Little Yogis

On Saturday I morph from social worker to yoga teacher. In the morning I teach yoga at a school for kids from the slums, and in the afternoon I teach the wonderful young women at the Soma home. This is four classes in total, and the two different locations are at entirely opposite ends of the city. Thanks to Kolkata's metro (which for many years caused total mayhem during its construction) all this means is short quick journeys squashed into a moving sardine tin, and then a couple of beautiful walks through two totally different areas. During my morning walk I pass a small market over spilling from the pavement and into the traffic of the road, leading towards a huge playing field rimmed by equally huge pipes. The pipes suggest a recent move to upgrade Kolkata's sewage system from one constructed by the British at the turn of the century to serve a population of 600,000. Today the same pipes are being used and the population is bordering on fifteen million. The new pipes have been waiting to be laid for months, and in the meantime, a few resourceful individuals have taken to living inside them, with bedding piled high, and portable stoves at the entrance. Inside the playing field lives many families, who during the winter months can enjoy dry days and nights, free from the darkness of the plastic tarpaulin rigged against the monsoon rains. All across the fields are boys and young men, showing their loyalty to the national game of cricket, as their sons and younger brothers cheer them on, or improvise their own mini versions on the parallel streets through the aid of rolled up plastic bags as a makeshift ball and broken branches as bats.

Tala Park school is situated next to the playing field and educates many of the children who live in its bustees. The school is ran by Calcutta Rescue, which despite its unfortunate name is an internationally funded organisation committed to reducing the health and social costs of poverty. Unlike many other of Kolkata's NGOs, Calcutta Rescue does not depend on foreign volunteers or function solely through providing free hands outs. The few volunteers who do work there have a mandate to share their professional skills by training the organisations staff and implementing improvements where possible. For example, their Austrian chemist oversees the stocktaking and distribution of medication. There is a teacher from Poland who trains the local teachers on innovative methods including how to control the children without resorting to physical abuse. There is a special needs social worker from the USA who works alongside the local team of doctors and counselors to share new knowledge and techniques.

Calcutta Rescue provide education to over 500 children from the slum areas. The children are given two meals a day to try and discourage truancy and improve levels of concentration. There are mobile clinics, outreach programs and a clinic specifically for TB patients and a general clinic which includes a section for Mother and Child providing lessons on nutrition and hygiene. All patients receive reimbursement for their transport costs and a bag of dry food including lentils and rice. Any medicine is provided free of charge. Calcutta Rescue also operate a leprosy clinic, which consists of a large canvas tent that is erected and dismantled every day, due to the community fear of creating a permanent leper colony. The clinic provides the patients with government funded medicine, the full course of which can stem the progression of the disease, preventing further physical mutation and protecting family and friends from contamination. They run an arsenic mitigation program and a vocational training centre, where unemployed men and women (including widows and different-abled people) make a selection of handicrafts for sale at a weekly event held by volunteers in Sudder Street.

When I returned to Kolkata in November, I was invited to teach yoga to the children at the Tala Park school. The teachers were desperate for the kids to have some physical activity but employing a yoga teacher was beyond their already stringent budget. I have taught yoga to kids all over the place – in fields, in gardens, museums and occasionally in the more orthodox yoga studios, but at Tala Park one of the major challenges was the restriction of space. The school has two class rooms which are both equally tiny. Although I was offered a class of sixty children, it was logistically impossible for the children even to have enough space to turn around, so instead we divided the class into two. Now perhaps for sitting on the floor and studying this is plenty of room for thirty little bodies, but when it comes to stretching out and jumping into downward dogs all chaos breaks lose as hands and feet intermingle and individual bodies become disguised in a mass of limbs.

Although my students are young (around five and six years old) they are incredibly eager, and their happiness is contagious. Even during the times I feel I should be working with Deepa or am exhausted by the prospect of four classes to teach, after moments of being with the kids I am smiling and laughing and unaware of the flying time. The most appropriate word to describe the classes is 'hilarious'. The little yogis and yoginis have total concentration and they all try really hard to follow the poses. Our audience is the school's cooks and cleaners who peer through the iron bars of the windows, studying our movements, smiling widely and occasionally trying to imitate. Although the children cannot speak more than one word of English ('Hello'), and my Bangla is restricted (namo pa, oto pa, namo haat, oto haat – leg up, leg down, hand up, hand down) thanks to the committed translation of their class teacher, they all end up copying some version of the required asana. What is particularly amusing is that the kids loyally follow every move I make. So if I turn around to show them what the pose looks like from behind, all thirty kids will turn around. Meanwhile, the teacher has given me total control, and will translate only what I tell her to, meaning that if I have not noticed that the kids and me are now sitting back to back, that is how they will remain until I turn around again.

The balancing poses also require a great deal of creativity, otherwise all of the children will automatically lean out to their neighbor creating a domino effect of falling giggling bodies. The one culprit tends to be one little boy whose trouser zip is always broken, so in order to preserve his young modesty he insists on trying to do the tree pose with this trousers half way down his bum, preventing him from fully lifting his leg and instead toppling to the side and taking his little swaying friends with him. Now I try to preempt the collapse and ferry them over to the walls. Once one has achieved the pose I will be called over to verify and congratulate, bringing with it a stream of demands from every child in the room, as each one wants me to personally affirm their postures. Another winner is the 'lion pose', where the children have to kneel down and lean forwards, sticking out their tongues and roaring like a lion. This leads to sincere and dedicated 'RAHs' from the children but leaves the class teacher in total confusion as to why I would risk such potential anarchy. Watching the kids jump into full lotus reflects their experience in squatting and a life time of sitting on the floor rather than in more restrictive chairs.

Even the most shy of the children are able to contort their bodies into whatever pose I imagine, creating smiles and pride where perhaps there has been a previous drought. The class teacher commented how yoga 'evened' out her pupils. The more disruptive were calmed down by their determination to do the harder poses, while the kids who struggled academically glowed through their yogic successes. We end the class with a series of finishing poses including sitting in full lotus and humming 'om'. The children all close their eyes, with their hands aptly turned into chin mudra, while 'omming' with the most peaceful and genuine sincerity, leaving me with one eye searching for the giggles which never come. Afterwards they surround me to take my hand and bring it to their forehead as a very formal sign of respect and thanks.

Despite the irony of teaching yoga to Indian children, all of whom seem to have an innate flexibility which I can only dream of; it is an absolute privilege to share my Saturday morning's with such beaming and bright little people.