The Archer

by Shruti Swamy

  “Yes,” she whispered, panting still, kneeling.

  “How will you dance Krishna if you don’t love him?”

  “I’m dancing as Krishna?”

  Teacherji smiled. Oh, she was kind suddenly, her face unfolding a new aspect. Her queen’s smile was regal but not distant, it was warm. “Tell me.”

  “Neelima Azim is Muslim.”

  “She loves her god.”

  “I could love Krishna.”

  “Will you?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “And what about your studies?”

  “I won’t fall behind. I’m at the top of my class.”

  “Good, good,” said the teacher. “We’ll begin on Thursday.”

  Dance had fallen from her all at once. She left the Bhavan, parting, with her dark body, the dark city. No, never dark: lights were winking on everywhere, the city waking to its second day, the yellow-sulfur municipal lights of the streets, flickering from hijacked electricity, and the warm-bulb light of the ground-level shops, and the thin blue light of the tin-shack kerosene. If men called to her she barely heard them. So this was joy. She felt like racing home, but forced herself into measured steps. Sweat cooled on her brow. In her mind joy followed joy: she made a plan. She would write to the Mother, she would say, look, I’ve kept my promise. She would say write anything back.

  She made dinner sloppily, badly. She was so excited. When Father Sir came home he saw her grinning. “What is it?”

  “I’m dancing a solo in the recital. The Krishna-story with the snake.”

  “Ah, very good.”

  “It’s tenth-December, will you come?”

  “Tenth-December? We’ll see.”

  He left the flat for the shared toilet, shutting the door. He was so blunt, so calm and private. Some days weary, some days stern, though he never raised his voice, he didn’t need to: measured, and cool with anger, his voice could be chilling. A voice you bowed before to seek forgiveness. When he gave it, you never quite felt better, you felt almost restored but slightly less. And some days Father Sir was just like this, passing through each day with just a slight resistance to it, with an almost amused kind of objection to it, as though encountering the second final price offered by the vegetable vendor—not satisfactory, but not absurd. He returned from the toilet clean, smelling of talcum powder.

  “Is dinner cooked?” he asked in admonishment of Vidya’s idleness.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Go call your brother, then.”

  She did, standing out on the shared balcony. She could see him, a dark shape, wild-boy, but boys could be forgiven for being wild. He didn’t hesitate, called in parting to his friends, hunched over their marble game, all still in their white uniforms streaked now with dust that some mothers or washerwomen would have to scrub. He must be hungry for the way he took the stairs, but she didn’t stand there to watch him do it, instead going back into the kitchen to heat the food and serve Father Sir, who ate quickly, as he always did, finishing before the boy had washed his hands and face. She served the boy too. She could never seem to keep him full, he was always hungry. After Father Sir had washed his hands but before he spread his newspaper out over the divan she said, “Father Sir, would you be able to write to Mother and tell her about my performance?”

  He looked at her. She so rarely saw him surprised that it took her a minute to place the expression: she had thought, at first, anger. “Or, I could write to her. You could just write the address on the envelope.”

  “Write to your mother?”

  “Yes, sir. If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Your mother is dead, girl.”

  She looked at the Brother, whose right hand dropped loosely in its plate. He did not, actually, seem surprised—only startled by the word dead. He pressed his lids together and then opened his eyes, shaking his head as though to clear it, and began eating again.

  “But we didn’t do the rites.”

  “Of course we did.” Now surprise softened to pity behind the round glasses, which was worse. “Don’t you remember those pujas we did?”

  “What pujas?”

  “Girls can’t come to the burning, you know that. But we did those pujas, remember? Two-three pujas the week after she died.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here. Right here in this flat.”

  “But who did the final rites?”

  “Your cousin Manu.”

  “Oh.” Oh. Oh. Oh. Dimly, she remembered sitting in the hot room, full of people in white. Only dimly . . . it was confusing, no one had told her why. She held her Brother on her lap, his hair shorn—he had just had his haircutting ceremony, late, she had thought, but at least he had had it. Her hair was untouched, perhaps if they had shaved her head too she would have understood. Now, of course, the truth was as obvious as furniture, and she felt embarrassed that she had not known it all along. Her question to Father Sir had been a child’s question. She went to the washroom and slid shut the new door. She peeked up into the blunt mirror. It didn’t look like someone capable of Krishna, only a girl, a small girl. There was a heat behind her eyes and prickling at their outer corners. No tears, but the breath shifted quickly in her lungs. The look that the neighbor women gave her made sense, poor motherless, and why they sometimes brought over the food they made, saying it was extra. The extra was not an accident, it was an offering to ward off similar misfortune. As though she was a god of it: and she was a god: Krishna. Straighten the spine. She watched as she posed in the mirror and something in her face began to shift, angle up. Her eyes became pointed, narrow. Her face looked thrillingly angry. She could do this? And then she let it drop and tried another aspect, one of sweet tolerance, of forgiveness. Suddenly her face was lush, her cheeks and lips ripe. Sorrow, and her face became one of suffering, her eyes spangled with tears. Mask after mask. She was good. The star-girl could not do this. A lover, her eyes looked flushed, not dreamy but focused with desire. Ah, she returned to anger. Anger was the most beautiful. Anger slightly parted her lips. Anger bent her brows into arrows. Anger made her eyes black and hard, capable of driving the feet against the earth without mercy.

  Two hours before the performance, she was dressed by Teacherji and sent off to the studio around the corner for her portrait. The outfit she wore was unprecedented and magnificent: an orange silk half-sari wrapped around her legs into pants; a gold blouse, fitted, itchy, tamped around her torso and the tops of her arms; and jewelry, including a gold-plated necklace with an ornate pendant that slapped against her chest as she tried a few experimental turns. The jewelry was Teacherji’s own, the silk the teacher’s own, though Father Sir had paid for the fitted blouse, which was hers to keep, extra fabric sewn in for eventual expansion, and the two small darts at her chest pointing hopefully outward where there were no breasts but might someday be.

  Teacherji draped the fabric around the bare legs of her student, Vidya feeling a dark pleasure to see her teacher kneeling at her feet to fix the edges of the silk so that the gold border striped the legs perfectly. Teacherji smelled of sandalwood and faintly of hair oil; from this vantage, she seemed small and fallible. She handled Vidya’s body with a professional detachment, still, to be dressed by a woman was to be regarded with even some measure of tenderness. It seemed to cause satisfaction each time Teacherji draped or pinned a new element into place. She painted a new face onto Vidya’s plain one: deep red lips that tasted of clay and rubber and eyes outlined in thick pencil so they could be seen from far away, and a little powder for the skin to make it paler. Teacherji pinned Vidya’s braid into a thick knot and then wound it with flowers, harsh with the bobby pins: tears smarted in the girl’s eyes. She was so proud. She felt neither girl nor woman, but like a marvelous other thing: like the half-man, half-tiger that broke from the pillar at dusk to kill the evil father of Prahlada. At the photographer’s studio she was stood under hot lights and told to pose. Vidya, tensile, a star: ready. She looked down the muzzle of the camera and s
miled, baring her teeth.

  Before the recital they prayed to Ganesh and to Saraswati, and she privately and atheistically to Krishna. The girls were dressed extraordinary but none were as spectacular as her—none but the star-girl, whose limber frame was clothed in violent red silk and a fitted gold vest that gave suggestion of curves. The mouth was the same color as the silk, the same red. She wore her own jewels. She was easy, laughing with the others; she did not hold herself separately from them as Vidya did, she did not need to gather her focus as they waited in their practice room for the audience to arrive in the auditorium, there being no backstage and the dancers not wanting to be seen until the event, like brides. They glittered and rustled in the dim light, the ghungroos on their ankles sparkled with sound at their slightest movements. She was threading her own calves with ghungroos now, looping the end of the strand around her big toe. Sometimes when she took off the full set she felt too light: unsteady, as though a breeze could pick her up and lift her away. Tying the brass to the body was like tying the body to earth. She knotted them firmly.

  “And who will you marry, Vidya,” Lanka called, “if the Teacherji’s son is taken?”

  “Careful, Puja.” Sonal was laughing. “You better marry him quick, before she gets better than you.”

  “She won’t,” said Puja, not with hostility. With only a little hostility. In makeup her face looked garish, radiant. “There’s too much effort in her dancing.”

  More girls laughed. “Yes, and anyway she’s too dark,” said Amrita, who had previously been the darkest. They all looked whole, loved god. Vidya pitied them. She moved away from them in her mind, saying her steps to herself silently, bringing her mind through all the movements of her body. If she missed a step! All those eyes! She had never practiced in her costume and now it occurred to her to worry. If she missed a step or the blouse arms ripped. And suddenly she was folded in worry, wanting to throw the whole thing away. Her stomach hurt. When all she had wanted to be was nothing! She remembered standing in the doorway watching Puja. A turn and a turn and a turn, like she would now do, her eyes whipping forward to brace against a spot in the room so her body would not falter. Shine like that. She wouldn’t.

  Teacherji came and led them to the auditorium, and the sound of their ghungroos as they walked across the courtyard corrected their casual footsteps into something deliberate, the sound of their ringing steps coalesced into a single sound, a single step, laughing out of nervousness and out of pleasure at the spontaneity of their shared step, as though young unbattled soldiers marching through a loving crowd. All but her. In her head there was nothing but white panic. It was a force like a train or a headache. It was an invasion of nausea. Father Sir had come because she had asked him several times. Even now he was there sitting in one of the velvet seats. As they passed into the auditorium the wide light that their eyes had grown accustomed to dropped away, then the auditorium revealed itself slowly, formally, the tapered, lily-shaped light fixtures that graced the walls, the threadbare velvet seats now occupied: a mass of eyes fixed on the entrance of the girls from the back of the room to the front, climbing up the stairs to the lit stage. The musicians were already seated there, and the teacher took her place beside them and accepted the reverence of the girls as they all bowed toward her, to the musicians, the Bhavan’s music teachers pressed into service for this task; to the small altar erected at the front of the stage; to the earth, and then took their places, similar to their positions they danced in the room, senior students up front and the junior behind, Vidya in her customary position just left of center, just left of the star-girl, whose body was pristine in the wonderful light, but whose eyes—yes, were still flat, absent, in a way that Vidya could sense even beside her.

  It was alright to absent her body and look out at the room. The noise of the music and the ghungroos and the movements of the body were comforting; she could feel her panic ebbing from her body like an illness. The automatic movements caused her, as they sometimes did, to float outwards, letting the cool mind observe the room with little feeling. In the false dark of the auditorium, it took her a while to find them, but she found them: Father Sir upright and expressionless three rows back, with the Brother, bored, beside him, still in his white schoolboy’s uniform, where his day’s errors were already visible. He was picking his nose and then flicking his findings at the girl—Kusum’s sister—seated in front of him. Kusum’s sister in the second row was watching Kusum, whose perfectly round moon face was replicated on each sister, and could be beheld in full original upon Kusum’s round mother, who sat beside her younger daughter, keeping the beat with her fingers and nodding. Vidya was better than Kusum, a second-row dancer, but their eyes stayed on her, Kusum, while Father Sir’s moved from girl to girl with the face of a patient man trying to occupy himself while he waited for the bus to arrive. Beside Father Sir was an empty seat like a missing tooth. The girls cleared the stage.

  Then the star-girl took it. Through her eloquent feet many sentences were spoken. The light burned her dress more red, her gold more gold. Despite herself, watching from the wings, Vidya was lifted. And the star-girl too, her face shifting under her makeup. At the apex of her composition, her feet moved so quickly she was not touching earth, but vibrating just slightly above it with perfect noise. Wah! someone cried. And the audience was on their feet applauding.

  Now she—Vidya—was next! No, no, a nightmare as she strode onto the stage. The mass of eyes fully fixed on her, because there was no other to be fixed on. Between skin and powder there was sweat at her forehead and her cheeks. Eyes and eyes! There was Father Sir, looking at her with a mild expression, the one on his face when he asked to check her sums. No, more, looking at her deeper. Had he ever really looked at her like this? The tabla player tapped the first beats of the drum and she almost couldn’t move. She just nodded. Teacherji clicked her tongue, as though angry. The tabla player tapped out the same notes again, calling to the body. The body knew the voice of the tabla. There were no bols to be called, only music, a singer to articulate the story and lend meaning to the theatrical movements. And a tambura to add sweetness to the singer’s voice. What a little clown she must look like, a child. Skinny, stock still, no-breasts, with a clown’s face painted atop her own.

  But the body remembered. It began to move again boyly; boyly she smiled. She could rid herself of her girl’s body if she wanted, and climb into another. Turning her head at the gopis she saw in her mind’s eye—they, bathing in the lake, smiling and shouting with laughter under her gaze, covering their large beautiful bodies provocatively with their hands. Now she was all play, splashing water at them. Through the screen of this story she could still feel the eyes on her but they made her brave, they thrust her more deeply into the story unfurling in her body because a story needs a listener. Listen: there was a blue god, young, a child, beloved. There was a small god who was taken from his princely life and given another one, the humble life of a cowherd, he was taken from his mother and given another mother, and he played in this new life like a game, never forgetting himself and so living with delight in this toy-world full of gopis, who looked always at him with half mother-love and half desire. In the lake in which these girls bathed there was a snake-demon-king: the child-god would have to kill it. Her body lost its play, hardening to the task. She would have to kill it. Ah, she had them too, the audience, she could feel now without looking, the feeling of them leaning forward, not singularly—she had lost that awareness—just the mass of them. Their interest in the story and in her movements gilded her body with purpose. Here, though the dance was still narrative, a clever pocket of nritta, pure-dance, was hidden within it; the teacher had composed a dark, whirling pattern to fell the serpent, in which the feet, now weapons, moved faster and faster upon the serpent’s head. Yet, even as Vidya danced the pure-dance, she had to dance it with the fury of a god, she had to bring that into her face and body: Krishna’s serene fury, killing it harder and harder with her feet, until a delight aro
se in her cheeks from the sureness of victory, until she spun, and spun, and spun without pause, and finished with a final, triumphant stamp, from movement to stillness in the space of a second, her hands thrown up and her head tilted up and a winner’s smile on her lips.

  Oh, she loved it, the breath forcing itself in and out of her chest, heavy, as she bowed to the crowd, again to the musicians, again to the teacher, again to the altar, and strode, still half-god, off stage. Oh she loved it—and the I? Yes. I remember an aperture opening again, that the body was given an odd feeling as the I flared in; it was a feeling I found later in pregnancy, as I lay awake, on my side, the enormous belly just a few weeks away from bursting—at least it felt like that, though I didn’t burst, only died, and came back to myself having touched death to expel out of me life—and I could feel that though I was ready for sleep my child was awake, and I could feel this not from her movements inside me kicking and whirling, or sweeping a limb across my belly, my belly her sky, but from the wide-openness of her eyes, black, and lashed, lidded, open inside me. Looking. I was being looked through, and because the seeing was so deep I looked in and out of myself at once: the body out of the dancer, and then the body out of the mother: and the observation married so oddly and exquisitely the look of the body and the feel of it, its weight and presence, it gave it meaning. Instead of ecstasy it was an animal calm, like those dreams where you remember you can fly.

  III

  I was in college, dancing every day. The college was in the north of the city, which was at that time the “edge” of the city, and the campus had an “edge” feeling, the buildings outposts in a strange jungle, with a large flat lake on either end—man-made, they were reservoirs for the city—yet people used them like any other body of water, swimming and bathing and even rowing small boats across. Since there were so few women in the college, we each had our own room, and against the window of mine an ancient mango tree routinely tapped its leaves and branches, scattering the glass with rain during monsoon, and touching dust onto its surface in the summer, as though several fingers touching and brushing affectionately at the glass, as if a friend’s hand. I studied at a small desk that I set against that window and watched a spike of flower produce a single hard green bud: I watched that bud swell, still green, and smooth as a stone outside my window, each day growing bigger. If I opened the window and leaned over the desk I could brush my fingers against it, and I did this often, obscured from view and ridicule by the branches of the tree and the leaves, whose bulk and motion over the months had taken on a presence to me. Truly I felt the tree living and I felt it to be my friend, in a profound way I never felt before or since.