She is eight or nine years old when it happens.
She is inside a room with baked-mud walls, a mud floor. There is little of beauty in this room. Everything is functional, everything is shared, the overwhelming colour is of the beige walls. But there is a television, and she moves and writhes her body like a woman on this television. She doesn’t have the woman’s curves, but she sways her girlish hips in time with her anyway.
She longs to be outside. But she has been punished and must stay indoors. “What is wrong with you?” her mother had asked as she plucked her from the scrum of boys she had tried to play with. It is hot in the room. She wishes she could be swimming in the canal outside her home, and thinks of the cool slip of water against her skin, how each stroke of her arms and the furious pumping of her feet stirs a rush of mud. She could barely ever see in that brown gloom. The grit stung her eyes and coated her hair and left her skin with a wash of fine silt. Above, the sky would be cloudless, the sun a gold coin. It is a different world under the water. Just imagine, she thinks, if I could glide to the furthest reaches of the canal, past the fields, swoosh into the greater surge of the river and swim right out of this village. For now, however, the whole world comes to her, streaming into her home through a big bowl-shaped satellite dish in the courtyard.
She puckers her unpainted mouth. She doesn’t know what the woman on the television yearns for, but she wants whatever it is. She knows the words to all these songs and she loves to sing, mouthing each word, her face twisted with the longing, the pleading. Ten years from now, the songs she will love, the ones she’ll sing into her phone and then play back and share with the whole world (or whoever is out there, listening to her sing at night when she is alone in her home and can’t sleep) will sound the same.
There’s someone in the doorway. Her older brother is leaning against the frame of the door, watching her dance. She wants him to be proud. To marvel at the way she imitates the woman on the screen. He’ll tell her parents and they’ll stroke her hair and tell her she’s more beautiful than any of the women on television. They’ll plead with her to do a little dance for them. No, not just them, but for anyone who comes to the house. They’ll turn on the music and give visitors a glimpse of just how she sashays and sways and knows all the words to every song. Just one, they’ll cajole, just sing one verse for us. Our little nightingale. Let us hear that sweet voice. Do you know how far you’ll go with a voice like that?
She puts everything she’s got into that dance for her brother. He’s the one who named her when she was born. She loves to watch him as he stands in the courtyard of their home, scowling, scissoring the air with his swift karate kicks. She tries to do it just like him. When he’s not there, she sneaks into his room and tries on his shirts and pants and looks at herself in the mirror, the cuffed hems of the trousers falling fatly around her ankles. He strides towards her and she beams. She looks up at him in anticipation, thinks of how he’ll retell this moment to their parents…and that’s when he knocks the breath right out of her.
Her cheek smarts, she stumbles to the side, bright motes before her eyes. He raises his warm open palm once more, but she sees it coming this time, feels the gasp of air as his hand rushes towards her and she scrambles away. He is shouting and their mother runs into the room. Will she think of this moment, years later, when she dances in—no, not in, but for—a huddle of men at a wedding, when her fingers brush the rupee notes that these men shower on her? The papers will caress her feet. She will tread on them. The bridegroom, drunk with happiness or actually drunk, will sway. Someone will fire an AK-47 in the air, and the rat-a-tat will startle her just a little. She will be sweating in her tight black jeans and T-shirt. A scarf, fringed with small shiny discs, will feel too snug tied around her waist. Or is that someone’s arm? (Later, she would swear that she hated that sort of thing. She would never do that. She didn’t even know those kinds of dances.)
Is that what her brother had pictured, what he had feared, when he saw her dancing in that room?
Will her mother remember that day when she walks back into the same room more than a decade later with small knots of journalists, their cameras slung around their necks, dark blooms of sweat on their shirts in the July heat? The journalists will hear about the time the girl’s brother slapped her when he saw her dancing.
By then, hundreds of thousands of people will have seen her dance. They will have seen her pull the white bathrobe she stole from a five-star hotel down over her shoulders. It’ll slip to her hips, a single knot holding it together at her waist. In that lime-green slip of a bikini, she’ll caress her breasts and trace the curve of her stomach. “This was just the trailer,” she will tell these people. “Do you want to see more?”