No One Told Me Learning Yoga Would Involve Snakes

A year ago, when my family moved to Southern India, my wife and I started taking yoga lessons from a guy named Suresh. At our first class, Suresh asked us why we were studying yoga. He was decidedly unimpressed when I explained that I wanted to be more flexible. “Yoga is not some circus routine you do with your body,” he told me. “It is about aligning the mind, body, breath, intellect, and soul.” It was also, he said, about dying.

Dying?

“Yes,” Suresh said. We must die many times before we actually die — and that way we are forced to find calmness and experience rebirth.” According to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, fear of death is one of the greatest causes of human suffering. The true practitioners of yoga must not only have spines that bend like saltwater taffy, Suresh continued. They must also confront their darkest fears. In Hinduism, the god Bhairava is the physical embodiment of fright. Bhairava, by the way, is typically depicted as a man standing buck-naked with a garland of skulls and a snake coiled around his neck.

The greatest snake catcher in all of Southern India is a soft-spoken 39-year-old man, also named Suresh. One day I saw a snapshot of him in the newspaper handling a king cobra he caught, and I knew he was the man to help me face my fear. I caught up with Suresh one afternoon this spring, after he had met with a group of schoolchildren. As part of his presentation, Suresh had with him a dozen or so snakes, including venomous ones, in burlap sacks slung over his shoulder, Santa Claus-style. He handed the snakes to an assistant, who took them and then sped off in a taxi. Suresh told me that he didn’t have much time to chat. He was a due at a farmhouse where a large python had found its way into a chicken coop.

“Can I give you a lift?” I inquired.

“O.K.,” he said.

We hopped in the car. Suresh sat in the front alongside my driver, who saved me each day from my second-greatest fear in India, death by speeding bus. I rode in the back. “What will we do with the python after we catch it?” I asked.

The python would ride with me, Suresh explained, in the back seat. “Snakes in the Car” — it was like a bad sequel to “Snakes on a Plane.”

I asked Suresh if he could ride in the back seat. He said that he was terribly sorry, but no, he couldn’t, because it would give him motion sickness. “I have a tendency to throw up,” he explained.

A short while later, the road that we were traveling on came to an end, and a well-beaten footpath continued into the jungle. Suresh hurried out of the car and walked briskly down the trail toward the village. I followed closely behind. In the center of the village, several dozen residents had gathered around a chicken coop.

Suresh wasted no time. He opened the door to the chicken coop, stuck his head inside and pulled out a writhing, enraged python. I spun around briefly and saw — true to the spirit of modern India — that nearly every man, woman and teenager in the village was filming the event on a cellphone, capturing the improbable image of the python, the snake tamer and the terrified white man.

Suresh was trying to get the python into a burlap sack, but it was resisting. The snake whipped its head around as if to face me. I focused on my breathing — in and out, in and out — just as I’d practiced in yoga class. For a brief moment — I kid you not — the image of Suresh and the python morphed into the specter of the god Bhairava, with the serpent coiled around his neck.

And then it was over. The python was in the bag; the villagers were clapping. I felt calm.

Very calm.

Suresh looked at me appraisingly.

“O.K.,” I told him. I spoke slowly, blissed-out, feeling as if I could have busted into tree pose and stood like a redwood. “Let’s get the snake in the car.”