Viparyaya

The bug wasn’t particularly vile-looking. It had a hybrid quality: part cockroach, part ladybug. The woman sitting next to me this morning trapped it with her travel mug.

We were at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, seated on autumn-colored carpets, waiting for a lecture by TKV Desikachar. Every Saturday, if I’m not traveling, I head to the school to hear its founder talk about yoga. His audience is a Benetton ad, a congregation of lithe yoga students from far-flung countries. In this crowd, a bug can take liberties. “Squish” is a dirty word. On the scale of criminality, it’s somewhere between sweetening your tea with Splenda and snacking on foie gras.

Her containment strategy satisfied me. I was glad it was her mug and not mine.

Several minutes passed, and then I saw this Prius of a bug on my bag. It was crawling quickly and too close for comfort. If we hadn’t parked our shoes outside, I might have reached for one. Instead, I put my Yoga Sutra book in its path. The bug climbed aboard.

I tapped the book on the floor and readied the cup. The bug hung on. Tap tap tap. Still, it clung. TAP TAP TAP.

My tapping turned my neighbor’s head at exactly the moment when the bug dropped to the floor. She saw the bug on the floor. She witnessed my last furious taps. The look of horror and disgust that crossed her face conveyed her conclusion: killer.

No, I wanted to say, I didn’t kill it. See, it’s here under your mug, alive and well. But by then, Mr. Desikachar’s lecture had started.

I missed his opening remarks. I was busy worrying about the stranger and what she thought of me. I was readying my post-lecture defense. When I finally tuned in, I realized he was talking about us: me, her, the bug. Mr. Desikachar was talking about distorted perception. Wrong seeing. In yoga philosophy, this wrong seeing is the fault of the mind. Our minds react, interpret, draw conclusions. A person with a clear mind – a yogic mind – draws the right ones. The rest of us, well, we just think we do.

I sat there smug. My neighbor – oh, humanity! – had misinterpreted what she’d seen. In Sanskrit, such misapprehension is called viparyaya, and the aim of yoga is to quash it. What did I care what this viparyaya-afflicted dame thought of me? I knew I wasn’t a bug killer.

Except that I am. I kill bugs all the time. The ant motels JJ sent guard the corners of my bedroom. I attack tick-like creatures and gauzy nests with fistfuls of toilet paper. I recently added a Rechargeable Mosquito-Hitting Swatter to my arsenal. It looks like a badminton racket and delivers death by electric shock. Sparks fly when swatter meets mosquito, and, I’ll admit, the crackle-pop gives me a thrill.

I am a killer of bugs. And sometimes I use Splenda. And I care what people think, so I do these things furtively. And, you know what, the bug died anyway. My neighbor lifted her cup at lecture’s end, and the cockroach/ladybug didn’t scamper. It wriggled a leg in that half-dead way. I like to think it ran out of air. In her cup.