When the World Makes Space

The first yoga class I ever taught lasted a week.
For seven late-winter days there was a weight on my shoulders—
the feeling of a parachute forgotten, even though the free fall had already begun.
Drifting alongside it was the ghost of impostor syndrome,
perhaps revealing something truer than I was ready to see.

As Friday afternoon approached, both began to fade—
partly because the fear of forgetting my lines drowned out everything else.
When the moment finally came, there was only a person named “teacher,”
facing her own parachute phobia, rehearsing lines that would soon prove unnecessary.
Tealights burned in lotus-shaped holders. Trams rattled down the street.
Every cell focused on looking harmonious.

As the clock neared six, the door opened.
Two shy students stepped in—apologetic and as nervous as the teacher himself,
only more honest about it.

From the very first, pressured mantra,
it was clear that the clock on the wall wasn’t measuring time
but the credibility of each passing minute—
how long I could keep performing the role of a teacher.
The flames trembled as if trying to breathe for me.
The counting of breaths didn’t flow, it imitated flow.
In that moment marketed as “light,”
there was a heaviness that made everything denser, holier, and more serious
than any moment could ever bear.

Both students followed along dutifully through the whole play—
a proof that I could act as if I were someone.
An hour later they thanked me politely,
and I never saw them again.

When the door closed, the room listened to its own breath.
The mind replayed lines already brushed aside
by life’s own raw authenticity and spontaneity.
The candles kept burning. Their shadows shifted on the wall
as if searching for someone who might notice them.

That was the beginning of a twenty-year tide—
a dialogue between teaching and its undoing,
where the need to be seen and the built-in fear of disappearing
kept folding into one another.
At times, both vanished into the brightness of nothing.

And when the candles finally went out in that late-winter evening,
even the dim light was enough to see clearly.

.

The night in Mumbai was dark, loud, and humid.
Car horns still echoed though the day had already turned.
The air was thick with the scent of chai stalls,
the puttering of rickshaws, and music drifting from open car windows—
a familiar yet endlessly bewildering canvas
where the stories of night wanderers wove together
like warm smoke in the wet air.

Sudden brakes pulled me out of half-sleep, again and again.
In the back of an old rattling van, I felt like any other cargo—
something being delivered express from one place to another.

Delhi’s fog had blocked the landing,
so I was in Mumbai, on my way to a hotel whose name I didn’t know.
Nor did I know much else: not my new flight time,
not who to ask, or even whether there was anyone to ask.
Apps weren’t yet the answer to everything—
least of all Indian airlines.

When the van finally stopped after countless halts,
I was left on a worn red carpet leading through foggy glass doors
into the hotel lobby.
The car door clicked shut softly behind me,
its exhaust adding one more layer to the night’s cocktail.

A dim, bare bulb glowed in the center of the ceiling.
The night’s circus poured in through the windows,
and my own existence seemed to sink beneath it.

My flight to Europe had likely already departed—
an empty window seat in the back rows,
an extra meal tray with my name on it.
A name that no longer seemed to appear on any list.

I sat on the edge of the bed and listened
to the old air conditioner laboring in despair
against an impossible opponent.
If I stayed long enough,
there would be only the request to leave—
the checkout deadline.
A command to depart,
without any invitation to arrive.

Questions rose to the surface and lingered in the damp air—unanswered.
How long could I wander through Mumbai’s night without a name,
without anyone noticing?
Could I simply stay—become one of the many stories
that vanish into the city’s endless movement?
Would I lose something if I stopped separating myself
from this night, this city?
And through whose eyes would the world then see me?
Would my story stop if no one told it?
Would I cease to exist—
or exist even more?

I turned off the light and fell into exhausted sleep—
a sleep without Mumbai’s night, without the weight of having to arrive.
A sleep where, mercifully for a moment, I could disappear—
and not only from the flight.

.

The first light of dawn crept through the curtain—
grey, hazy, and gently revealing.
The rickshaw driver slept curled on the backseat like a cat.
Somewhere, planes were taking off and landing,
but no one was yet missing me.
“Good morning, sir.”
To the unsmiling waiter delivering breakfast,
I was faceless—one sir among many.

The pale morning light revealed a new softness
that had entered the world overnight.
As if I had simply shifted direction and place
when the wind turned.
I hadn’t fallen off a passenger list,
nor vanished faceless into the Mumbai night—
it was more that all meaning, urgency, and importance
had collapsed in on themselves,
and I with them—
as if the idea of “me” had, for a moment, forgotten itself.
And from that forgetting, a strange peace was born.
As if disappearing was just another name for being.

With the rising sun came a new fog—unannounced, unapologetic, real.
It filled the streets and runways, covering signs, directions, destinations.
For a moment everything looked the same—
as if the world had exhaled heavily.

Hours later, a faint inhale began.
I was someone again—
a person in a window seat on the back row, existing.
The foil-wrapped palak paneer carried my name.
The flight attendants smiled in welcome,
unaware of how long I’d been gone,
missing from their lists.

When the fog lifted,
the double-decker giant rose into the air—
its engines breathing heavily,
climbing upstream in slow motion.

.

That slow ascent against the current
reminded me of a Friday afternoon in late winter.
A trace of that memory had resurfaced over the years—
sometimes as a gentle reminder of life’s absurdity,
sometimes as an echo of the mind’s strange alchemy.
An alchemy that can turn nearly everything
into the heavy metal of selfhood—
worthiness, success, belonging,
and the need to appear right—
all melted into a single, merciless metric.

The night in Mumbai had ended in a moment of lightness—
like a dream that had swept everything unnecessary away.
A moment without a name to defend,
no place left to reach,
no one to witness who I was—or wasn’t.
Only the edge of a bed, a ceiling light,
and the old coughing air conditioner—
whose steady rhythm held together, for a while,
whatever was left.
The need to know, to fix, to be seen
had merged into the city’s steady pulse.

And when nothing argued back anymore,
when nothing defended anything imagined,
the moment felt real—
like those fragile, luminous threads in the river of life
that keep humming quietly inside us.
Those in-between frequencies where the “I” dissolves
and life remembers itself.
Like fog rising and retreating—
without permission, persuasion, or the need to be someone special.
Lightly, and so truly
that the whole world makes space for it.

And in those moments,
I can still feel that small crack of a Friday evening in late winter—
a flicker of something weightless,
behind the story of who I thought I was.
The moment when no one was watching anymore—
and the candles went out,
but even in the dark,
there was still enough light to see.

…….

If something in this kept breathing inside you,
perhaps we're walking the same path.
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