Glass-bottomed downward dog

AS TOLD TO BC PIRES

My name is Angela Webster and I went to India for three months, to train as a yoga instructor.

Rishikesh is the world capital of yoga schools. I figured if I wanted to be a chef, I’d go to Paris, so…

I couldn’t really say where in Trinidad I’m “from.” Because I’m Colombian-born and adopted by Trinidadian parents.

I grew up in South but went to Maple Leaf International from age 11-17, then hotel school, then UWI.

When I was 13, my mother found I had too much Maple Leaf lip. I took so much for granted! Like getting picked up and dropped to school from in front of my house. Always having whatever I needed.

So my mother sent me to stay with our housekeeper, Sally, in Siparia.

They didn’t even have a parking space. We had to park in a dirt trace and walk in on foot to a board house on stilts. They had just put in a toilet.

My mother told me, “You were not given up by your family to become a spoiled-brat privileged trust-fund kid.”

She wanted me to understand the culture of the majority of Trinidadians, not the minority.

For the past two years, I’ve been trying to find the word to describe the feeling of meeting my biological mother.

There is no word. You feel detached and attached all at the same time.

I was waiting for my mother to arrive and I stopped talking and said, “I smell my mother.”

She had never held me. I had not been laid on her body because she haemorrhaged literally as I was born, so they took her away to save her life.

So it was odd, but I really could smell her.

If you ever saw the movie Lion, that scene where she meets her son shows what a mother goes through.

She looked at me and didn’t see a grown young woman. She saw a freshly-born infant.

She counted my fingers and took off my shoes to count my toes. Pulled at my ears, nose, lips; a little bit more and she would have put a pacifier in my mouth! She held on to me even when I wanted to go to the bathroom.

I was like, “I’ve been doing this for myself for a while!”

It felt like one of those pieces of domino artwork, and the last domino falls: it was a completion.

I’ve seen drunken men at Carnival. You push them off and that’s the end of that. Men in India are different. They look straight into your eyes and you can SEE what they are thinking, you understand exactly what they want to do to you!

It feels disgusting. To be taken out of your own without being physically touched.

And you wave at them to stop and they just continue to stare at you.

A Trini man will look away. No human emotion passes across an Indian man’s face but evil. For a complete stranger to have that kind of control over you is scary!

When you get out of the train in New Delhi metro, they have coloured lines on the platform that you follow where you need to go, like most countries. There was a pink line that was marked, “After you have been raped, follow this line for immediate assistance.” Not, “If”, you know, but, “After”. Not possibly. Certainly. Like, “It’s gonna happen.”

I was working at the (yoga- and New Age-friendly) Kariwak Village Hotel and I went out on a reef tour in Tobago with a friend who has a glass-bottomed boat. I realised I’d spent the day with him in his “office.”

An English yoga teacher at Kariwak, Wenche Beard, told me I’d be a really good teacher. I thought about my friend’s glass-bottomed boat office.

“I like doing yoga,” I thought, “I could go to work barefoot every day.”

The thing I love about doing yoga at Rishikesh is that I was able to find my own rhythm in teaching.

The bad thing was getting sick. About 20 of us in the class got the water parasite giardia, from brushing our teeth using Indian water.

In India, they think the West Indies is a country. I gave up trying to explain Greater and Lesser Antilles.

They hear “West Indies” and they think, “Chris Gayle.” They know the West Indies is Chris Gayle’s country.

I have not one regret about doing my yoga course in India. I’m on my glass-bottomed boat now, nice and barefoot.

You can pick out the Trinis in a crowd but you can’t say what it is that stands out. It’s just a certain level of warmth, a certain aura that we all carry within us.

TT is sweet T&T to me, even if it’s not so sweet these days.

People all over the world save all year to come and spend five days in the Caribbean. We live here.

Read a longer version of this feature at newsday.co.tt