Beloved Strangers (11 page)

It didn’t take long to discover that my joints, unlike my voice, were stiff, awkward and resistant. Symmetry and balance were completely missing in my limbs. I could easily carry a rhythm on my lips but had none in my feet. I was drawn to the beauty of the dance but I was running a fool’s errand in trying to be a dancer.

The following semester I signed up for Indian Classical Dance II. I couldn’t help it. It was the only place where I could hear the ragas again, listen to the high notes of the harmonium, the pulsating beat of the tabla. In dance class, I could be near those sweet, beloved sounds and try to let my feet do what my voice had always wanted to do.

In the beginning, my senses were mollified. The dynamic between a guru and disciple, combined with the familiarity of the music we danced to, comforted me enough to think that I might have found a new interest, one that would take away the hankering to sing. Every morning I stared at the small dancing figure of Shiva I had picked up from an Indian store and reminded myself that the very God of Dance would help me. My recalcitrant limbs were not as easily convinced but I believed they would ultimately catch up. They had to.

Slowly, I let the idea of dancing seep into me. Because it was supposed to save me from singing, I sought a new, more solid identity in it. I stayed after class and commanded my sore, overworked feet to master the moves. I was too old, my body too inflexible to learn how to do a split or spin on one leg but I tried so hard that by the end of dance class I had no energy left to finish assignments for other classes. Rain or shine, I turned up for dance class, clutching my ankle bells, my body aching with hope. Every day I hoped to find the kind of bliss I’d found in front of the bathroom mirror, holding my pretend pencil microphone. Every day I was disappointed.

By the end of the year, I no longer went to dance class for the love of the ragas or in search of a new passion or even the longing to be delivered from music in the same way that one prays to be delivered from evil. I went because I had let loose a hunger in me, a blind and brutish hunger which proliferated in the perpetual absence of satisfaction. I had felt the first pang of this unrelenting hunger when, on that sweltering afternoon years ago, my friend Raqib and I had kissed and violated our fasts. I waited, ravenously, for the end of each dance practice, when my muscles were too tired to hold me upright, for only then, I was too numbed to feel the roar of that vicious hunger. Dance allowed me to survive by pulverising my body and anesthetising my spirit. Dance had become my saviour, my nemesis.

I was not a talented dancer but my tenacity alone made my teacher offer me a position in the small dance company she ran locally. The hours of dance practice tripled. Now that my teacher had a vested interest in me, she was no longer tolerant of my half splits and slow spins. ‘Oye! What’s wrong with you? You look like a Shiva with a broken leg. Lift your leg higher, higher, higher . . .’ she’d holler at me constantly. On the company T-shirt I wore was, once again, the picture of the same dancing Shiva, balanced on one leg, furiously dancing the universe into creation. Every muscle in my body felt the tautness of his incredible split, every cell of my being felt the tumult of his tandava, that thunderous dance, its explosive thrust, but I could not dance it. No matter how hard I prayed to Shiva Nataraj for a dancing boon, he was as silent and unreadable as the god of my childhood.

My mother’s reaction to my newfound occupation further unglued me. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said emphatically. ‘You must continue to dance. I’m so happy to hear it.’

‘I’m not very good at it,’ I admitted to her.

‘So? You’ll get better. Just stick with it.’

What I would have given to hear her say that when I gave up my music lessons.

‘I wish I could resume my music,’ I ventured, emboldened by her enthusiasm.

‘Hmmm . . .’ she said. This time her voice was barely audible.

One afternoon after dance practice my teacher invited me to join her for a cup of tea. I was almost certain that she would fire me from the company. We drove down the narrow streets of Amherst in her black Toyota Camry until we arrived at a small Asian teahouse. We ordered Chinese tea in a round white teapot with blue and red dragon motifs and tiny matching cups. I sipped the pale tea, trying to identify the scent of the flower in it. A student at the next table was reading a book that caught my eye. It was called
The Wisdom of No Escape
. I wanted to lean over and ask her the name of the author but my teacher spoke first.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked, her brow creased with concern.

‘Yes. Why?’ She had caught me off guard.

‘Well I’ve noticed how low you’ve been lately and I wanted to talk about it.’

I was annoyed. Why not just tell me that dance wasn’t for me? I knew it, she knew it. There was no need for Chinese tea or looks of concern. She pulled something out of her handbag and shoved it into my hands. It was a pair of red fleece mittens.

‘I’ve seen that you never wear gloves even when it’s freezing cold. I thought these might help,’ she smiled, kindly, the way she often did when I was able to only half-perform a difficult move. But she had gone to an awful lot of trouble to simply release me from my own shortcomings. Through the open window of the teahouse, I could see some students lying on a patch of grass, soaking up the late fall sun. Maybe I ought to lie on the grass sometime. Maybe I ought to read a romance novel with the sun on my back, instead of chasing after dancing deities. Maybe I could ask my teacher for help.

‘I never wanted to dance,’ I said, almost under my breath.

My teacher popped a round red bean cake into her mouth and nodded slowly.

‘I wanted to sing,’ I said a little louder.

‘So why don’t you?’ she asked.

‘I need a teacher.’

‘That’ll be hard here but I know a lot of people in this town. Do you have some training?’

‘Only a little.’

‘I’ll look around,’ she said. ‘Let’s go, I’ll drop you off at school.’

I picked up my backpack and slipped on my warm new mittens. My fists looked cartoonish and I grinned looking at them, realising at the same time that I wasn’t going to get fired.

My teacher was resourceful. She gave me the name and number of a Bengali graduate student at UMass who lived in a remote part of the town of Amherst. To get to his house, it would take me an hour and a half from Mount Holyoke and I’d have to change buses three times. The lessons began in the dead of winter. I read my textbooks on the bus and took notes for papers and quizzes. Some days I almost forgot why I was travelling on those lonely New England roads, the snow piled high on either side, giving the impression of rolling through a white tunnel. Beyond the roads, gnarled shapes rose in the silent darkness.

The music teacher was polite and mild-mannered but not exactly a gifted vocalist or even a spirited coach. He was a student himself and was as tired as me when we met on those wintry evenings so that he always seemed to be in a rush to get the lesson over with. In the next room, separated by a thin wall, I could hear his wife and baby girl, shifting, pacing, listening, waiting for him to finish. Often I felt the same lack of mirth I had seen in my mother years ago. Where was the joy, the giddy heights of pleasure I experienced in front of the bathroom mirror? On those icy nights I could not get back to college before 11 p.m. For dinner, I’d raid the vending machine and fall asleep with my coat on, a half-eaten bag of Cheetos next to me.

I would’ve kept doing everything I was doing to keep my fantasies alive – my fantasies of a singing career, fantasies that scurried under the bed in the presence of my mother and father. My new teacher, however, put an unmanageable price on his lessons. I could not afford an extra $400 every month from my campus job alone, which was my only source of income. My father gave me money for books each semester but I was responsible for the rest of my bills. Asking my father for the additional expense of music lessons was out of the question. His feelings on the subject of music were less ambivalent than my mother’s. He had made it clear that music was not an acceptable goal. To make matters worse, the small harmonium I’d brought from home broke down. Without warning it withdrew its music from me. I pressed the keys but no sound came out. ‘It froze,’ said my teacher. ‘These delicate instruments don’t do well in this cold weather, you know. I guess we have to wait until next semester before you can go home and get a new one.’ He looked relieved.

I was relieved too. For more than two years, I had lived on the fringes of a normal college life. My off-campus dance and music practice, the increased work hours to pay for the music lessons and the hours I spent travelling on buses barely left me enough time to attend classes and do schoolwork. I was always dog-tired. I never went to parties or dinners or dates. I missed important guest speakers and concerts and sports events. I had no time to participate in any of the social or political activism on campus. I was lucky if I could catch a meal at the cafeteria with the few friends I had. So relief it was, but it was the kind of relief that might come from amputating a bad limb.

The day I went for my last lesson was breezy and cool. I saw the first crocuses as I walked from my teacher’s house to the bus stop and their feeble heads reminded me of a comment made long ago:
Young green grass, crushed under a rock
. I laughed, the words sounding more ludicrous than cruel after all these years. A homeless man sleeping on a bench looked up at the sound of my laughter. I gave him a quarter.

And I kept on dancing. I twirled and swirled, feeling the world spin off balance, an unsung song on my lips. What drove this feckless compulsion? Was it because my mother approved of dance or was it because she wouldn’t approve of music? It was no less wretched than my childish need to polish the world into perfection.

After I graduated from college and moved to New York I had many more options to take music classes. But the number I dialled was of the Indian dance company not the music school I had found. Once again, oddly enough, I was accepted, despite a rather average audition.

‘You’ve got great eyes and perfect hips. Your muscles, um, need more training and time,’ said the woman who ran the company. An audition passed on the merit of my eyes and hips. Fate was persistent on giving me a second chance with dance when it had done nothing to help with my music.

My life fell into the old cycle of work, practice and exhausted sleep. The demands of this dance company were much more rigorous than the previous one. My weeknights and weekends were spent rehearsing in a small Manhattan studio on the west side of the city. I hardly had time to explore New York or make new friends. Sometimes, after practice, I went to a bleary diner called Moonlight with my fellow dancers. It was the only social activity I looked forward to. Besides, I was constantly in pain. From overworking my inflamed, intractable joints, I developed an excruciating and chronic back pain. My swollen knees buckled when I climbed up and down stairs. I refused to seek medical help in fear that I might be instructed to stop whatever was aggravating the pain. I spent my entire first year in the city at either my office desk or a dance studio.

At the end of my first New York year, my mother came to visit me. That summer, I was to have my first public recital with the dance company. We were going to perform at the Lincoln Center, three nights in a row. My mother insisted on coming to the show, even though I did my best to convince her that it wouldn’t be worth her time. She waved me away. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ she said, adamantly.

On the afternoon of my opening performance, she brushed and tied my hair the way she used to when I was little. It always hurt when she ran the comb through my long, tangled masses and as a little girl I’d always cried and complained through the ordeal. When I was a bit older and I learned to braid my own hair, I missed those few minutes when I had her to myself, the way her fingers felt on my scalp, smooth and supple, just before the sharpness of the comb scratched my skin. Now, after a decade, she had offered to braid my hair again. After she finished, she surveyed her work. ‘Your curls are softer, straighter,’ she said, ‘not heavy and tangled like they used to be. I liked the way they were before.’

‘Did you?’ I asked. ‘But you told me you shaved my head seven times in the hope that my hair would grow more straight.’

‘When did I say that?’ Mother looked piqued.

‘You told me that every time I asked you why my head was being shaved.’

‘I don’t recall. It must have been due to the heat!’

‘Mother, it is always hot in Dhaka.’

She sighed, then whispered a prayer under her breath and blew into the hollow of my neck for good luck.

In the dressing room, minutes before the show was about to start, I sat with the other dancers, feeling conspicuous in my overdramatised make-up and glaring silk costume. I kept biting off bits of my freshly painted nails, something I’d never done before. One of the girls came over and placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Nervous?’ she smiled. I told her that my mother was out in the audience, waiting to see me dance for the first time.

‘You’ll make her proud,’ my friend said, gently.

It struck me then that I didn’t need my mother to be proud of my dance. I needed her to be proud of
me
, me as I was, behind the make-up, under my skin. Waiting in the darkness of the wings, trying to keep still so the bells on my feet wouldn’t jangle, I was overcome by a sudden compulsion. I wanted to quietly exit the wings, slip off my silk costume, discard my heavy silver jewellery and scrub my face clean of its garish make-up. Without the protective mask and shield of my dancing gear, I wanted to approach my mother and rest my tired head on her lap. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t want to dance, not even for her. But the curtains lifted, the MC spoke into the microphone, the stage filled with light. I whirled out of the wings, trying to summon the rage of Shiva’s tandava. On the third row, I spotted my mother. She was leaning noticeably forward in her seat, her shoulders rolled frontward with tension, her hands tightly clasped under her chin. She looked as if she was ready to catch me, should I fall. I didn’t quite fall but my eyes glazed, my head reeled and my lumbering feet felt heavier and more awkward than ever before. I knew this was my worst dance to date but I didn’t care. This was not my tandava, it would never be. The only universe I had ever created with this dance was a fallacy, a complete fiction.