by Shruti Swamy
My former teacher had not taught me the gliding step by which gods crossed the stage, or people moved through rivers, or demons traveled in flying chariots, and my new teacher taught this to me first. You must swivel your feet, turning them by their ankles, open and closed while the rest of your body remains still. It was a feeling unlike the rest of kathak, of smoothness rather than sharpness and precision. Then for many afternoons I went back and forth across my small room, crossing it again and again in silence, as the other girls had complained it was too noisy when I practiced with my ghungroos. Anyone who looked through my open window might have seen a girl through it, moving without friction and in the kind of fashion, I thought, that people might use to occupy heaven.
In those days I felt more like a child than I had during my childhood, when there were always meals to prepare, and a boy to care for, laundry to wash, and all the small pinpricks of household chores that I did daily, each little chore a tiny needle at the surface of my thoughts, which, so pricked through, could never fully grow. Here I lived in the college hostel. I had only one person to care for: myself. There was a cleaner who came to sweep out the hostel halls and scrub the bathrooms so we were only responsible for the tidiness of our own rooms, which though they collected dust very easily and required regular upkeep, were each left to our personal tastes and so I kept mine neat for my own pleasure alone, never for the expectation of someone else. Likewise, while I did not have the money to have my clothes washed, and while I had so few clothes that I had to do the washing daily, I found this task to be a mild delight, as there was running water at all times of day. The mess hall served our four meals, including tiffin, which I had never been able to afford, and where there was always an urn of plain hot chai, very strong. Our food was very good: better than the boys’, because the students of each hostel helped manage the kitchen, but the other girls often supplemented these meals with home-food they brought back with them to share after weekend visits—or sometimes home-food would be sent with some relative or visitor if the girls were from farther away. I alone was never the direct recipient of these snacks and meals, for I never visited my home, and there was no one to send me food from it: I and another girl, Radha, a tailor’s daughter from Bihar. Radha was a legend by the time I arrived at the college. She was in her last year, and alone in her major—that is, there were no other girls—not because it was the best but because it was the least useful: Aeronautics, there were few jobs in that field in India, and those pursuing the degree would have to go abroad or find another field once they graduated. Because of this, at least in part, Radha’s intelligence—brilliance—had gone undetected for several months before the boys in her classes had uncovered the top scorer in each of their exams by ruling out every other possibility and then seating themselves strategically nearby when the tests were handed back, and verifying with their own eyes her perfect marks. Her limber mind: from then on there was no doubt, how rigorously she trained it, more rigorously, I think, than I trained my body; how she drove herself with a kind of violence forward, far beyond any of her peers, male and female, and coming first in every exam.
Radha studied alone, her door locked against the noise the other girls made, teasing and chatty as they studied together. My door was often locked against the other girls too, often but not always, because there were days when my solitary room, a solitude which I had so coveted, became dark and oppressive, the few objects in my room acquired an almost sinister quality and the tree outside felt far away. This feeling squeezed me in a familiar way, from the inside. And I couldn’t bring my mind back, I couldn’t offer it anything. I almost couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to. After a while I would unlock my door and find some pretense to join the room in which all the girls gathered, the common room downstairs, or more often it was Saheli’s on the first floor, hers being the most spacious and the most central, and she being the most popular of the girls. When I came in to the room, they accepted me within it without remarking upon my previous absence, the circle broke to gather me, then re-formed to include me, and the talk continued undisturbed. We were seventeen and eighteen; the older girls were twenty-one. Serious, all of us serious, but in that room the talk was light and full of teasing laughter, a kind of talk that could fortify against the male world we had barged into.
Radha never gave in the way I did: her discipline was holy. When she left her small room to visit the bathroom those evenings the girls all gathered they would call out to her the way men would call out to us to get us to turn and look—but not with malice, only the affectionate envy sisters have for one another, for with brothers the envy is felt in a different place: the envy you feel for one who has what you will never have, rather than the envy you feel for one who has what you could. She was our most precious fighter, valiant in our war, though she gave no acknowledgment she fought for anyone other than herself. She proved again and again her worth, and so ours too, and the calls subsided with deference, as soon as her serious, half-absent gaze crossed the doorway. Did she even see us there, sitting on the bed or cross-legged on the floor, or leaning against the wall or against one another’s knees? She made no indication that she heard us. The room was just outside of the reach of the mango tree that shaded so many other of the rooms, and if one stood at the window one could be seen by all passersby, and many passed by to sing up at this window, sometimes on their knees, sometimes drunk, sometimes shouting, to one particular girl or to the nameless several as we stood, laughing or irritated or shouting back, taunting, or once pelting down rose petals to a particularly love-sick young man. They were always chased away, eventually, by the scowling watchman, equally angered by the gall of the boys and the need to rise from his post, expressing his anger in a bewildered aside to himself in Hindi, Marathi, English, and Panjabi, calling upon all the languages he knew to express his disapproval, diminishing him into a bumbling, comic figure, which gave an added pleasure to the boys who howled with laughter as they ran.
Yes, the black feeling passed. Yes, if it was loneliness, it abated. But the other girls were easy with one another in a way I was not, the silent one. I had almost nothing to offer into their quick-moving conversation. Where had they learned such ease? Watching myself beside them, I felt an oddness that would never subside, same as the oddness with my girl-cousins, and my childhood schoolmates. I sat upright, never leaning against anyone’s knees, or even against the wall, sitting very rigidly in my body, alert, in my freshly pressed clothes, sitting upright the way a monk would sit in prayer. These girls tolerated my oddness, being glad freaks themselves in at least this one, shared regard: not the swiftness and sharpness of their minds, which many girls possessed, but from the frank prideful ambition that led them to race their minds against the minds of the boys, to prove against the minds of the boys the worth of their own, instead of locking them immediately away in motherhood and household chores.
And yet I missed my family. I missed unrolling the cotton mattress before I lay down to sleep. I missed my brother, not how he was now nearly grown but how he had been as a child, when he had been mine, though I had not fully wanted him. For many months I did not visit them, pretending to be busy with my studies. I wrote them several letters over the months that they never responded to, not out of anger or hurt, I knew; I knew it never even occurred to them to reply. I pictured them often in the flat. It was no more silent than when I had lived there: the noise in the apartment was generated almost completely by the world outside it. My father had hired a bai to do the work I had absented, and though I had never seen her I could imagine her squatting on the floor, cutting vegetables. If a thought causes pain you can move your mind away. This was true of almost any thought in the whole world. I thought then of Radha.
The day after our first semester exams I had woken early, very early, as was my habit from my childhood, which I had no desire to break. I loved those morning hours: loved them even more deeply here because the quality of silence at the college was deep and vivid, it was a village-quie
t or even a jungle-quiet instead of the rudeness of city-quiet which was not quiet at all. Only birds: wind: sometimes the faint prayers from the temple by the lake edge, the ringing of the big brass bell that hung in the archway, whose grooved tongue you reached up to slap against the belly and wake up god. Hardly anyone else was awake at this hour, except during exams when the other girls kept odd hours, and a few doors wore a band of light under them, proclaiming its dedicated occupant was awake and studying. This disturbed my sense of quiet: it didn’t matter that at this hour the girls made no noise. So perhaps it was not quiet I sought but a sense of solitude like those morning hours as my mother prayed over her English, reaching for something. The day after the exams, only one door showed a strip of light underneath: Radha’s. On my way from the bathroom as I stood in the hall watching the door. Every once in a while I could see her shadow move across the light or hear her footsteps on the linoleum. Then she opened the door.
She was dressed in a yellow sari, and there were flowers in her hair. Chameli, bright against her dark neck. When she saw me standing there she smiled and it was such a surprising look on her face I realized I had never seen it before. Her shoulders were loose. “You’re awake?”
“Yes,” I said. No one really thought she was beautiful. I had heard them say her brow was too heavy, her lips too thick. Her face at rest appeared to have a slight frown on it. But I suddenly thought she was beautiful.
“Well, come on then,” she said. “We’re going to the temple to give thanks for our exams.”
“We don’t know how we did yet. They’re only posting the marks next week.”
“I know how I did.”
Certainly, and she was right, always right, always first. I was still in the sari I slept in, mussed, and hadn’t bathed. But I was worried that if I asked for a little time to get ready she would leave without me. She carried a plate with sweets on it. All the buildings were dark still, the boys were sleeping, even the Assistant Warden was gone from her post. The world was ours. We took the path the lovers took, that looped behind the hostel and led to the lake—no men to call after us; even the cows we passed seemed occupied by their own thoughts, some kneeling, though not asleep, their dim eyes only half-open, as though rehearsing their dreams. I had been to this temple only once before but had not stepped inside it, feeling that it marred the edge of the lake, man-made but otherwise pristine, but today I felt more warmly toward it. It was a simple, almost humble structure, white walls reflecting the opening light. A flock of parrots laughing as they passed overhead. Radha might have liked this too. This was a girl I had never seen: she seemed so easy in her skin. I was irritated when the priest stepped out and greeted her by name, he bare-chested in the coolness of morning, and hairy. We went into the temple and he blessed us, pressing a thumbprint of kumkum on her forehead, then mine, and letting her hands pass over the sacred light, and I took it too, smearing it up over my eyes. She prayed and offered the sweets, and I sat there, looking at the small idol, pitch-black with white eyes, sitting in repose with her veena, her body studded with fresh marigolds, between her bent legs and her arms and even the crease between her breasts, and then looking at Radha, so small, so slight, folded up into herself, pointing the knife of her mind at her prayer. She was older than me, smarter than me, but at that moment she seemed to me like a small child, fierce but small, defenseless.
“Here,” she said, and offered me a sweet from the plate. And then, without waiting for me to take one, she pressed it to my lips.
As I said, I felt like a child in those days, a second childhood, though really it was my first, and I admit I enjoyed playing this innocent role, even when I truly had a little more worldly knowledge than I let on, enjoying the surprise of a friend crying with alarmed delight—but you do know what married people do together, don’t you? (I did, or thought I did, though later, it turned out I was mistaken, or, if not mistaken, then at least not completely correct.) Conversely, I took much pleasure in uttering crude things like a child would with great innocence, something illicit she has overheard without understanding the exact meaning, but understood enough to intuit its dirty nature, and using her innocence for impunity, like the time I used the words “blue film” in a rare conversation with a group of boys in which I was the only woman and therefore cast in the double role of innocence; this group turned raucous by my use of the phrase and my insistence that I knew what it meant. “Alright then, what?” they said and I answered “those art films that Satyajit Ray makes,” and the group burst into laughter, thinking the joke was at my expense, but I knew that I had played the joke for them, I had stepped into the role and played it for my own pleasure, liking, as a child likes, to be in the center of the room, demanding special attention and care; it’s almost deference that the precocious child demands, especially a boy-child whose gentle antics are always rewarded with smiles and laughter and the affectionate stroking of his chin.
Radha’s innocence, though, was wholly genuine, and carefully protected: not an act but a choice. Because she held herself in the strict isolation of her own mind; because she rarely, if ever, came into the room where the women gathered, and rarely, if ever, spoke to the men outside of her classes (this indifference seemed to be mutual, and at times boiled over into plain hostility: but they wore this, we knew and she knew, to mask their fear of her, fear born of love and reverence for her luminous, untouchable mind, a mind so knifely focused it was like Sita’s body in the ashoka grove, utterly impervious and even serene), she kept the innocence of a young girl easily, and wore this innocence protectively around her. Their attitude toward her didn’t seem to wound her. She had learned from somewhere the dancer’s bearing and stood upright. Innocence straightened her back. It was like this when she placed the sweet in my mouth. Her mouth opened as mine opened, the way you feed a child, unconsciously parting your lips so that the child will part his, and in the sweetness of this gesture I felt like I glimpsed the thing inside her that she so closely guarded—her slender, vulnerable core. Because of this I wanted to cover her mouth with my hand. I didn’t. Her bright fingers pushed the sweet into my mouth: it was terribly sweet, not from jaggery, which would have stained it brown, but from pure white sugar, which was very expensive, and gave the food a singular, focused sweetness, cut only by the black scent of elaichi and the flecks of pistachio, whose skins had been roasted with salt, but which nonetheless had a tacit green softness when they met with the tongue.
“Oh, it’s heavenly.”
“It’s just from the sweet shop down the street. I can make better.”
“Why don’t you show me how? Now that exams are over, we can think of other things.”
She shook her head. “Last night I came home and fetched the sweet, and after that I went to sleep. In my sleep I could dream about whatever I wanted to, and this morning too, I could think about whatever I wanted to. But now that I’ve made my offering I will go back to work.”
“Back to work? But exams are over.”
“This semester’s exams. What about next?”
“Classes haven’t started yet.”
She didn’t reply, just shook her head again.
“What do you dream, if you can’t dream what you want to?”
“I solve my equations.”
“Bap re, Radha. And last night?”
“It was also equations,” she said. I understood. Not with my studies, of course, but dance. Unlike Radha my marks were not exceptional; they were not bad but they were not the best, which, for us girls, was almost the same. But I was not troubled by my marks. Some days it was as though the world had burst open into a fully bloomed flower I wanted to stuff whole into my mouth.
“You should be more serious. You should study more,” said Radha, not unkindly.
“I think you should study less. Why can’t you one night dream about walking across the sea, or flying over our forest?”
“It doesn’t interest me.”
“Do you have bad dreams?”
&nbs
p; “Yes. Sometimes the numbers don’t make sense.”
Though she had not meant it as a joke, I couldn’t help but laugh. It was true that for years I had been the most serious girl in the room, though I had not thought of myself as serious, just someone who enjoyed her own thoughts. Against Radha I was playful. We had begun to walk back, stopping first to ring the bell. The note that sounded once, then twice, as each of our hands reached to stun the tongue against the belly was fast, acidic, like a spray of lime. The air was warmer, the sky coming open, a slight pink.
“When you’re married, you won’t dream of equations.” This is something I would have never said to anyone but Radha. It was like something that someone would have said to me.
“Not you too,” she said. “The other girls are always teasing me.”
“Everyone admires you. That’s why. They see you so quiet for weeks and weeks, every class you’re quiet and then suddenly look. You’re on top.”
She made a small, pained noise.
“I’m not going to marry. There are too many girls in the family and I’m youngest.” Then she said, “I don’t want to marry anyway. I don’t want to go back to my village. I want to go to space.”
Space? Her major now made sense, and, at the same time, became ever more absurd. Sometimes god puts a soul in the wrong body. I took her arm, cool, almost hairless, where three perfect moles in a line marked the place her limb folded into elbow. It had been weeks or years since I had touched someone, it felt to me at that moment, and the same for her the way she let me have her arm. We walked home like this, in silence.
