I weave through winding roads; a thin gray slash stitched through verdant, towering trees. A luscious sea of grass opens and closes with each turn.
I prescribe myself a day’s dose of Tibetan flute music to steel my nerves.
The horizon slowly reveals a gray slab puncturing the grass sea. I never imagined the prison would look like giant, unbroken staples—freshly released from its box.
I arrive at the front gate. A giant black eye, perfectly smooth, unblinking, stares at me.
“Kia ora?” I say to the void.
I had never seen a CCTV camera this close.
The rest of my journey is a storm of sound, a swirling cacophony.
Fluorescent beams flood the labyrinthine fortress. Jarring voices. Metallic buzzing. The battle is fierce—unending; any ground gained, pyrrhic.
I move through echoing halls in eerie silence. Fragments of men ricochet—a cough, a name called, boots—as bodies traverse this alien fortress.
After the shortest eternity, I reach the unit where my students live. Beneficiaries of a centuries-old tradition. Who knew whispers on a leaf could traverse unbirthed horizons?
I am met with eyes surrounded by tattoos and thin sleep, earpieces and vigilance—all underlined with a crease of suspicion, curiosity, or both.
“What are you doing here?” a Corrections officer asks.
Curiosity.
I look at my yoga mat, realising how tightly I’m side-hugging it. Hoping it will answer on my behalf.
It doesn’t.
“Yoga,” I say, with strange confidence.
“Yoga, aye? Do you know where it comes from, brother?”
Suspicion.
“It depends on the lineage, I guess?” I reply, cheekily.
Curiosity.
Why is he asking? Can he tell my teacher training certificate is only a few months old? Is it obvious my downward-facing dog is an anatomic anomaly?
Suspicion.
“India, brother. It comes from my people.”
The door opens. All eyes on me. A flurry of greetings rushes in.
A nod.
“Good morning.”
“Kia ora.”
“Sup.”
“Yeeeeeyuh.”
“Brother.”
“Yo.”
“Ayeeeee?”
“Cheaaaa—pilates, is that us?”
A tall, large man steps out of the flurry. They are all tall and large; he is taller and larger.
“You want a hand with that, bro?”
He means the plastic box at my feet, brimming with mats and blocks. It is not heavy.
I look at the box. I look at him. I look at Whaea.
Half a second. Maybe less.
He sees it.
Something moves across his face and settles, the way a door closes without slamming.
“All good,” he says. “I’ll just walk with you.”
“Nah—yeah. Please.” I push the box towards him too fast, my ears hot. “It’s heavier than it looks.”
“Sweet.”
He lifts it with one hand.
It is not heavier than it looks.
We walk. He asks me nothing for four steps.
“Tama.”
“Rod.”
“I know, aye. She said.”
Four more steps. The corridor turns.
“You done this in here before?”
“First time.”
“Chur.” A pause. “You’ll be right.”
He is carrying my box and telling me I’ll be right.
We trail behind Whaea, my eccentric guide in this steel fortress. Worldly, streetwise, unhurried in a building where nothing else is. In other words: a guru; a mother, a wahine toa.
We land in a room as wide as four poker tables. The men filter in, buzzing with chatter laced with sizzling nerves. Whaea’s voice slices through the air—a clean cut.
She says one man’s name and the room rearranges itself around it. My hands are confused twins in adjacent supermarket aisles—our parents lost in a cloud of pixels—unsure where to go.
Whaea is a surefire distraction. All eyes on her.
“Alright guys. Here’s the deal. Six weeks. Yoga with Rod.”
It’s Rodolfo. Rod is my dad’s name. I bravely correct her in my mind.
“You go to at least four classes, you get a sausage roll as a prize.”
“Yee!”
“Shot, whaea!”
“Easy!”
“Thank you!”
“You guys also get a certificate.”
The room shakes. An explosion of cheers. Joy bounces off the walls.
Elation.
Whaea’s presence holds the space. The moment she leaves, it plummets.
I am in freefall.
All eyes on me.
Curiosity. Suspicion. Elation.
All of it, now a grayscale kaleidoscope.
The sounds arrive at once. Ringing laughter. Bumbling baritones. Foreign announcements surging through speakers. Faint buzzing from my earpiece. Everything ricocheting off the walls. No escape.
Swallowed whole.
Inside the wire.
In the belly of a hungry giant of steel and stone.
Frozen. Muted. Nothing. No thing…
And then: a churning in my chest. Slow. Unstoppable. A ripping.
Excavated. My throat closes around something with edges. My eyes go hot before I understand why.
Time begins anew. The world before me blooms with a cataclysm of colour. More vivid. Greener greens; redder reds; bluer blues. I don’t know for how long, but I am smiling. My heart is smiling too.
The word feels too distant to be true—yet closer than any other:
bliss.
I am happy.
My jaw has come unclenched. I don’t know when.
For the first time—before it was taken from me eons ago, and I was told to forget—I feel peace.
“Kia ora everyone. Before we start, should we do introductions?”
A blur of nods.
“Sweet. Ko Rod tōku ingoa. My name’s Rod. (Well, I guess it is now). Nō Piripīni ōku tīpuna. Engari, ko Aotearoa tōku wā kāinga. I was born in the Philippines, but I call Aotearoa my home.”
Smiles grow on a row of faces.
As each student shares their name, whakapapa, the place they call home, their faces grow brighter—glowing under the warm spotlight of recognition.
Tama from Tauranga. Lived there all his life. Olly, or “O”. Moved around heaps, but whakapapa to Northland. Rangi from Kirikiriroa.
“Mātuas, please grab a mat and two blocks from the box.”
Questions fire as quickly as mats and blocks leave the box—questions I hadn’t really thought about; questions I didn’t know I needed to know the answers to; questions I believed didn’t matter.
“Which side of the mat is on top? The bit with the logo?”
“What are these blocks for? For your bumcheeks, aye? Hahaha!”
“Is there a difference between these mats, Rod?”
“Oh, those are one of those vegan things, aye? Those sustainable ones? Good as for Papatūānuku!” a student says, pointing to my cork yoga mat.
“Ah yeah. It’s pretty good for the planet. It’s made from cork, which comes from trees that naturally shed it.” I say it with rehearsed, self-convincing confidence—my well-worn justification for buying yet another yoga mat, despite being a broke student with two perfectly good (non-cork) mats in tow.
They seem more convinced than me.
The rest of the class is filled with similar surprises—small flashes that show how woefully unprepared I am beyond the conventional, Western, serene, incense-filled studios.
“Come onto your hands and knees, shoulders over wrists, hips over knees. Take a deep breath in to settle. Tabletop pose. As you inhale, lift your tailbone and let your belly soften toward the floor. Gently pull your chest forward between your arms and broaden your collarbones. Let the spine lengthen from tail to crown. Cow pose. As you exhale, press the floor away and round your back like an angry cat. Draw your belly gently in toward your spine and let your head drop naturally. Cat pose.”
As the students begin to flow between these poses, quiet giggles start.
“Moooooooooo… meowwwwwwwwww… moooo… meowwwwwwww…”
A ripple starts in me that cannot be contained. My laughter is gasoline to a spark.
Then the room is ablaze—an inferno of joy.
“That’s it, mātuas. You got it. Inhale, moo; exhale, meow.”
Our joyful uproars feel almost caustic against the walls around us. I swear the boundaries—within and without—are melting into a haze.
My eyes: a misty gaze; softening, squeezing out liquid debris. A mournful smile I do not remember starting.
Home again.
I teleport to a tender past: childhood days in my village in Mindoro, Philippines. Seven years old, galloping in the grass, I notice subtle murmuring in my periphery—a preverbal spycraft I learned in the womb. The gift of precisely locating the source of a beloved’s suffering, all the while making oneself invisible. Minusing myself—so I add nothing to another’s hurting.
And so: I still myself, readying my mathematics in response to another’s agony, as though suffering could be quantified.
I slow my breath, searching for the stirring. Beneath blades of grass: a lone dragonfly. It wriggles like a worm. It is doing magic—conjuring a reality where it has wings to fly; where its birthright to soar remains unripped by bored children playing God, whose crude calculations believe that one life of flight subtracted, adds one moment of fancy to a day of boredom—as though happiness could be quantified.
In this gray maze, where each step turns radiant sunshine into piercing shafts of light, everything echoes. The thousand jaws of this metal behemoth bite into air; synthetic voices crackle viciously—a hornet’s nest kicked with clockwork precision.
So what does the heart do, magnificently relentless in its humming—the birdsong of its longing?
How does a caged bird fly with broken wings?
It flutters in its dreams. Brittle bones flap; feathers wanting. It sings and lets its soul float instead.
Despair may echo in these walls, but hope echoes too. Songs swish like symphonies—each songbird uniquely showing its colours. The walls carry the winds of joy.
Tama’s sounds reach the shores of Tairāwhiti. He breathes for the first time—again and again—atop a cork mat, one hand flat on his sternum like he is checking something is still there.
“O” bristles and bounces with questions about the body: how bones and muscles shapeshift between silhouettes; how all of it affects function and form. He tweets air currents of wonder.
Rangi’s mumbles are more subtle. His song sneaks, then catapults. No stern and sombre yoga teacher is safe.
“In triangle pose, we will all look different, and that’s okay,” I reassure the men.
“Mine looks like a circle. Still okay, Rod?”
Inside the wire, Rangi freely mines a most luxurious good—laughter.
Through the glass in the door, the officer watches.
He catches my eye. Lifts his chin.
His question has been in the room the whole time, sitting on the mat beside me. I have nothing to put next to it.
He moves on.
As the class nears its end, I guide them into savasana, the final pose—corpse pose.
“Lie long on your mats; arms by your sides; fingers spread. Relax the shoulders; take a few deep inhales through the nose, then open the mouth to sigh it out. We’re here for three minutes. If you’re comfortable with it, begin to close down the eyes.”
A few seconds pass.
Then they shift and spring to a seat—backs tall, eyes alert.
“Mātuas, we’re here for three minutes.” Their eyes dart everywhere else but on me.
So I lie down anyway.
Slowly, I lower myself onto my back, flat on the mat, and close my eyes—first.
“Together, mātuas, let’s take a few deep breaths.”
For the next three minutes, I lie there on my back. Long. Arms by my sides. Relaxing my shoulders. Taking a few deep inhales through my nose. Mouth open, sighing it out. Eyes closed.
Somewhere to my left, a body lowers itself onto a mat. Unhurried. Like a man putting something down.
If the perfectly smooth black eye on the ceiling had a mouth, it would be agape—jaw hanging in disbelief as it watched me lying there, eyes closed, in front of ten men in a New Zealand prison.
If anyone asked me to show my work—how I arrived at this figure—I’d be at a loss. For me, it was never about the maths. Plus, it makes zero sense why anyone would ask.
No one asks a bird why it flies.
So there I lie, modelling a makeshift metamorphosis. My voice starting up this dawn chorus.
I sit up—three minutes long gone.
And sometime in those minutes, they’ve followed me down.
Now there they lie, nestled in their self-stitched stillness.
I cue them to make their way to a seat to close their practice.
Yet there they remain.
I am met with the loudest silence I’ve ever seen.
Still, they remain. Chests rising and falling, eyes dancing under closed eyelids.
I soften my eyes and listen close.
And in the distance, a hum.
It grows louder and louder into unmistakable whispers of wingbeats.
Week six. One student.
The rest have been moved—other units, other prisons—or released. Nobody tells me this in any official way; I hear it from the men and the staff, mostly in passing, mostly as a general statement. A year of teaching inside now, more than two hundred students, and this is the pattern. The room you start with is never the room you finish with.