SHIVA’S SANCTUARY
By Viva Jones
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Viva Jones
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After three weeks in the retreat in northern India, Abby was ready to leave. She’d had it with day-long yoga and meditation sessions, with austere vegetarian cooking and with the strictly-maintained no conversation rule. All this introspection wasn’t doing her any good. On booking this trip, she’d imagined that after at least ten days she’d have achieved some kind of breakthrough or other: some deep and extraordinary revelation that would rock her very soul (in a good way, she’d hoped) and turn her into the happy and fulfilled person she longed to be.
Instead, Abby feared she was going to die of boredom. She could have slipped into a coma and she wouldn’t have known the difference. The only revelation that had been forthcoming was that she just wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing.
Filled with disappointment, Abby left the centre and took a taxi to the nearest town, where she was due to spend a night before carrying on to Delhi, and her return flight. She felt a failure who’d not managed to get remotely closer to her inner self. Perhaps she didn’t even have an inner self? Perhaps she was just a confused outer shell who drank too much, partied too hard and hadn’t had sex in way too long. She stared bleakly out of the window at a pair of buffalos pulling a cart. Since Steve, her boyfriend of the previous four years, had gone off with another woman, her life had been plunged into a turmoil of self-doubt and negativity she’d hoped this trip would cure. What had she been thinking?
A hiking or a cultural trip would have taken her out of herself, made her new friends, given her inspiration. All that meditation and yoga had simply focused her even more on her unhappiness. She’d hoped she might reach the place where it lifted, changing everything, but fat chance. It didn’t matter where you went, she told herself; you were still stuck with the same old you when you got there.
The taxi took her to the budget hotel she’d chosen from her guide book. It was clean and simple and friendly, and her room consisted of scuffed off-white walls, a single bed and a tiny bathroom with mothballs filling the basin, all of which made it quite luxurious compared to the bleak cell she’d endured at the retreat.
On one wall hung a painting of the God Shiva, a snake draped around his neck. Shiva, she’d learnt from her guide book, had authority over death, rebirth and immortality. So much for my rebirth, she muttered with a wry smile. It was time for her to enjoy her last couple of days in India.
She freshened up and went in search of lunch. If there was any consolation to be had, this trip had been cheaper than she’d expected, and so she considered heading somewhere where she could do that most sinful of things: indulge in a large gin and tonic while eating a decadent buffet meal. She could already imagine that hit of gin reaching the back of her throat, the slice of lemon or lime bobbing against her lips, the sparkling tonic water – like an addict, she needed a fix, and Abby thought she knew just the place.