner on his right leg, his left leg wrapped around his neck and with his right hand resting gently atop that foot.
He got married himself a few months later, to a young Japanese woman whom he met at one of those Shinjuku nightclubs. We went to their wedding, where I had a small part in the ceremony.
I have looked him up on line a few times, once just before writing this essay.
But, though I could find several Buddhadeb Chaudhuris on the World Wide Web, our dear old friend did not seem to be among them.
Postscript…
Thanks to everyone - old friends and new - who came by the Pacific Northwest shop last Saturday during my signing of The Grievers’ Group, or joined me for drinks that evening. I had a wonderful time. I hope you did, too, and I doubly hope that you enjoy the book.
Post-postscript…
My publisher is allowing the electronic version of The Grievers’ Group to be downloaded today only for free! So if you’d like to read the book on Kindle or on your iPad, now would be the time. If you like it, please review in on Amazon.
Some bodies just were not made for yoga. Which makes me wonder why so many people ignore their screaming legs and backs while listening to their yoga teachers. Perhaps we have more masochism in our souls than we usually admit.