The Archer

by Shruti Swamy

  Which is not to say that I was lonely. I was not lonely. I lived in a house full of women. But the tree was quiet, many decades old. It had a strong, rough bark of golden wood. Under my fingers, the fruit-bud was warm from the dappled sun, warm as human skin. Then one day when the fruit had grown to the size of my fist—which, I have since learned, is the size exactly of my heart, and a similar shape—a blush came over it, red-yellow, as though all these months it had been quietly ingesting sunlight, and had finally decided to reveal its solar nature. The orange-red spread, it softened. Should I pluck it, and eat it? I fretted over this question. From below, the tree’s transformation was evident, it had hung itself gaily with yellow ornament, as though with a hundred golden earrings, but from my window, it seemed like this small fruit was the tree’s single expression, that it had used all of itself to make it. Silly as it sounds I could not bear to eat it and could not bear to think that anyone else would. I felt tenderly toward it and possessive over it, the way one never is over possessions one feels one truly owns, and can do with as one likes. I suspect that my possessiveness would have been the same if someone had plucked that beautiful wheat-haired doll from the window of the toy store in Colaba and placed it into my desirous hands. I would have felt pain, I think.

  Each day, the afternoons grew hotter and the mango grew more ripe. I spent days studying for my final exams, studying alone, mostly alone, because I was the only woman in my batch in my major, which was Electrical Engineering—normally popular, but this year the other women had all opted for Chemical or Mechanical. I would glance up at the fruit. It was a miracle that a bird had not pierced it with its sugar-seeking beak, as I would have, had I been a bird, or a monkey had not snatched it in the evening raids they conducted, raining their wild feet over the roof. Three more days, I thought, and it would fall and rot. I imagined it rotting, its beautiful skin blacking. Red and black ants would come and defile it, leaving a sticky trail. Worms would bore into the heart. This was why we burned our dead, so that our flesh would not have to suffer such mutilation. Yet, I could not bear the thought of plucking that fruit.

  It was the gardener that decided me, his torso lost in the branches of another tree, while his bare feet gripped the ladder that leaned against the tree’s trunk, and whose hand held a small knife that dipped at the air at times before disappearing back into the branches, and whose other hand held sometimes air and sometimes the full golden fruit of that tree: my tree was next, Farnaz told me, she said our tree, as her room too looked out onto its branches, and she was amused at my dismay. The gardener’s ladder would not reach the upper floors of our hostel, but if he reached for it he could grasp it, my fruit. If he grasped it, if he touched it—I leaned out the window. I could touch the fruit but not pluck it from this position and so climbed onto my desk and kneeled, reaching my arms and torso quite absurdly out the window. It was evening, but the air in my room was already cool, shaded by the tree. To reach the fruit I had to assume a posture of supplication, then one of desperation, like a thirsty man reaching violently for water, one hand gripping the window edge, the other thrust out into space. Thank god for my long limbs, my mother’s. I grasped the fruit in my right hand, gently. It pulled easily from the stem. It was as though it had made itself ready to be plucked at that very moment by my hand. It was a pleasure to hold in my hands, leaning out the window, like a creature of two worlds, and before I retracted my body back into the shell of its room, I cast my eyes downward, and saw that from this position, my face and chest and waist and the trailing edge of my sari were in fact visible through a gap in the branches to anyone who would happen to pass under that spot, and where in fact a meandering path led around our building and out to the lake, used only occasionally by the girls of the hostel and their suitors, though even they preferred a different path, one that looped around Hostel Seven and kept the girls away from the disapproving gaze of the Assistant Warden.

  When I looked down I saw two men looking up at me: one I knew from my physics lab, and who had often been very friendly to me and once even asked if I would like to take a walk around the lake, which I declined, intuiting a code for something more illicit, though at that point, I didn’t know what. He had taken this refusal with good humor and continued to be kind to me, he even asked to study with me a few times though he was a terrible study partner, his buzzing mind leaping from subject to subject and then growing bored, a confident boy, not quite handsome, but rich, whose interest in me I correctly assumed was due to my rarity as a female and my proximity. And indeed, he soon found a more receptive target for his affection at the ladies’ college where women were more plentiful. The other man I had not seen before. He was tall and fair, almost pale, and wore an appealingly moody look, though at the moment we caught each other’s eyes we lit with a mutual surprise, a warm, mutual surprise that took the embarrassment I might have felt from being so exposed and turned it into laughter. The man I knew gave a little wave. The man I didn’t offered a bow. I pulled myself into my room, my heart beating very quickly.

  The fruit, when I ate it, was very sweet.

  As I said, in those days in college I danced every day. But not long after I began my classes at the college, I left my teacher. At times, and especially as I improved, I could feel a tension in her—or at least, I thought I could—a desire to meet my hunger to move more correctly, and a withholding of the means to do so, as though she were stopping herself from offering further instruction, or more complex movements. Because, I wondered, of Puja—had she been chosen as the sole inheritor of our teacher’s skill and knowledge? Was I—my dark skin, my poverty—so unworthy? I felt restless, returning again and again to the site of my childhood, to the ghost of my earlier self. For weeks, I determined to speak with her, and when I finally mustered the courage to do so, it was she who told me it was time to find someone new to learn from. In all my years with her, not one crumb of compliment had ever passed through her lips, nor any encouraging expression crossed her face. I had outgrown her, she said, a kind of praise at last, and I felt it like a slap.

  Still, I was used to her voice. It was her voice I heard speaking the bols to me as I practiced. I was used to her stern face, the narrow precision of her eyes that watched me like a predator, detecting flaws in the slightest movements, which I understood to be a kind of love. It was love, wasn’t it, to look? When I practiced at home, I would think of her looking, her eyes in my mind becoming ever more seeing than they were in life, and I would make myself perfect, looking at myself and through myself as I danced to anticipate the flaws that she would see and correct them. I would go to the Bhavan with my body barely able to contain the steps I had practiced, wanting to lay them out at her feet like gems before a queen, but under her true gaze, one of distracted or conflicted indifference, something would begin to slip: the bend in my fingers losing their symmetry, my face sliding into the wrong expression as I concentrated, showing the effort of my quick steps, or, horribly, missing a step or falling slightly off the beat as I sometimes did, the sequence correct but the rhythm lagging, slightly lagging: it was as though you held a palmful of water as you danced for her, desperate not to spill a drop from your palm but the movement of your body demanding some water spilling or slipping, something always slipping. I had grown used to dancing this way.

  Around this time, a movie was released that contained a sequence of kathak danced by a Bombay dancer. This sequence so impressed me, so moved me, I went to see the movie many times, sitting impatiently in the dark for the dancer’s feet to appear in a shimmer of sound. At first glance the dance seemed light, almost girlish: the feet matched the voice of the tabla, each phrase beginning slow and ending quick, and a series of her beautiful chakkars was followed by turns even more feminine, in which she leaned back as she turned, dipping or swirling herself through low air, catching as though by accident her skirt with her arm so it flared around her, burning white. As the rhythm picked up, the contrast between the lightness, the girlishness, and the intensity
of the movement deepened: there was something clever in this contrast, I thought, almost subversive, to tuck such power into such lightness: smiling fire. There was nothing not traditional, not classical about this dancing—yet I could see in it the thing I wanted, the thing I would chase after foolishly, desperately, until it was mine. The kind of awareness that I could manage to sustain for only a few moments, she lived in, so much so that even the watcher took on the feeling of that ability as she watched. All your life you walked around going about your daily tasks, and then you watched her dancing and remembered you had a soul.

  I wrote her many letters begging for a meeting. She lived in Versova, two buses and easily two hours away from the college, and she was from a different lineage than my old teacher, who, for this reason, would be unable to make a convincing introduction. Despite these obstacles I persisted. Four of my letters were unanswered, but my fifth letter received a terse reply, communicating the date, time, and address of our first meeting. I was at least an hour early, maybe more, as the buses were unreliable and I had not wanted to be late. Pausing at her doorstep after checking it several times against the address she had written in a lovely looping script and finding it to be correct I rang the doorbell. During the long silence that followed I considered ringing the doorbell again. She answered the door herself. “So, you’re Vidya?”

  “Yes, ji.” I was crushed by shyness as she looked at me, then, in defiance of my own shyness, I lifted my chin. Her face, whose beauty I might have been inoculated against from the many times I had seen it onscreen, was actually more astonishing in life, where it appeared more complex, though the film had not robbed her face of its limber quality, its natural expressiveness. In the flesh, her face was living, simply that. It had its own heat and light. It was bare today: no kohl lined the wide-set eyes, no lipstick reddened her dark lips, no bindi anointed her brow.

  “Early.”

  “I can come back.”

  “That’s quite alright. Come in. I was just finishing my own practice.”

  “I can come back.”

  She was smiling. “I didn’t expect you to be shy.”

  “Ji?”

  “Come in,” she said again, and I followed her. In that bungalow the windows were always open, and the door to the verdant patio was also kept open in every kind of weather but the stormiest. I had never been in a house before that had been arranged for pleasure, that had offered pleasure through its simplicity: for though the house was mostly free of decoration, the objects she had gathered, small pieces of pottery and palm-sized brass statues of several gods, the dark carved wood divan upon which sat some cream-colored cushions, or even just the facets of the house itself, like the sea-facing window, offered pleasure not just for the eye, but somehow for the lungs, the body, which lightened in the lovely space, freed of some weight.

  “Get us some water, Vidya,” she said. “The kitchen is just over there.”

  In the kitchen I found a clay-pot and ladled the water into three tumblers, holding one in each hand and the third in the crook of my arm. The tabla player accepted the water without acknowledgment, the teacher—she was not yet mine—said, “Next time, use the tray.”

  “Next time?” I said.

  “Sit.”

  I sat on the floor, blushing. The water had the delicious taste of clay. She beat upon her thigh the theka she desired, the tabla player repeated it, and she began to dance. What I had seen only on-screen I now saw in person. She had found within the movements a looseness and ease I had never seen before, and this ease did not seem at war with the rigor of the postures; rather, these two qualities were sliding against each other, in a way that was intriguing and joyful, even in the simplest movements, for, though she was working on a composition herself, she spent time on her basic footwork, keeping her arms clasped in front, as I had as a beginner, and passing the rhythm back from foot to foot steadily: this seemed to be a lesson: her home and her dress, both of which were simple, almost plain, with no extra ornament; her hair in a clean braid down her back; her clothes white; her walls empty except for its small, lovely window; her beginner’s steps that she practiced with steady grace and concentration, until I saw they too were lovely, they were the pit of the dance, the hard, lacquered center. Every once in a while she would stop to speak to the tabla player, offering corrections or refinements to the rhythms he was playing that she demonstrated both with her feet and the clapping of her hands. He accepted these comments seriously, amending the cadence of his fingers—his fingers were quicker and surer than Ravi, the tabla player of my former teacher, and his patrician face so fully inexpressive it was easiest to tell his mood, I found later, by the lightness or heaviness of his hands against the drum.

  After her practice she wiped her face with a hankie, made some chai for all of us, and began to interrogate me.

  “Will you leave your dancing when you get married?”

  “I’m not even engaged,” I said.

  “If not now, then soon.”

  “My father wants me to finish my studies.”

  “And then?”

  And then? It felt unreasonable for her to question me like this, as though it were under my control.

  “I’m tired of teaching girls who only want to add dancing to their list of accomplishments. Then once they’ve secured a husband, they leave it.”

  “Not me.”

  “Not you? Why not?”

  “If I couldn’t perform I would dance every day in the kitchen even if no one saw me. If I was injured I would dance every day in my mind.”

  “Oofo, very serious. I remember this from your letters. But when you dance I hope you remember to smile.”

  When the tabla player was finished with his tea, I showed her. I followed the beats the tabla offered me easily, working through a composition of my teacher’s that I knew suited me. When I was finished she said, “It will take a lot of work to scrub out all the Lucknow affectations. No disrespect to your teacher. You’ve worked so long in this style, why would you want to move on to another? You cannot do both.”

  “I will give up everything and start over.”

  “Will you leave me so easily one day?”

  “It is not easy. But I want it. More than anything.”

  “Want what?”

  What could I say that would not make me sound crazy? “To be perfect.”

  “Yes, I can see it in your dancing,” she said, “this arrogance.”

  “Me?” I said, genuinely surprised.

  She had a warm laugh. Behind the shame of being called arrogant there was a small pride: the only people I knew who were arrogant were men.

  “A little is good,” she said, “it gets you through your inexperience. But too much and you won’t learn anything.”

  Twice a week I went, for I could not afford to come more often, nor did my school schedule allow me, though I would have come every day if I could. Some days the bus was not running because the rains were too bad, and those days I stayed home and practiced, or sometimes, when the buses were running but the rain was bad I still walked the two miles between the bus station and her house, arriving warm and wet, soaked to the bone. The outdoors saturated the indoors: sometimes a little rain blew in through the screen and pearled the leaves of the potted plants that sat on the marble sill, various herbs she grew and ground into a paste to enhance the radiance of her skin. In her plain house there was one outlier: a pair of jade and lime colored lovebirds that perched in a circular brass cage. When it rained, she placed this cage also near the open window, so that they could smell the rain as they loved to, she said, and indeed they were quiet in their cage by the window, their beaks pointed toward the rain. Drenched, I’d arrive, dripping wet on the soft concrete floor, enjoying the performance of my devotion to her and to dance, and she, I think, enjoying it too, being in every way a natural performer. She’d give me her own sari to wear and spread mine out in front of the fan so that it dried by the time I was finished with my lesson (hers somehow just
as simple as my own, but finer spun, more elegant, and in her sari, surrounded by her powdery scent, I felt called into the elegance of her body and danced better). Then she would, after a pause, resume her own practice, allowing me to watch her. I watched her with real hunger, a hunger for her movements and the possibilities they offered, for her compositions, which, though in fact quite traditional, seemed also particular to her and therefore new, for her body danced them easily and brightly and with much pleasure.

  She knew drama: she knew oddness: she was unmarried, not widowed, a single woman living alone. She knew oddness: shame: gossip. So I think we spent time together in those morning hours, working with each other in a kind of intimacy unlike that I had had with my previous teacher, one that came not from the formality of our bond, but rather from our surprising ease within its confines. When we spoke, it was never about biography or emotion; we spoke just enough to work more. But I think we spoke through work, through our bodies that learned to understand the other, mine always following hers, curved as a temple carving, and bright with its lazy quickness, as she often leapt to her feet to correct me or demonstrate a new way of moving. Though the tabla player was present at all our lessons, his presence had a different quality from Ravi’s, and our time together felt nothing like that of the star-girl’s and my former teacher. Where they were three, all separate, urging one another all along further, we were often one, an extension of my teacher, whose essence seemed perfectly expressed by the tabla’s unceasing rhythms, and imperfectly expressed by my own body.