Voices
gered one of the teachers, an athletic-looking Texan who felt the
integrity of the member line was
compromised. Soon, she was saying the word “scam” a lot.
Clearly my fun facts were not
diffusing any latent tension. I
tried to discreetly melt away. The
rapper made that hard. “Thanks
for the tip!” he shouted.
Back home, anxiety was being
relieved. “You’re a great mother,” Farida reassured the mom.
“They’ll thank you some day
when they know what it is they
saw.” Eventually the line opened
up, and we moved in view of the
warehouse. “Good for the kids to
see something different,” Matt
whispered to me.
We wound through the final
stretch, a maze outlined by those
stretchy bands used in airports.
Farida reminisced about the years
she roomed with Jim Morrison’s
lover, Pamela Courson, in the sixties. “Pam,” she called her. “Jim
Morrison’s Pam.” Soon, Farida
was designing long white sheaths
for Pam to wear. The conversation
took an obvious turn. All of us
agreed that yoga is great.
By the time we got to the guard
whose job it was to determine
how many should be let into the
MALLIKA
RAO
HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
room to wait their turn inside,
there was no question. “Six,” Matt
said firmly, when the guard asked
how many were in his group. He
had entered a single man. Now he
was a patriarch.
Inside, the grid shone with refracted light. We entered together.
Farida stretched into a standing
yoga pose and the rain opened like
One of the little girls
started to cry. “I hate it,” she
said, pointing to the drops.
a curtain around her. I reached
out to touch a line of water — it
was there and gone. The menacing
sweep in the lower Himalayas was
thousands of miles away. There
was no danger here. An expensive
Canon could safely be held up and
clicked — as Matt was demonstrating just then.
One of the little girls started to
cry. “I hate it,” she said, pointing to
the drops. We smiled ruefully above
her head as if we knew something
she didn’t. Outside, the line
was six hours long.
Mallika Rao is an arts and entertainment reporter at The Huffington Post.