The Afternoon Visitors

Dance Lessons

When I was about seven, my mother suggested dance lessons. I was at the age when I had newly discovered the charm of Hindi movies and of the lilting songs that would come over the radio on Vividh Bharati. We did not have television then in India and from the handful of movies that I had been taken to, I recalled the scenes that had accompanied some of these songs and tried clumsily to reproduce the dance movements. Naturally, to my untrained body, these did not come easily and my movements were blindly repetitive and I would twirl around until my head spun and I fell down dazed.

Enthused by my budding interest in music and dance, my parents took me to a series of Indian classical dance recitals that further fired my imagination. We watched dancers perform the traditional Indian dance forms – Bharata Natyam, Kathak, Odissi, Kathakali and so on. I almost bounced in my seat with excitement and tried to commit the action sequences that I was watching to memory. I now had many more impressions to draw upon in my emulations.

To the horror of any purist who may have been around, these distinct and independent classical forms all merged in my mind at some level and I recall my attempts at replicating them later at home. Most of all, I remember trying to reproduce from my memory discordant juxtapositions of the highly expressive Bharat Natyam hand and arm postures with the furiously fast footwork of Kathak, interspersed with the more dainty and understated movements of Odissi.

Then, as my rendition built up to a crescendo, I graduated to the exaggerated swaying, stepping, thundering and thumping movements interspersed with occasional blood-curdling screams that I remembered from the fearsomely attired Kathakali artistes I had seen on stage, until I twirled around and crashed to the floor, ostensibly dead. It seemed to me to be the perfect climax to the whole thing. Oh, what satisfaction and pleasure it brought me! I thought I must be experiencing what the dancers I saw must have felt, looking at life and death in the raw.

It must have been after watching me do these routines doggedly several times (and possibly after silently gritting her teeth, shaking her head and looking upwards at the ceiling) that my mother asked me if I would like to take Kathak dance lessons at the dance school situated up beyond the curve on the road that ran in front of our house, Kohinoor Road. Recalling the breathtaking colors and sweeping graceful movements of the dancers I had seen on stage, clad in shimmering resplendent costumes, glittering jewelry, gossamer veils and wide bands of bells, ghungroos, on their ankles, I said yes without hesitation.

She explained to me in her usual well-informed and objective manner what the dance tradition of Kathak was all about but not really possessing any baseline knowledge about it except to remember that the dance routines of Kathak I had seen on stage somewhat resembled the dances in the film scenes I had been so interested in to begin with, I became quite enthusiastic about it and then, child that I was, forgot all about it when the next thing came along.

But my mother remembered and was as good as her word, inquiring at a local dance school and then enrolling me. She told me about when my first class would be, her expression bright and happy. I think at times she felt that my needs were probably being ignored because my two younger sisters were still practically toddlers, a year and a half apart, and got everyone’s attention most of the time. The thought that she had set up the dance lessons for me so that I could discover a whole new world of experience must have been immensely satisfying. Today, I wonder, did my mother have any grand expectations for me and about what I would be able to do later with the dance experience. Become a dancer of repute? Or at any rate, discover my hidden talent and enjoy it for its own sake? I will never know because we never spoke about this specifically.

We set out for my first dance lesson, walking up the sidewalk from our house on Kohinoor Road, past the makeshift stall selling ganne-ka-ras (fresh squeezed sugar-cane juice) and nimboo-pani (lemonade), past our glorified neighborhood “dhaabha”, the Pritam Restaurant (which film stars often patronized late at night driving up in their sleek imported cars) with its mouthwatering smells of tandoori barbecued meats and other fragrant mughlai dishes that wafted on the cooled air currents that emerged when customers went in or out, up past the row of shops selling fabrics and ready-mades, the toy shop, the local haberdashery, the humble tea-shop and the Iranian restaurant, to the jazzy little shop in a wooden shack that sold imported and smuggled goods from Hong Kong and Singapore. Here we turned into a tiny lane, scarcely noticeable, that wove between the shop fronts and twisted into a narrow passage between the residential buildings that I had never noticed before.

Here, next to a sign announcing the name of the dance school, my mother stopped and shepherded me up a narrow winding staircase on stilts running up the side of one of the buildings that reminded me of an illustration in my copy of Alice in Wonderland with its unexpected and gravity-defying twists, turns and landings. It was really like walking into Alice’s world. There was a sweet floral smell in the air, noticeable but not unpleasant. We could hear the sound of a tabla being tapped and tuned and someone loudly reciting something in rhythm with a beat. We stepped onto a barely existent landing and into a tiny apartment that seemed full of people bustling about.

When we had accustomed ourselves to the scene, I noticed that there were girls my age, younger and older, practicing steps and routines in duos and trios around the room. All of them had ghungroos on, the broad anklets with bells tied around their ankles as I had seen in the movies and on stage, and they were thumping their feet in rhythm with the music wafting around the room and the tablas. Some parents, mostly mothers with younger siblings glued to them edged the wall, watching and offering advice that no one seemed to be listening to. Every now and then, a person or group would stop their steps and movements, walk to the side of the room and take off their ghungroos. People constantly arrived as others left. Everyone seemed to know exactly what they had to do but us.

We stood and waited, trying to catch someone’s eye. Finally, someone did notice us and I was ushered off to a corner where a spare set of anklets was tied on to my ankles. As my mother joined the lookers-on on their side of the room, I found myself grouped with some other new learners. We were shown the basic Kathak steps which involved, then to my untrained mind and now to my possibly faulty long-term memory, thumping one’s feet in a sequence that went something like right-left-right-left and then left again, followed by the starting sequence, over and over and over again.

The young woman who demonstrated the beginner-dancer steps made it look so ridiculously easy and even enjoyable and cathartic as she accelerated to the hastening tempo of the beat and the music and then slowed down again to demonstrate what we were to do. Now it was our turn. We painfully followed suit. Over the next 15 minutes or so, I gave my whole attention to my feet, going back and forth between the steps our teacher continued to demonstrate, speaking aloud the directions, and my own renditions. Somehow, I always stalled when my foot had to do the double beat, left-left or right-right. My mind would go blank and both my feet, in this strange new territory with no prior learning to fall back on, would stop altogether or keep marching without the double-step in between. I recall thinking then that it would be so easy to just keep marching the whole time – left-right, left-right without any break in the pattern. Why did the double step have to come in and disturb the rhythm?

The instructor clucked her tongue, patiently to start with and then increasingly impatiently. I looked at the other girls in my group but they all seemed to have got it. There they were doing the left-left and the right-right perfectly interspersed with the four-regular step. I didn’t know if they were as new to the steps as I was but they seemed to have mastered them nevertheless. The instructor moved some of them to another group which seemed to be involved in trying more complicated stepping routines and tried to bring the rest of us more on par with what she had in mind.

One by one, she expressed satisfaction with the footwork of one, then another, dance aspirant in our group and let them go but by the time, she came back to me, her mouth had set into a grim line. She led me again through the sequence slowly so that I had time to encode the steps into my memory and then faster and faster. I struggled, I panted, I tripped, my legs seemed to get knotted up and cramped. The more I tried to get it right, the worse it got. I was in tears.

My dance teacher led me to my mother and told her that I had to practice the basic steps that she had taught me until I got them right. Until then, I could not join the others or learn anything more. She said that it was entirely up to me and there was no point in my returning for a second class until I had mastered the basics. It was clear that my first Kathak lesson was over and so, on an anticlimactic note, my mother and I started back home.

Now started a new phase. Along with timely reminders from my mother, I began to practice my footwork, first enthusiastically and with hope and, soon, less animatedly as I struggled with aligning my internalized comprehension with getting my feet to move accordingly. Before long, I realized that I was going to have a hard time to get any congruence between these two aspects of my being. My mind told me I had to move my feet in a certain way but my feet had their own mind, so to speak.

I struggled, I practiced, I memorized, I dreamed when I was asleep about doing the steps. And finally, I found that if I recited the sequence fast enough in my mind, I could somehow force my feet to obey without too much argument. When I performed before my mother, her expression told me that I had progressed to the point of not missing too many steps at least. “Good!” she beamed. “I think we can now go back for your next class.”

This time, it felt different. The place looked and smelled familiar and there were fewer people around. Everyone looked more relaxed and there was a general swirl and flow that I warmed to. The young woman who had taught me the steps last time recognized us and came over to get me started off on my second class. This time, when I demonstrated my basic footwork to my dance-teacher, I made fewer mistakes. She nodded with approval but looked doubtful. “Not bad. These are the most basic steps. If you cannot master them, then you cannot be a Kathak dancer. Keep practicing.”

My mother and I looked at each other. My mother must have sensed my silent frustration at the thought of more foot-movement practice for she turned to my dance teacher and suggested that perhaps she could teach me some other movements as well today and then I could practice all the steps and movements at home before the next class. The woman paused as though to consider it and gestured “Come” to me. She interrupted a small group of girls involved in learning upper-body movements as they continued their stepping. My teacher demonstrated some sweeping movements using both her arms which I tried to copy but ended up colliding painfully with the limbs of another girl who glared at me.

The rest of the session did not vary from this earlier pattern. No matter how deliberately I followed the simple connected actions my teacher demonstrated, I always forgot something. When I focused on my arm and hand and torso movements, my feet stood still because I had forgotten to keep them moving to the beat. And when I concentrated on my footwork, my arms flagged at my sides until I remembered that I was supposed to move them in a particular manner. Sometimes, when I moved or twirled around, I did so counter to the others although we seemed to all be following the same directions. I would inadvertently knock the breath out of someone or someone else would tread on my toes or kick me in the shins. I hoped it would get better. My mother reassured me that it would. We went home, with me resolving to get all the movements right but, truth be told, it was all one blur in my mind. I hoped that my mother remembered the steps from watching us.

She said she had paid for a month of classes for me, twice a week. I probably attended almost all but the individual sessions run together in my memory because things did not change or improve much. I remember that one day, I was passed on to another teacher who made a game of it. She told me to imagine that I  was in a flower garden, plucking blooms and demonstrated how I would do so.

Reaching high and pretending to pluck a flower out of the air and putting it in my other palm and then reaching low to pluck another one. Then I was to bring both palms together as though holding the many flowers I had picked, raising them and pretending to scatter them to the winds by spreading my arms outwards. This was fun and I had a good time except that I forgot all about stepping to the music. I went home and even demonstrated it to my tiny sisters who really couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about.

My mother did not go with me to my dance-classes every time. I remember my father taking me on a few occasions and also my grandmother, a couple of times. My grandmother thought that the stairs were perilous and did not want to go there too often in case we both tripped and fell headlong down the stairs together. But after a while, I think we all felt that I had plateau-ed out somehow. I wasn’t learning anything new because I still hadn’t mastered the footwork fully.

The other girls and I were still engaged in occasional and spontaneous unplanned physical skirmishes that left us with throbbing ankles and ribs but with no hard feelings because somehow they accepted that I could not help it. And when the month was up and my mother accompanied me to the last class, it was all plainly on the cards. My original dance teacher did not believe in mincing words. “I don’t think your daughter will become a Kathak dancer. Not everyone can do it. It would be a waste of money and time.”

I think we were all secretly relieved. On our way back, ostensibly to cheer me up, my mother took me the long way home by crossing over at Khodadad Circle to Farmer Bros. Milk Bar where we sipped iced strawberry milk through tall straws and watched the passers-by jostle and double-decker buses lumber through the traffic entering the new flyover. We did not talk about dance lessons again but I kept on with my play and pantomimes on boring afternoons or in surplus moments just before bedtime and entertained my sisters with the flower-plucking sequence I had been taught or the dramatic Kathakali death scene complete with the bloodcurdling scream. For some reason, they both found it hilarious now and would chortle and giggle until they became almost hysterical and out-of-breath.

(c) 2014, PRB

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