This Is One Way to Dance

by Sejal Shah

  During that year in Iowa, I felt free, felt the flat edges of the world curl up against my fingers, pressed myself into the earth and felt, for a moment, held. Far from the ballast of family and familiar places, far from everywhere I had lived previously, I felt weightless, unanchored by the past. First it was startling, depressing. Then, I found my footing, finding the familiar in the unfamiliar.

  When I returned to Decorah for the summer, I worked with a community-based collaborative dance company, Black Earth Arts. Leigh—fierce, athletic, unsentimental—took the time to memorize one of my poems. She read it with such feeling and intensity we were both brought to tears. She walked across the stage, moved through the words and the story they told about driving along the Mississippi. The words became current—a current—connecting me to someone I barely knew. She inhabited those words, and I believed them again; I believed in words and movement and how they can, briefly, elevate a moment from the past and deliver it to us again.

  I am getting ready to move again, to leave New York, and water is what I will remember about New York City too—the East River’s pungent brackish smell, the swirls and eddies, looking across to the lighthouse on the northern tip of Roosevelt Island, this view a few blocks away from where I live. When I am away from any place I have ever loved, it is the view of water that brings me back. I feel the desire to return to Iowa every summer. What I know how to do, what I love to do, is to walk through a landscape with the layers of every other time I’ve been there underneath and around me shifting as I walk. I am five years ago and now with every step. I am ten, balancing on two wheels, pedaling forward and then pedaling back to brake and then gliding before I realize I can ride, that I have been riding for two minutes when two minutes before I did not know how.

  In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison writes,

  All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our flooding.

  As I write this, I am readying myself for a trip to India—a place so unfamiliar to me that the thought of going there sometimes makes my skin crawl. I have to remind myself to breathe, to pedal. I have to remind myself I’ve flown across two oceans to India twice before. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to not know my parents’ homeland, and that some memory runs in my bloodlines. I have to remind myself that once upon a time Iowa was unfamiliar, too.

  [2011]

  Castle, Fort, Lookout, House

  It was not you I wanted; it was more than you. It was not a handsome man I asked for; it was love. However, I got a handsome man.

  Your mother, a hippie, named you after rock. This is how I always thought of you, but I was wrong: you are the absence of rock.

  Your eyes shine and two veins Braille your forehead. Your hair spreads outward like the sun. You are lit up; you glow—incandescent. You are one-sixteenth Indian you tell me, proudly. Did I care? No. You wonder if this is the source of your affinity with your Indian friends, with the Indian girlfriend who came before me. Is this infatuation or my heart?

  You are half Jamaican, half Rochesterian; you are my heart. Does this mean my own heart does not love me? Why do we love beauty when it is not love?

  A quarry is a large, deep pit or a type of open-pit mine. Quarries are often used for building materials. I wanted to build a castle, a fort, a lookout, a house. I did not intend to get stuck in an open-pit mine. Who intends these things?

  One November night, I wanted to get back to Brooklyn from Washington Heights. I used to be scared of hailing cabs. “I’ll go with you,” you said. You hailed a black cab. “One drink,” you said. Our friends fled. You hailed a yellow cab to Brooklyn. You got in the car with me, came up the stairs with me. You stayed.

  People lie, they flatter; they are nice or they want to be. You lie, but you say it’s not lying. You just don’t tell me everything.

  The last time I saw you, you looked past me—and this is what drew me to you. What has always drawn me to you. (Look out.)

  It was not a boyfriend I asked for, it was a husband. It was not a husband I asked for, it was love. It was not a place to swim I needed but a place to rest. It was not someone perfect I asked for, it was a songbird like you, with your hair sticking straight up, your wolfish teeth, your golden eyes. And though I had been on my way out the door in Washington Heights, I turned around. I dropped my coat. I stayed. With you, I will always want to stay.

  Nine years have passed since that night in Washington Heights.

  My name means water. You are the absence of rock: something that can hold water, something that is whole without it.

  Why do we love beauty, when it is not love, not at all?

  There is a second definition of quarry: an animal pursued by a hunter, hound, predatory mammal, or bird of prey. A thing or person that is chased or sought.

  I wanted a castle, a fort, a lookout, a house. I did not want the absence of rock.

  Water-filled quarries are deep, often fifty feet or more. This water is often bitterly cold. It was not a fool I asked for. Am I a fool? This want. This is not a fort. A fort is if someone needs protection. Who needs protection? A water-filled quarry is a swimming hole. My name means pure water. You shock me sometimes, still. I shock myself, too. It was not a handsome man I asked for. My unwillingness to extract myself. It was love.

  Nine years have passed since that night in Washington Heights. Black cab, yellow cab, castle, fort. You, swimming away from me. Love. You, turning toward me in the bed, light slanting in from the streetlamps, through the latticed window, from the coming sunrise, from the day.

  [2011]

  Curriculum

  AREA STUDIES

  The map was printed on a handkerchief. It is a map of a place that no longer exists. British East Africa. On a handkerchief—you can hold the Republic of Tanganyika near your nose! Around the carved-out section of Africa float pictures, symbols: a rhinoceros, a bird you cannot identify. Strangely, we had two maps, nearly identical, except that the print on the handkerchiefs, the outlines of the place, were slightly blurry; neither was perfect. I was always thinking about stretching these handkerchiefs, ironing them, framing them for a present for our mother who was from there, but nothing came of that. I was a child who wanted perfect. They were hers, so it would have been giving something of hers back to her; what kind of gift is that? A good one or a sad one, or both? I never did it. I still find them from time to time.

  WOMEN’S STUDIES

  Three embroidered, cream-colored cloths—or are they two—float in the kitchen. They are not framed the way stitching, cross-stitching, and needlepoint are framed in other people’s front hallways and parlors and living rooms and above stairs. They are not framed at all. They are not letters, pilgrim blue. They are not a repetition of vowel sounds, of consonants. They do not linger. They are flowers, and they curl. They taunt me: what was it that I meant to do? To frame, to frame, to hang up. Nothing done. Were they part of what women had to do to show some sort of mastery over the smallest surface? I will never embroider like that. We had latch hook, just hours of watching The Guiding Light and All My Children and hooking. The ugliest designs and colors until some design, oversize red and blue mushrooms in a field, grew, moldlike, in shag rug splendor.

  VISUAL STUDIES

  My friend Anne says, “Use the old frames and wear them. Replace the lenses.” I, too, wear glasses. This is one way I know I belong to my family since I don’t really resemble them. They are my mother’s cat-eye glasses, from the sixties, or maybe it was the seventies. They are broken, and I cannot bear to get rid of them. I keep them in the blue-and-white flowered glasses case she always used. I keep them in a wooden box that says Buffalo Baking Powder Company that I bought one summer at an antique fair.
I was not even twenty-five. What did I know then of the way things break down? Of the way I would and one day did? I want to believe I will wear her glasses one day. I keep thinking about these objects that have no particular use, how I study them: two handkerchief maps of an area now called something else; pale, needle-pointed flowers (unframed); spectacles with black and gold rims, a relic signifying forthcoming absence, these glasses of a mother I will lose one day.

  [2012]

  Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent

  “I think we’d like to make love now.” The words repeated: a murmur, a shimmer, a cat walking across covers. The woman saying these words had red hair and very pale skin. She wore sparkly eyeliner, purple. She lay next to a man beneath a brown sleeping bag. It seemed like a reasonable request. My eyes flickered open. I looked at their bare shoulders and collarbones. (Why were they saying this to me?) The night, absent of stars, wound itself around us. I lay curled near their blanket-covered legs. I closed my eyes and fell back to sleep.

  I opened my eyes. The night lifted, a navy-blue scrim rising. The white man had dreads. The white woman told me that she had been a sixth-grade teacher. “I was a teacher, too,” I said. The man grinned. He reminded me of a former student who often argued with me and liked to talk. A lot. My student was tall but hunched over, always wore an olive-colored jacket, and something about him seemed oddly animal-like, but not in an unpleasant way. I paused. Then: “What am I doing in your car?”

  “I dropped acid,” I said, “but the guy I was with—I made him promise that I would get home okay.” (I’m going to kill him, I thought. This is not okay.) “And I don’t have a ride out of here. I’m stuck.”

  “It’s okay,” they said. “You’re fine. Burning Man is a safe place. It’s different than the outside world.” They laughed and said, “It’s a story. You’ll find a ride. But we really would like to make love now.”

  I opened the door of the SUV. The cold air, the sun breaking at the horizon, long rays, long shadows. I did not want to leave the car’s nest but knew it was not cool to keep two people at Burning Man from having sex. I did not know where I was in relation to my camp. I was afraid of being lost, I was mortified things had gotten—that I had gotten—out of control. I was in the desert with no way out. “We woke up,” they said, “and there you were.”

  I don’t remember much about that night except that the temperature dropped in the desert once the sun set. If I am cold, there is almost nothing I will not do to get warm again, including breaking into a strange car close to midnight. I do remember this: hundreds of points of light lit the inky darkness, glittering until the dust storm arose. The night sky stretched, yawning to show the Milky Way’s silvery ellipse, an elongated spirograph, spinning. Stars shot out here and there, crisscrossing the sky. We snapped on light sticks as bracelets, as chokers—slender bands of fluorescent yellow, green, red, blue, orange. We biked toward the art structures, blazing in the darkness: the figure of a woman arching, hands clasped in a balletic pose, the temple outlined in the bright colors of Christmas tree lights, almost winking. We rode through swirls of dust until the outlines of art structures appeared, magic, lit up against the dusty night sky. And then I was by myself. I was alone. I didn’t know where my camp was; I could not locate anything, no landmarks. I didn’t recognize myself but for the desperate attempt to vanquish the cold—my personal kryptonite. The cold makes it hard to stay within the contours of your own skin.

  When I realized I had been sleeping next to strangers—on top of their blankets, curled in their bed, that I had broken into their car—I began to cry.

  I climbed out of the cocoon of their car. “Don’t forget your hat,” the sparkly-lidded woman said. I stepped out into the waning nighttime sky, a violet haze, clutching my white wool hat. The blazing sun just rising in the desert, the morning sun roaring up, then clearing the horizon. I didn’t have a watch on me. It was cold out, frigid even. I blinked, trying to see with dried-out contacts, to orient myself and find my way back to my camp and tent.

  Months later, when I tell this story to my friend, Magda, she says, “I bet they’ve been telling this story to their friends, too.”

  Burning Man comes with its own survival guide. That should have been a clue as to what lay ahead, but it only made me more curious to see why people went, and why they kept returning. The survival guide states, “Burning Man takes place in the beautiful, remote and inhospitable Black Rock Desert of Nevada . . . you are responsible in every regard for your own survival, safety, comfort, and well-being.” The Man: an effigy burning, sharp flames flaring, engulfing, releasing the old year’s demons, smoke against the black-blue sky, then fireworks, shooting curved lines into the sky. The flames leap higher, he collapses, a shout rises, a cheer; only night and darkness to witness. I missed it, but this is what I imagine, what other people described. I had promised to work at another retreat center, and it meant leaving early, before the Man burned. The festival occurs every August, the week prior to and through Labor Day weekend. It’s not great timing for a teacher. It’s terrible. Did they plan it this way?

  Whether or not the timing was intentional, the fact is that I was not teaching for the first time in years. I was there. In Nevada. For me, Burning Man was a week of exceptions: I ate bacon that week. (I am a vegetarian. Normally.) I dropped acid (twice, the same night) and then remembered almost nothing about it. I’d never done anything outside of alcohol and pot—nor had I had much curiosity. I came of age in the Reagan era: Just Say No. I had done just that. I was thirty-nine, a month away from my next birthday. I had lost my job, had moved back in with my family. I was lost—not just on the Playa, but in my life.

  Before the morning I woke up in a stranger’s SUV, I strapped on motorcycle goggles and rode a too-small mountain bike through that nighttime dust-and-wind storm in the desert. Later, I found out it was the kind of evening that made many people decide to stay in their tents. The four people I camped with snapped on light sticks, suited up, ventured out, and took acid. I did it too, but didn’t mean to. “Just try it,” they said. They handed me their extra light sticks, not just as costume or decoration but so other riders could see me in that dusty, windy darkness. They dropped acid. I thought I would say no. They had a pack of sugar cubes and handed me two. I took them. (What was I thinking?)

  We rode through this mysterious moonscape studded with lit-up large-scale art installations, each of the structures emerging from the dust only as we approached. We pointed ourselves toward one in particular: the temple, made of ornate, filigreed wood, papered inside with hand-written messages, letters, pleas, prayers, photographs, eulogies for people who had passed, wishes for forgiveness. The temple radiated power, resonance, sadness, weight.

  The crowning event and spectacle of the festival is a large bonfire, in which the figure of a man is burned. I did not witness the burn. Other art is also created and then burned: ephemeral art. A city of nearly fifty thousand, Black Rock City, amasses for this week. You must bring your own water, your own food, a bike, costumes. I had never been to a festival of this size—a music festival or any kind of festival. Who were all of these people who hauled their own water and food to a festival? I couldn’t understand the appeal.

  The ten principles of Burning Man are radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy. Radical self-reliance: “Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.” Did I rely on my inner resources? I did. Did I ask too much of my campmates? I did. I haven’t asked them; they haven’t said.

  School was a system I understood. But I struggled as a teacher. I was good with students but felt defeated at the end. I began to hate it. Months before I would have applied for tenure, my contract was not renewed. The first big failure in my life: humiliating, public, irreversible. Though I had been thinking about leaving, the letter stunned me and sho
cked my friends and colleagues.

  No job, some unemployment benefits. I left New York, traveled for three months in India, my own eat pray love, studying yoga, staying with friends and relatives. Then I moved home. No regular job allowed me the opportunity to travel. I planned to work on a project with a friend in Seattle, stay with my uncle in the Bay Area, and work for a month in Big Sur. In Oakland, with three days to prepare, I decided to go to Burning Man.

  Burning Man runs on a gift economy. I was not prepared. The only gifts I carried with me were a bottle of gold nail polish and artisanal salted caramels wrapped in parchment paper, bought from a farmer’s market in Columbia City, Seattle. I left a small brown box of them with the Oakland couple who shared their shade structure with me. They made coffee and bacon and shared that with us, too.

  The one caramel I had put in my pocket made it through the laundry without melting over everything. At the laundromat, a woman approached me and said, “Where are you going?” I managed to croak out, “I’ve been camping.” I could still barely speak, but I had spread out my clothes at the laundromat as I washed both my bags and clothes; dust and sweat coated everything. She said, “I’m reading a book about a woman who is camping”—and brought out a hardback book with a single hiking boot on the cover. Wild.

  This heartened me. I’d met the writer and taught one of her essays, “The Love of My Life,” for years. It was an essay my students and I loved. It was an essay that sometimes brought me to tears, even in class. Nothing I had done seemed as brave as her journey; still, I was flattered to be put in that category of adventure, of nerve. I think this is what I had wanted all along—to strengthen my nerve.