The Archer

by Shruti Swamy

  There were just three of these boys, sometimes five. Among other things, they were supposed to be in charge of the lights. The cast was nearly just as small: three shipwrecked sailors, four lotus-eaters, and me. They seemed always to be arguing about something—the positioning of the bodies on the stage, or the inflection of the lines, or the meaning of the play and of the poem, arguments that thrilled me, the whole thing thrilled me at first, as I positioned myself in my seat among them. It was a beginning, I felt: here I was in the company of artists, their arguments proof of their commitment to the stage. Here were people who, like me, felt their lives on the stage to be more vivid than their ones on land. None of them were strictly handsome, but they all had their moments, their angles—they all knew their angles. I could have fallen in love with any one of them, I thought, if I needed to.

  Yet: often my ideas went unheeded. I would raise my hand shyly, as though I were still in class, and when I was noticed, if I was noticed, my suggestions were not met with the same argumentative fervor of the men but with the tolerant deference reserved for sisters-in-law. Anand would “take it into consideration,” but of course, I knew very little of the stage, while all of them had had so much experience with theater, and how it was done. Of course. I understood then why they had asked me, and why Sushmita had refused. They wanted an audience, not just for the finished product, but for the entire process: they wanted someone to see and revere them as artists. It was only in front of me—a girl—that they became artists—men—and they left this part of themselves as soon as they left the auditorium, and they would leave it here permanently, moldering in this college, when they finished their studies.

  Against this I studied my own interest. Was I, after all, any better? I felt scorn when I thought about their futures, how they would so easily abandon the thing they seemed to care about above all else, getting jobs as engineers or managers, or a degree in business, acquiring a wife and children and other fine objects, supporting, too, their parents, an unmarried sister. It wasn’t just greed or cowardice that would cause them to abandon their calling; I knew this as surely as I too would be pressured into abandoning mine—but this knowledge created in them a fervor, I think, to convince one another and themselves of its impossibility. And perhaps I too had performed my fervor, to the audience of my teacher, and then just to myself. I liked the guise of artist as much as they did, it gave me clarity, meaning, and pride. I was different from them in one regard: I was sure I would succeed where they were so ready—even willing—to fail, and this made me even more prideful, increased my scorn, and gave me a sense of loneliness that both pleased and saddened me. So while at first the play had served to lift my spirits and my esteem, it ultimately drove them down, and I stopped going to rehearsals.

  Still, I took pleasure in the composition. I poached sections from other pieces, but since none of them fit the situation whole-cloth, I was forced to invent what I sought to convey: longing, distance, love, femininity, and a terrible beauty—none of which, strictly speaking, was in the text, but seemed apparent as I thought about the wives sitting at home, lonely, or strolling at evening beside the sea, looking for life on the horizon or even trying to look past it, into the dark, faraway corners of the earth where their husbands were hidden, or underneath the folds of the very sea where they lay dead. I felt the anger the women might have had, staring off into the vast horizon, which had offered everything to their husbands and withheld everything from them, the wives. The fact that I too felt like this when I looked at the sea, even then, as I composed, simply looking at the sea through my mind’s eye was inexplicable, for I was not the widow of a sailor nor had I lost anyone to its depths. Yet the sight of it, especially blazing with the last light of afternoon, would fill me utterly with this feeling that no other body of water inspired, not the lakes that bordered the campus nor the glittering pools at the British-built clubs or the homes of the rich, where years later my husband took me to parties.

  The evenings for others had turned romantic, the path outside my window into the forest showed an increase in traffic in the dusk hours, and, leaning out as I sometimes did to watch these couples pass beyond my sight, I felt chaste and benevolent, a goddess who had no consort of her own, but blessed women’s wombs and assured them joy. The boys from my college strolled with the girls from my hostel, but also with girls I had never seen before, borrowed, I think, from the Ladies’ College where the choice was more plentiful, and the girls were prettier and more feminine, at least so we were told sometimes by the men whose advances we had spurned (a more feminine girl than Sushmita, for example, seemed difficult to imagine, but I accepted these comments, applied generally to the ladies of our hostel, and once or twice, specifically to me, with the same shamed pride that I felt when my teacher called me arrogant.)

  I was often leaning out my window then, watching these couples with curiosity. What did they talk about, what did they feel, when they let their hands brush but not clasp, just brush against each other as though by accident, until they were under the cover of the trees? What did they do then? For it was true that I knew what married people did with each other, and also true I did not know, did not fully know until my wedding night, though I had seen a grown man’s thing between his legs because he had wanted me to see, a girl alone, and dark; men started calling to me and whistling even when I was young. The thing sitting in the hand of the stranger had not provoked fear or even revulsion, only a mild dislike, almost a feeling of embarrassment for him, whose want was so naked on his face that I had to pity him: it had given me a kind of power to see the want on his face, reversing the hot-shame feeling of powerlessness all the other eve-teasing had roused. Chi! I said and spat at him, and then I ran.

  To want it? I would have liked to talk about it with someone, with Radha. Even with her I felt too shy to say the puzzled words aloud. And of course, she would know less than me. You ask a girl like Farnaz, who passed many times beneath my window, and not always with the same man. What I had was a sweet, undefined feeling. I could not picture myself walking on the path with any man, brushing his hand with my hand and laughing. I could not picture a man waiting for me at the top of the stairs with a bouquet of roses in his fist. I could only feel a soft feeling that came at night, and alone, it was almost an unbearably tender feeling, provoked by no one person but by a moon-like presence, and the feeling would wash over my body like moonlight, very softly, it would part my lips, and on the edge of my mouth I could almost taste the flavor of a sweet I had once eaten, a memory so strong it left the barest trace of taste along my tongue. If I pushed against this feeling, the calm in me would start to fade, and I would start to feel something delicious and akin to panic in a way that scared me, so I would stay there, in the soft calm my body had created, without pushing further. It was in those sweet evenings or deep in the night when I understood it was not really a punishment to be a girl, for what I felt was a girl-feeling, I knew, though I had no name for it beyond that. In those moments I was glad to be a girl, and I was glad to be alive.

  While I was working on my composition I had not seen my teacher; she had been away for a performance in Paris and one in Lyons and when she answered the door she looked neither happy nor displeased to see me, though I was bursting to see her, having worked on my composition for weeks I was very eager to show her. In truth she looked a little distracted, and her cottage, when I stepped inside, offered a few discordant notes: a black line of ants trailing the pristine kitchen; the divan, mussed, slept in, instead of neatened for its daytime use. She was straight-backed and neat as always, almost severe today in her neatness, with her hair pulled back sharply and her sari so pressed. Within the harsh lines of her clothing her body looked soft. “Subramaniamji has not yet arrived; still, we should get started. Without the tabla you can still show me your turns.” I put on my ghungroos as she put the bedclothes away and straightened the room. The way she moved moved me, even when she was not dancing. Her movements in both were neither showily gracef
ul nor were they stiff, rather, the grace came from their inherent economy, their purposefulness, and an innate pleasure: when her hand passed over the divan’s cover to smooth it, her body communicated the feel of the cotton under her palm and even the pleasure of its color: a spotless ivory. She saw me looking. Her face at that moment was unguarded, open, likely because she was tired. She had been hurt—I could see it from the slight redness of her eyes and the way she pressed her lips together. The hurt I could see, but not its source. And I think because she loved me, she didn’t immediately break her gaze from me to conceal it, she let me see: brave, and plain.

  “How was your trip?”

  “My trip was not good.”

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head. Her face came back into the present moment. “Come, let’s see your chakkars.”

  Not bad, I thought, each time I brought down my foot; surely I had improved, though I still had not reconciled my body to the new way of moving, and my body rejected it, blurring, yes, I could feel it, the stillness with imprecise movement. After a moment she stopped me by waving a distracted hand in front of her face. “Are you practicing every day?”

  “Of course,” I said, trying not to sound too indignant, but she said, “How? Do you do the steps until they are perfect? Or do you just thunk thunk thunk mindlessly until your time is up?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I looked down at my feet. The wide tiles held a trace of my reflection, foreshortened and squat.

  “Well?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I have, if you say I have. If I’m not getting better.”

  She ignored my tone and said, “Shall I show you again?”

  “No, I remember.”

  “So let’s see it.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes, again. Again again again until you’ve got it right.”

  “But—didi, we’ve been doing this for weeks, for almost two months and—”

  “And?” Her voice was cool, almost amused. “Have you got it yet?”

  So, again. And again. It was a terrible way to pass time. She would not let me speed up past a beginner’s pace. After a while—hours?—it began to feel as though the room was spinning and I was still within it, lifting and bringing down, from time to time, my one foot, aiming my arms as one might aim a bow and arrow. The ball of my left foot felt raw, the heel felt light, my arms ached, my fingernails dull, and there was a queasy feeling in my gut. I cannot exactly call this pleasure, but after weeks I was finally losing the twitch of irritation and becoming curious about the new movement, almost despite myself. To thrust stillness into the heart of a turn now seemed decadent, like a sudden draft of cool air as the door of the jeweler opens when you’re standing on the hot street. I remembered, in the film of her, the way the dense skirt of my teacher’s dancing costume would continue moving around her hips when she paused, the hips that went, in an instant, from living to stone.

  “Ah,” she said, “finally you’ve lost it.”

  “What?”

  “Your resistance.”

  “So can we move on?”

  “That is just the first part of learning and it took you weeks—months, as you said. There’s still more work to do but it will come quicker now. Anyway, Subramaniamji has still not reached—he must have gotten stuck somewhere. It’s enough for today.”

  “Didi, what was Paris like?”

  “Paris?” She sighed, but her mood had changed since my chakkars had smoothed out. Dance could do this to me, but I found it remarkable that just teaching me had done it for her, for as boring as I had found it to turn, how much more infinitely boring it must have been to watch me, and yet she had, sitting up very straight, her attention never flagging. It made sense she would like her turns this way. To do the turns in her style was to declare that stillness was underneath everything—any whirling motion, any violent emotion, joy, irritation, anger, grief—and so to offer both dancer and watcher a way out of their pain. “Clean. Gleaming. I performed in a very beautiful theater, as though I was a jewel in a box of velvet. All the white people watched very politely and clapped quietly when I was finished.”

  “Do you always perform solo?”

  She smiled at me, amused. “I know what you’re asking.”

  I blushed. “I wasn’t asking . . .”

  “Two years past I staged a dance drama with several dancers, my students and friends. But I only travel alone; it is more difficult with a troupe, more expensive. Two, though—”

  “One dancer, one assistant—”

  “Two dancers. But not now, you’re not ready. You have not proven your worth to me, only your desire.”

  Had not yet—? Or she was teasing me for my naked ambition—for what is ambition if not desire—which did not embarrass me and which I made only little effort to disguise. For when she looked at me, it was never enough. I wanted her always to be looking at me. “Oh, didi, I want to show you—”

  “What?”

  “I’ll just show.”

  This I know, I presented pristine, for I had polished it with my feet and my mind, like a rubbed piece of marble growing ever more smooth: my lotos dance. I had taken from everything I knew and made a new whole thing, and as I danced I felt the smoothness and sureness of my composition, nearly forgetting my teacher in the joy of my movement. I was at the sea, I looked against the shore, walking for a better look: through the window of the bungalow I could hear it rushing, the real sea, the real making the imagined more strong in my mind, allowing me to vanish, almost, into the dance I was making. I could feel her looking, though I did not watch her face, keeping my eyes fixed on the wall behind her as my body kept the rhythm of my steps against the beat of my heart. Stop. Stop! “Stop!” She clapped her hands together one time, and the dance washed from my body all at once, like a spell breaking. As I gazed at her face, I wondered what I had possibly expected from her, pleasure, or respect, or even amusement, for there was none. Her face, so lovely and open and easy, one that glowed with fairness and health, was transformed with her anger: her lips folded, her brow bent, and a cast came over her face and made it terrible, almost ugly. “This is what you have been doing while I was away?”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking her anger was simply a mistake, and so still proud, “there’s a talent show, you see, didi, and they asked me—”

  “I can think of nothing, nothing more disrespectful to your guru or your gharana than what you have done. You think you can just play with this, with kathak like this, for your own amusement? What do you do when I’m not around? You wear your ghungroo into the toilet with you because you’re too lazy to take it off after practice? You go and spit in your father’s face for fun?”

  “But you compose, your dancing—”

  “Are you comparing yourself,” she said, “to me?”

  “Well,” I said, “we dance, we both love dance . . .”

  She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. My body was alarmed by her anger, flushed and in a state that felt similar to joy, and because of this, I found myself on the verge of confused tears. Who else had ever scolded me with such passionate fury? And so, how could I be sorry for my error? No one but my mother.

  “I warned you about your arrogance, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’ll simply have to discard your dance and do something else. Some other composition you’ve already learned from me or from your previous teacher. And seek forgiveness from god.”

  “You don’t believe in god.”

  So shocking was my comment, that I heard a catch in her breath. I too was surprised. It was small, but with it I had pushed us past the bounds of our relationship, that of disciple and guru, whose god-like words were taken as command, and into the uncharted and unnatural territory of false equals. Though my teacher had never enforced the boundary between us the way most others would, with her manner, her criticism, or even her bearing, still there were rules that governed our relationship and gave it its structure no mat
ter how informal it appeared. My own rebelliousness frightened me, yet I was also thrilled by it, long dormant, hidden even from myself, and now flaring up at this unlikely and undeserving target.

  “I don’t believe in your god,” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Yes. I made it, my dance. And anyway they’re expecting me to perform it.”

  “To make the dance in ignorance—though it is difficult for me to believe your ignorance, I will allow you it—that is one thing. But to know, now, that it is an insult for a novice like you, an arrogant novice, to take a centuries old tradition and break the rules of it—like a child, playing with a precious vase, smashing it—”

  “Don’t you too do this? Bend and play with dance?”