After a night’s sleep, in my sub-human state, in the half-hour of ‘Yog Nidra,’ I find absolute bliss. I am neither awake nor asleep then. In a 24-hour cycle, this ethereal 30-minute period is what I value the most.
That is when my metabolic rate slowly rises. One of my eyes opens a little to assess the dawn’s early light and quickly shuts. A yawn stretches my lower jaw to the fullest capacity and I mumble a prayer to thank the almighty. In that horizontal position on the bed, my blood circulation goes up gradually as my mind races to push up my torso, urging me to get going.
With morning ablutions done, walking shoes on, I go out the front door to receive the required vitamin D from the sun.
The neighbourhood park is bathed in sunlight. The wind swishes through the canopy of trees. There are dewdrops on the bushes and palm fronds. Companions at dawn are along the jogging track of the park.
Young and old, male and female, all of them are appropriately geared for exercise— they are all earnest.
Each one is familiar. I don’t greet, I don’t chatter, I don’t know their names, and they don’t know mine either. As I huff and puff, I give them mental names purely by superficial observation.
“Today ‘dhoti-clad man’ has not come,” I say to myself, and recall that he is probably older than me. “And oh, there’s ‘fancy t-shirt’ is here, he is wearing one with the Harry Potter logo on it.” I wonder about the blood circulation of the teenager I named ‘STJ’ (Super Tight Jeans) but today she was in early and was already on her way out as I entered the park.
Many wear headphones. From the one I get an audible robotic sound, I call this one ‘miss robotic’. Some mothers discuss maids, ayahs and lunch boxes so I think of them as ‘lunch box recipes’.
One group is forever discussing their bodily pain, ills, and chills so they are all ‘ill chillies’. Then there are the loud-mouthed fellows who discuss politics, they are only two but they are raucous.
Most of them walk faster than me so I am often overtaken while I do my three rounds. They are named ‘long hair overtaker’, ‘short pants overtaker’, ‘huff-puff overtaker’. Most go clockwise but two go counter-clockwise so this pair is named ‘first one’ and ‘second one’.
Some do yogasanas and others do physical exercises. One yoga fellow audibly chants the Patanjali invocation shloka “Yogen Chittassya Padenah Vacha...” and I mentally label him ‘yogeshwar’.
The one who does isometric exercises is ‘isometric lady’. ‘Mr rope skip’ skips rope. Do companions at dawn give me a mental label? Let’s see... they might label me ‘baldy’, ‘taklu’ shining dome or some maybe just ‘fatty’.