21. Chapter 16: Mahboula - Mad Woman

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Transcript

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Chapter 16, Mabula, Mad Woman. My yoga philosophy teacher Anvita in Mumbai, India, recently explained to me some of the basics of Samkhya philosophy, from which yoga is derived. There are two main elements of Samkhya philosophy, Purusha, the universal soul, and prakriti, the material world. These concepts are referred to as Drashtha, the witness, a synonym for Purusha, and Drishya, the scene, a synonym for Prakriti, in the Patanjala Yoga Sutra. But they are the same thing. Prakriti can take on many forms. It has 23 manifestations, including the elements, the senses, actions, the mind, and the guna. And Vita explained to me it's as if our soul, our Purusha, has gone to a theater to watch a play. As our soul watches the play, the performers are telling a story, changing outfits and scenes. The soul, Purusha, is witnessing Prakriti change and evolve. This ever-changing performance that Purusha is witnessing is all of the chaos, all of the drama, all of the happenings of our everyday life. According to Yoga Sutra 2.15, everything we experience in life is pain. And it all exists for the sole purpose to lead us towards samadhi or consciousness. Contrary to what many of us feel, there are not events in our lives that are working against us. If we aren't careful and we aren't committed to our practice, we can get sucked into the performance. But if we are engaging with our spiritual practice, then at some point, eventually, the curtains fall. And we realize that we are watching a show. When we become aware of the fact that we are watching a show, we are then able to step out of the cycle of suffering and instead witness the world as it is. At the stage of my life when I was living in Kuwait, I wasn't deep enough into my spiritual practice to understand any of this philosophy. I didn't see it at the time, but I see it now. Everything that I experienced in my 20s served a purpose, and it led me, many years later, to a state of joy and liberation. Life for the wealthy students I worked for, essentially, was like a show. In the same way life for me in Lawrence Park, Toronto was a show. And what's behind every show? A backstage cast and crew, aka Mabula. Kuwait is a unique country because expatriates account for 70% of its population. From grocery store staff to gas station attendants to restaurant waiting staff to doctors, people come to Kuwait from all around the world to perform the jobs necessary to keep the country operating. Most of the poor expatriate laborers lived in Mabula with me and rode buses into the city every day, working 12-hour shifts, sometimes six days a week, to send home a couple hundred US dollars a month. All my life I'd lived in North Toronto, which is, without a doubt, the wealthiest and most privileged neighborhood in the city. I'd heard about neighborhoods like Mabula and Toronto, such as Regent Park or Jane and Finch, but I'd never been to them. In Kuwait, my living situation was reversed. As a teacher in Kuwait, I worked for the wealthiest children in the country, and I rode the bus home at night to live amongst the poorest. I speak often in my yoga classes about clarity and contrast. For the first time in Kuwait, I saw clarity and contrast. I lived clarity and contrast, moment by moment, breath by breath. Being exposed to poverty each day firsthand was an intense experience, and I learned just how much the family, country, religion, and race you are born into shapes your destiny. After a long and tiring day at work, our minibus pulled off Highway 30 at sunset each night to see the harsh realities of life for all the workers in the country. Our bus of teachers would be held up behind a long line of buses full of migrant workers on their way home from work, too. Every few minutes, our bus would come to a halt as another bus in front of us stopped and unloaded. The men in the surrounding apartments lived several men to one shower. And as I watched them race across the road, I imagined they were racing to be the first to line up. From my apartment, I could look out of the window and see men lying on their dorm room bunk beds across the road, ten men to a bedroom. They'd be hanging out the window trying to get cell service to speak to their wives and children at home in India, Pakistan, or Sri Lanka. They might climb up to the rooftop to sit and get some alone time away from their nine roommates. They hung their laundry on the rooftops. They were saving as much money as they could of their$200 a month salary to send home to their wives and children, some of whom they hadn't seen in years. How did all of us teachers end up living in Mabula? The story goes that the owner of the school, a Kuwaiti man, built this apartment tower, the oasis, about seven years prior to me moving there. People said that when our teacher's housing complex ended, it literally lived up to its name, as it was a tower built on sand drifts, an oasis in the desert. You would turn off the highway and drive straight over the sand dunes and pull up to the front gate of the compound. From your apartment window, you could gaze out and look straight over the sandbanks into the Gulf. Originally, it took only a 20 or 30 minute drive from the school to the apartment complex. That was in 2008. In a very short period of time, Kuwait exploded. Mabula became a crowded urban desert with buildings built quickly, yet seemed to be already falling apart. What was once idealized as an oasis away from the city had its own little city built up around it. It became a chaotic, bustling urban setting in its own way. Mad Woman. The fact that our compound was still called the Oasis was ironic to me. Most of the teachers lived inside a walled compound with play areas, barbecues, and a mossy green pool, which was later closed due to rumored hand, foot, and mouth disease being transmitted, and it never reopened. They also had a family of security guards, all five of whom were named Mohammed, who manned a security desk 24-7 and prevented visitors from entering if they were not accompanied by a resident. However, the overflow building that I was living in, the addition, had no such security. At 50 degrees Celsius, it was way too hot for a security guard to stand or sit by the gate all day without a proper office. That meant that the security guard of my building spent more time in his own apartment watching movies than anything else. He had no idea who was coming in and out each day. When you unlocked the fence by reaching your hand through, you'd see his toes poking out from underneath the partially opened apartment door as he lay on his mattress on the floor. That's how you'd know he was there. Because of all the safety concerns, instead of investing in a proper security for the building, the school had made a concentrated effort to hire more male teachers to house in the edition. This made me one of the only women living there. There were 22 apartments in the edition, and every single one housed a single man except for the top apartments. It was as if they put us women at the top to distance us as far as possible from the neighborhood below, with a bunch of men in the apartments in between to keep us safe. Jokingly, I referred to myself as the queen of the edition. My humor was a strategy to make myself feel better about the situation. Rebecca was more in the loop with gossip at the school than I was and told me that a few of the teachers hadn't returned to school after the summer holidays. And so there were some empty apartments in the oasis. These teachers who fled early were called runners. It was most common for teachers to leave at Christmas when the honeymoon phase of culture shock wore off. So they were sometimes called Christmas runners. But teachers left in any season: Christmas, spring break, or summer vacation. So thanks to runners over the summer holidays, there were some empty apartments within the compound. Rebecca helped me get put on the waiting list. Maybe if I was on their radar, then they'd put me at the top of the list to move into the Oasis apartments when one opened up, as it inevitably did. I emailed William, the school director, asking, would it be possible for me to move out of the addition apartment and into the Oasis compound if an apartment becomes available? Not long after I got what I'd wished for, William called me into his office and told me that they had an apartment inside the compound for me. It was a family-sized apartment, which typically weren't given to single teachers. They were reserved for teaching couples with children. But because it was vacant and he knew that I wanted to move, he decided to offer it to me on one condition. I had to agree that I'd move out into a single apartment in the compound in June of the following year. I was so happy. Moving out the following June didn't sound too bad. At least I'd have the place for almost eight months. I visited the apartment on a Thursday night after work and unlocked the door to a huge 70-foot living room. There were three bedrooms and three bathrooms, and there was a large sweeping kitchen. But what was most important to me was not the size of the apartment. It was that I was going to be within the gated community. I bounced into Rebecca's classroom, delighted to share the news. By noon, all of my colleagues knew that I'd been offered the family-sized apartment because the oasis was like an episode of an afternoon soap opera. We all lived in a very small bubble, within which gossip was a favorite activity. People were upset. Apparently, back in June before I'd arrived, they'd had families and couples move out of these apartments because they didn't have enough apartments to go around. Instead of offering the newly available family apartment to one of those couples or families, they offered it to me, a single teacher for no reason. People made inappropriate jokes about what I'd done to get the apartment. These comments made me anxious and upset. I worried so much about what everyone said behind my back. But a part of me was so excited that I just tried to ignore them. I packed up all my things, and on the first day of Eid holidays, I spent the morning moving into my new place. Not long after I moved in, it became evident. Like many of the units in the tower, the air conditioning was broken, and the apartment was crawling with cockroaches. But I was okay with both things. I could wait it out a few days with no air conditioning in such extreme heat until they got around to fixing it. The responsibility was on me to find a way to exterminate the cockroaches, but I optimistically said that I could live with them. It's a family-sized apartment, after all. The cockroaches could be my family. I was just so thrilled to be moving out of the addition and into the main compound. After all, I felt much safer, and now I had a place in this community I so desperately wanted to join. Once I settled into my new place, I'd get up every morning to ride the bus and to work. By this point, I'd sleep in and catch the later ride at six in the morning instead of at 4.45. Driving down the roads, the bus would pass farmers with herds of camels walking in front of the orange and red desert sunrise. The cars would dart in and around each other, racing at 140 kilometers an hour. The eight-hour time difference between Kuwait and Toronto seemed to call even more attention to just how different my life had become from my friends. Every Sunday morning at 6 a.m., I'd be on my way into work when it was 9 p.m. on a Saturday night, Toronto time. I'd refresh my Instagram feed and see pictures of my friends from high school and university at nightclubs in downtown Toronto, big pints of beer in hand. I'd wonder, why did I choose this life when I could have been there instead? But there was something about the fact that I'd made this choice. I wasn't forced to come to the Middle East. I chose it, or it chose me. I didn't want to admit that I'd been wrong, that this would be harder than I thought. So my Instagram became a feed of epic international experiences, giving the appearance that I was having the time of my life when that was hardly the reality. I was moving into a depressive slump, but I didn't want to go home after telling everyone I was moving overseas for two years. I was determined to survive it.