Chapter 5

It was the day before the opening of the Madana Theater Groups’s latest production. The troupe had gathered at the house in George Town for the final rehearsal. While they were finishing up in the terrace, Sowmya received the man from the Kalyani Mess, who arrived with two large brass containers strapped to the sides of a bicycle. One contained idlis, dumplings steamed to perfection, and the pongal, the savory rice dish cooked to creamy consistency and glistening with cracked black pepper roasted in ghee, separated in sections. There was hot sambar in the other.

She stirred the sugar and steamed milk into the kettle of fresh coffee and poured it carefully into two large thermos flasks. It was only nine in the morning and already sweat was streaming from every pore. With the loose end of her sari she blotted her head and face. Her hair had grown in where she could comb a parting in it after oiling it down. On a day like this she discovered the relief that a close crop provided. With a damp towel she wiped down the strips of banana leaves and stacked them. When she carried them all in a couple of trips to the second floor terrace, her arrival was greeted each time with cheer.

It was too hot to continue the practice in the sunlit terrace, which had begun at five that morning. This corner of the terrace had become the rehearsal stage for several weeks now, since the new program got settled. Mallika’s brother Kitappa was the music director for the Madana Theater Group, which staged mythological operas. The company was known for its fabulously crafted stage settings. When he first began there in early 1930, Kitappa had persuaded Mallika into giving them a couple of dance items. That very first production was a huge success, and now tickets sold briskly when the flyers carried Mallika’s name.

When Sowmya came up, Mallika and Kitappa were engaged in a small argument over tempo and choreography. A young woman named Neelam had joined them. She was related to Mallika and had arrived from the village only recently and lived with her aunt in Egmore. She would be singing for Mallika tomorrow, and the three of them huddled often over the program.

Somu, who played the flute, and Pillai, who played the mridangam, worked on contract for the drama company. Long memories connected them all from the time of Mallika’s grandmother. Their common lineage traced back to the same narrow and familiar streets, with houses squished together, their tiled roofs and open porches always remembered in a timeless past. Like many others from the villages, they too had found their way to the city and had settled in proximity with each other. This colony of artists from the Thanjavur district was absorbed in the commercial heart of George Town, along with the Jain silk weavers and diamond merchants from Gujarat, the Portuguese and the British settlers, the Armenians, the Mussalmans, the goldsmiths and crafters of tin sheets, traders in mica and porcelain toilet fittings, furniture makers, and costume makers. Sowmya had seen only the high walls of the Fort St. George in the north end of Madras beach, from where the town spread out sprouting hundreds of temples, churches, and mosques, meat markets and flower bazaars, as well as houses of prostitution that serviced its barracks.

Sowmya put down the two carriers. She wiped her streaming face and head again, and looked at the performers to see if they were ready to eat. Some days the musicians lingered and continued to play long after the dance practice was over, with Pillai coaxing beats from his drum in syncopation with the notes that Somu drew from his flute. His one leg crossed over the other, Kitappa would bring his palms together and slap-count the beats, with an occasional cry of appreciation, Sabhash! Brilliant moments like these amazed Sowmya. Like her they too carried memory of destroyed lives, and yet how their work made them brim with cheer! She wanted that, to have that something that would possess her as she in turn possessed it.

Sowmya placed a scoop of pongal on a leaf, two idlis, and ladled some sambar over it all and took it to Mallika. It was then that she noticed the man seated next to her. Bald and frail looking, gray stubble covering half of his face, he was reading aloud a poem for Mallika. Sowmya had seen him before. He brought the poems he wrote to Mallika, and if she found them suitable she would have Kitappa set them to music for her.

“Give it to the poet,” Mallika said with a movement of her head when Sowmya approached.

The man looked at Sowmya and immediately stood up. Making no move to take the food from her, he continued to recite:

. . .these bruised lips.

Who left these marks on your left breast . . .

Sowmya’s eyes widened and she drew back. When he then made a move, she stuck her hand out holding the leaf to him, as if to block him. He paused and looked at her for a moment. His eyes twinkled.

“Thank you, thank you kindly.” Still eyeing her, he accepted the food.

She quickly went back to her chore, her heart beating so fast she could hear it. She passed the rest of the food to everyone and then poured the coffee into brass tumblers, focusing hard on what she was doing to stop her hands from shaking. The small incident with the poet had created a sudden storm in her, of the smell of wet earth and beedi smoke, of a man’s rough hands invading and groping her on a rain whipped afternoon when she had taken shelter under a tree.

After everyone had eaten she cleaned up and took everything back downstairs. Later when Sowmya was passing with the betel leaf box, her arms around the heavy casket that she pressed to her chest, the poet stopped her. He reached for the leaves. His fingers lingered inside the box and she felt as though his knuckles were grazing the front of her sari. She was afraid to drop her gaze down from his face. What if he misunderstood that as flirtatious? She looked unblinkingly into his small eyes, his beteljuice-stained lips that parted in a smile.

“You are not from these parts, are you? Hmmm? Where are you from, girl?”

Sowmya tried to swallow hard the burn spreading through her dry mouth.

From somewhere Mallika’s hand zoomed in, firmly nudging his hand aside and dug in for a few leaves for herself.

“Who’s the girl?”

“Sondam, Swami,” Mallika said, and smiled at him.

Sondam. Kinfolk. Our own. The term made Sowmya’s heart leap. She was suddenly pulled into a cool shade from the blistering sunlight. The power in that response made further questions cease.

“Oh ho!” The man nodded his head, still smiling at her.

Sowmya turned to look at Mallika. The way the older woman averted her chin without meeting her glance left her confused. Did she do something wrong? Did she draw this unwanted attention? The conversations in the terrace came to her in a garbled noise. Somu and Kitappa and all these people she thought she knew receded from her in a flash, and beyond that her parents, Ponmalar itself. Her connection to the world so tenuous, it can vanish just like that, with a little lift of the chin. She stood alone on that terrace, only feeling the heat that rose from below like the one true thing. With nervous fingers Sowmya fixed her sari around her bosom.

“Ours is such a business,” Mallika told her that night at dinner. “What we do, our work—we are always out there. They look at us—we are an open field in men’s gaze. You cannot let it frighten you or affect your work. Swami is an old lecherous man, but he’s harmless.”

Sowmya kept her head down, afraid to betray any emotion.

“I wasn’t worried,” she said.

“Good then. I thought I would tell you because you may not be used to our ways. The agraharam is a different kind of place.”

Sowmya knew very well the fear, envy, and curiosity that devadasis evoked in the women in her neighborhood. It was enough to make them pull their sari closer and cover their neck, touch their wedding necklace. It was with such trepidation that the women invited the temple ladies to come bless their birth ceremonies and weddings. They were sacred beings, the beloved of the Dancer with His Left Leg Aloft, even if they bankrupted their men who paid dearly for the dancers’ attention. It was all too shameful to talk about so the women in the agraharam ground their fear and loathing into the chilies and coconut in the kitchen.

After they cleaned the kitchen and washed the floor clean, the women secured the kitchen doors. Mallika instructed Sowmya to turn off the light and went up to the open terrace to sleep. Sowmya walked to the front of the house.

The house Mallika rented was one of three identical ones inside a compound. The landlord was a Chettiar who traded in diamonds and wholesale teak furniture from Burma. He had built similar sets of rental properties all over the town.

A front porch spanned the width of the house. Mesh panels screened it and a trellis supported a scrappy vine of Queen of the Night, which now scented the porch. A tanpura, the string instrument designed and custom made for Kitappa, was leaned against a corner on its gourd base, and a harmonium was at its side. A couple of rolled up mats leaned in another corner, ready to be unfurled for seating or sleeping when needed. This was a music studio for Kitappa where he received his visitors and composed his music. The polished cement floor was cool now. Two sets of doors opened from this porch, but the one on the far end was permanently locked.

Kitappa had been extremely disturbed by Sowmya’s arrival. He accused Mallika of kidnapping and began to arrange for Sowmya’s return right away.

“Child, give me the address,” he had said, pen in hand, shooting hot glances at his sister.

Sowmya looked at Mallika and Mallika looked back at her in silence.

“Address, amma! Don’t you know your own address?”

Even now she shuddered at the recall of her father’s dark eyes, tight with the accusations that descended with a terrible weight on her chest. So Sowmya had mumbled an address to Kitappa, not her father’s. Kitappa sent a letter. Twice. Nobody came to get her.

Sowmya pushed aside the curtain of glass beads that hung at the doorway and walked into the interior, a space divided by an archway, windows on every wall. These two rooms served the purpose of a hall, reception room, eating room, sleeping room, dressing room, and any other need that arose. Another set of doors opened into a terrace, a kitchen to a side of the terrace, and arranged against the rear wall, a well, bathing room, and a latrine. A staircase wound up above the kitchen to another terrace, where the practice for the opening day was held this morning.

The house’s sharp contours were quite unlike anything Sowmya had called home until now. When she arrived here from the train station she felt the absence of the odor from the cow stall that permeated the darkened interior in the house in Ponmalar. She missed that smell. The street was removed from the house, so one could not peek out and watch the busy grid of teeming life that she knew was just outside the gate.

Sowmya switched off the lights in the front rooms, and finally sat down on the granite washing platform in the rear terrace. It was still holding the heat from the day. Banana trees curved against the dark sky. From beyond the back wall, a motor horn tooted. A little later a train swept past. Its rattle and then a long whistle faded into the distance, leaving an echo in her head.

Sowmya held her hand softly to her mouth. Her mother, aunt Meenakshi, her father, the twins—the very smell of home rose from her hand to her mouth and pooled in her throat like a bruise. If her father were to see her now he would not understand a home like this, run by a woman who mimed a poet’s words, and got paid for it and kept account of it. Debauchery, her father would have called it, disgust curling his lips.

Sowmya turned in her seat. The man that morning had asked her where she was from. What village, who’s your father? Perennial questions that would daunt her every time she met someone new. Mallika had claimed her as kin. Did she mean it? How long could she live like this in her house? Where would she go, how would she live? Nothing in her imagination could penetrate the fog that appeared as her future. As promised Mallika took out her drawstring bag and paid her a sum. Was her earning enough? She had no idea. Neelam took her share as the musician, tucked it into her own bag, and went home. Maybe if Sowmya also had some other skill, like Mallika and Neelam did . . .

Before she finished her thought, Sowmya got up and walked towards the stairs. The moon had risen high above and the sky was full of stars. She stopped just before she reached the steps. Something made her want to strike a pose that she had seen Mallika do many times. She was not sure what to do with her hand and she experimented, holding it first at her chest, palm up fingers fanned like a blossom, and then throwing it away from her. She repeated the gesture with her hand held another way, palm facing down. She would dance. The thought stunned her even as it made her giddy. That is what she would do. People would pay to come and watch her. She would really belong, be kin. No more questions about who her father was, the name of her village. Nobody asked Mallika any questions. But would Mallika accept her as a student, teach her?

Mallika used mudras, symbols, with her hands and fingers to speak the language of mime. Shiva’s whirling matted locks, the crescent moon he wears in it, the river Ganga that flows down it, the garland of skulls, his four hands, the deer he holds, the flame on his palm, the rattle of life and death—Mallika’s fingers and hands painted these sacred tales, over and over, over and over, each time plumbing the story a little deeper, revealing the mystery all the time. When Mallika danced to the verses of Thy elegant foot raised in infinite mercy, Sowmya found part of her rise up and walk away from her. She saw it whirling and whirling in a joyful frenzy. In those moments Ramki’s death, which had smudged the edges of her life with charcoal, would recede from her. Her family, her mother and father, all of Ponmalar, vanished. She saw only herself in the shimmer of dance.

She started paying closer attention to the jati, the rhythmic patterns Mallika tapped out with her feet in response to Kitappa’s calls. The swiftness and dexterity of it, its tempo and the melody, its tone and its insistence, thai di-di-thai tha! thai di-di-thai tha! The leaps and the twirls, the promenade, the pivot. She could not bear to watch silently. The soles of her feet twitched to the beat. It seemed that there was another being inside her who knew how to make those leaps, how to land with the grace of an antelope. She saw the music, she heard the dance.

In the privacy of the bathing room, she placed her feet in position and noiselessly stepped. Sowmya could already imagine a day when her feet would be ready to obey the beats emerging from Kitappa’s block of wood in front of him. He struck it with a stick and commanded: thaiya thai! thaiya thai! Her feet would obey.

A little aghast at her own audacity she looked up at the window, set high on the bathing room wall. A branch laden with mango blossoms mocked her. Widows don’t dance, you foolish girl.

Still, unable to bear it anymore, one rainy evening she asked Mallika for lessons.

Mallika was silent for what seemed like a very long moment. Would she reject her? Laugh at her foolishness to imagine that she could be a dancer?

Just when Sowmya was going to repeat her plea, Mallika said, “Why? Why dance?”

What should she say? I want to be like you, answer to no one? I want that thing, that thing in your dance that makes me choke with feelings I cannot even name? I want money in my string purse that I would tuck at my waist like you do? How did you get that way?

“I don’t know why. I just want to dance. Like you.”

Mallika looked up sharply and Sowmya geared herself for a rebuke.

“It might look glamorous, all the make-up, the shiny clothes. But it is hard work and takes—it requires thick blood to withstand the abuse. That pale thing that runs in Brahmin veins will never do.”

The bitterness went straight to Sowmya’s heart and she reeled for a moment as though Mallika had punched her.

Mallika put a hand on her shoulder and made Sowmya sit.

“Let me tell you something. There is no marriage in this profession. If cooking and housekeeping are what you desire, or if you want kids—do you want kids?”

“No!” Her eyes went round with shock and confusion, and Sowmya shook her head with vehemence. “No.”

Mallika regarded her for a few moments. “Because if that’s what you want . . . and you are young, there is no reason why you shouldn’t—but if that’s what you want, just give up all this about dance right now. Find some other honest work to do.”

Sowmya perspired, squirmed under this gaze.

“Stand,” Mallika said.

She made Sowmya tuck the folds of her sari at the waist so she could see her feet and knees.

“Sit at half bend,” she said and demonstrated.

Sowmya knew how to splay her feet and lower herself, until her knees bent at the same angle as Mallika’s.

“Look up, not at your feet,” Mallika lifted her face up by her chin, touched her shoulders, made them square.

She sat down next to Sowmya, scratched her head for a while. They sat like that for a long time while the rainwater dripped from the Queen of the Night vine.

The next evening, when Kitappa came home Mallika announced her plans.

Kitappa became furious. He called his sister a mad woman.

“Initiate this girl? Are you planning to get us both counting jail bars? You have already kidnapped this girl. If you start this initiating, and this and that, we’re finished. We’ll be arrested for running a whorehouse! Do you hear me, akka?”

Sowmya understood that with the new resolution at the Legislative Assembly, Mallika could be charged with getting a minor into prostitution simple by teaching her to dance. Dance was such a dangerous thing, yet no one was calling for the abolition of prostitution.

Mallika sat silently while her brother raged. After he was done she said, “You do whatever is necessary. Write to her people, write to the government, write to that doctor lady. Tell them all to come and claim this girl. She was going to be packed off to Ceylon by her people, like a sack of potatoes. All I have done is bring her home. Let them come and arrest me.”

“So you will teach dance to a Brahmin girl.” Kitappa looked her in the eye. “Tell me, what in the world is she going to do with it? Nobody is going to let her dance on stage, you can forget about that.”

“You take care of writing to everyone, I will take care of teaching the girl.”

Defeated, Kitappa turned to Sowmya.

“Child, don’t let my elder sister put these crazy ideas into your head. Tell me, do you really want to dance? Do you?”

Kitappa was a jolly man. He had an open-mouthed laughter and kindness in his eyes. But he looked at her now with only annoyance. All she could think of was what it would be like to be a woman in a world of men. She wanted to set people in the state of elation Mallika’s dance ignited in her, and get paid for it.

She nodded her head. “Yes, please.”

Kitappa sighed.

“Listen. Just listen. Stop your thoughts, and just listen to me. The moment you start asking questions, you have stopped listening.”

These were Mallika’s first instructions.

Surrender to the dance. Listen.

Kitappa clicked on the wooden block.

“Did-di-Thai!” Kitappa called out. He sat cross-legged on the floor and struck a small wood plank with a stick to keep time.

Sowmya reflected the sounds back with her feet.

Thai Di-di-Thai Thaa!

Thai-Thai Di-di-Thai Thaa!

Thai-Thai-Thai Di-di-Thai Thaa!”

She repeated everything in double time, now triple time.

Sowmya’s lessons began on Vijaya Dashami, the feast for the Goddess of Victory. To her surprise and delight, it was Kitappa, the musician with impeccable beat and rhythm pulsing in his blood, who was her instructor. She had been forgiven, she hoped.

The lessons were held as Kitappa’s time permitted, and lasted as long as his mood did, an hour one day, three hours another day.

Sowmya crouched at half-bend, knees flexed, heels raised, resting on her toes, arms extended and level with shoulders, palms parallel and pointing down.

“Flex the knees more! The shoulder, don’t let it sag!” Mallika tipped her elbow with a finger. “Your muscles will strengthen in time, but posture should be held.”

“Use the whole body, Sowmya! If you use the leg muscles alone, you will wear yourself out.”

“Ok, from the top.”

“TaKiTa Ta-Ka Dhi-Mi, TaKiTa Ta-Ka Dhi-Mi”

“Let’s hear the feet speak! Let’s go, let’s go,” Kitappa called out. “Accuracy is paramount, precision, precision!”

Sowmya used all the parts of her feet to tap out the sounds Kitappa called out. It made her recall the way Pillai used the parts of his hands and finger tips to produce texture to the sounds on his drum.

Sowmya learned to coordinate the shoulder movement with the chin movement, the chin movement with the eyes and the glance. She arched her brows, knitted them, and learned to make her whole upper body shimmer while her feet danced.

She learned to form the mudras symbols in her fingers, hold the pose and tap out the rhythm with her feet, and coordinate all these with precision. Kitappa kept pace, sometimes leading with his calls, sometimes following.

“Subtlety in facial expression,” Mallika said. “It should arise slowly, fade and give way to something else to rise, leave space for a thought, poetry to form. This is what defines this art, the abhinaya. Take fury. Fury yes, but with compassion, this is what it’s all about.”

Sowmya danced. Desire. The celebration of the body, a gift, which is nothing if not love personified, bliss itself. Bliss. It’s only the body that can yield up its spirit in total bliss, in communion with itself. This is the dance.