Two characters debate next steps and outcomes while changing their passports in “Yoga.”

Track: “Yoga”
Album: Devil in the Shortwave (2002)

There are two things to take note of in “Yoga.” The first is obvious from the first line, when we learn that these two are doctoring passports in an attempt to escape Bombay. We know we’re in a time before 1995, likely, as Bombay became Mumbai then. We know we’re dealing with unscrupulous characters, again likely, because most aboveboard people don’t have kits to adjust passports. The second thing is revealed in the last verse, as one characters tells the other that one of them “will be all alone someday.”

It all depends on what you believe. The narrator calls the other character’s statement that there is nothing in their way a lie and calls the statement about one, but only one, of them making it out the truth. All we know about this person is that they’re adjusting a passport illicitly. Why would we take their statements after that as truth? Even zoomed out from that, why would we assume they know what’s going to happen next?

“Yoga” unfolds the more time you spend with it in that way. The narrator may be lying, the other character may be lying, neither may be lying, and they may both be wrong or right and not know yet. There are many stories like this over the catalog and John Darnielle loves to create narrators that appear to be omniscient but really only know what they believe is true. On the surface, it’s a song about two people doing what is surely just another crime on a longer list. Below that, it’s people who aren’t sure what’s real anymore and probably ran out of good ideas a long time ago.