The Archer

by Shruti Swamy

  “Not this time.”

  “Do you want to learn kathak just to break it?”

  “You didn’t break it. What you danced, that was kathak. It was just . . . more . . . deeper . . .”

  She wiped her eyes quickly against the back of her hand, gently enough so as not to disturb the lines of kohl that delineated the sharp edges of her eyelids. Then she said, “My own teacher would never have taken me back.”

  “I know.” It was good strong tea that I had made, sweetened very thickly with sugar, although after I burned my tongue I sipped it slowly. Exasperated, she picked up my cup and saucer and cooled the tea between the vessels herself. There were strands of gray at her temples; perhaps there had always been. “Finish your tea and let me see them.”

  I drank the tea she cooled. I could feel its warm drive downward, the way it made my eyes more open. But I didn’t need it: my body was like a coiled spring in those days, always ready to leap into motion. I remember the way my hands sometimes rested on my thighs as I watched my husband eat, the fingers unconsciously expressing lotus mudras. And I dreamed hard of dance, waking damp and ready, as Radha had dreamed her maths. Through the years of my practice I had come to understand my body, its limits and its pleasures. The “I” did not burst upon me anymore in a terrible dazzle, it lay soft in me, alive to the surface of the world as my own flesh. I put my cup down. I didn’t hesitate. I turned. I turned. I turned.

  That night I lay awake in bed thinking about the summer festival: a vanity. A vanity, but I could not help myself from taking the memory out of my pocket like a candy and placing it again and again into my mouth: tasting then a double sweetness, of time passed but also of time promised—the festivals I had been invited to and that would come after, and later, the performances I would carry on my own. All the stages of the world, sleeping and awake, lit for a performance, blazing with music, or resting, quiet, silent with the unspoken desire to be occupied by voice and bells, to be slapped awake by quick and merciless feet; they seemed to me, in those nights, mine, as I looked out through the eyes of memory from the stage constructed for the summer festival at Azad Maidan, I was looking out at the audience as I did so, running my eyes over their faces just as a tea-seller counts his coins: with a detached, professional pleasure. Ah, they still leaned toward one another, heedless of me, one laughing at her companion’s remark, another openly reading a book, glancing only from time to time up at the stage, there, my husband, with a camera propped on his knee, yes, I had him, but none of the others: I would have to win them, for they had not come to see me, a junior artist performing so early in the evening, before the sun had even set.

  It was a grave honor to be so young a dancer and to perform at the summer festival at any time slot, even one so early, which I had secured by performing well in the Shining Stars of Youth concert. From seventy performers they selected ten to dance in the summer festival, one young artiste—“star”—to open each night of the ten nights of the festival, and with payment enough to secure accompaniment. By coincidence, the night I performed was the night my teacher was scheduled to dance too, though as I looked for her in the audience almost despite myself, I could not locate her, nor did I really expect to. I was dancing a traditional piece, one taught to me by my teacher—not taught, or not quite given, but one absorbed through the afternoons when I sat through her practice, carefully watching her movements and the way she instructed the tabla player, which I had begun to practice in earnest in the years of our absence. It was the dance I had first seen flickering in black-and-white on the screen of the campus movie theater—the one that had called me to her, and bound me.

  I stepped into the dance as I had once stepped into the lengths of soft, dry cotton she had offered me in exchange for my wet garments. When I had been her student, the feeling had been one of borrowed elegance; now the feeling acquired a new dimension, one of sorrow, though the dance itself was a joyful one: I was honoring her, as if she were dead. As though dead, but sometimes too I had the feeling that from far away my mother watched me, from very far away, and still I dared, committing all sorts of actions she was sure to dislike. I could feel the crowd begin to pay attention to me, but as my awareness of this feeling grew, I realized that I was not dancing for them at all. I was dancing for her.

  When I was finished, the sky had darkened with evening, and some lights had come in. I had won the audience, most of them: I could feel their attention and accepted their applause with a small, short bow. The makeup was smothering, I seemed to be sweating underneath it, without that sweat being able to express itself to the surface, and when backstage I tried with a washcloth to remove the mask that had been painted on me without complete success, and left the tent mortal, a mess. With this face I reluctantly met my husband who was waiting for me at the entrance. “You danced well.”

  “Thank you.” The sight of him could make me shiver—as though in fright, or recognition. Today in a printed cotton shirt and bell bottoms, both better versions of the outfits my brother wore, having been purchased in London, instead of stammered out by the local tailor.

  “You looked happy up there.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  We walked together to the lawn. I was thirsty, but didn’t have anything to drink; he went and returned with two soft drinks without my asking. Licking, burping fizz, electric, sugar light on the tongue, he would not hear my protestations, “Already bought,” he said, and when I was finished he went to take the bottles back. I was hungry too, cooling slightly in the slightly cooling air, returning to my civilian body after wearing another’s. Pouring myself back into my body, or drifting back into it. We were listening to the next performer, a Hindustani singer whose voice held an appealing textural roughness, almost a dirtiness, which, as she stretched one note to the length of her breath, smoothened and cleared. It was a dusk-raga and matched the light and air: indigo and gold, and I was aware of my husband’s proximity to me, the big messy bow of his long legs folded, and his long, gleaming arms, and just the very edge of his scent—man’s sweat, and a kind of spicy perfume that I had never before known any man to wear. If, when I danced, he looked at me with the camera’s eye, in life it was a glancing look, softer and more gentle, the kind of look one caught only as it moved away, having already touched its object softly and thus briefly satisfied its desire. I looked at him like this too, in pieces: whorl of ear, hump of nose, soft ridge of lower lip.

  “She’s not so good,” my husband whispered. “You were better.”

  “You can’t compare,” I said, blushing. Not displeased.

  She was finished now. A new audience was beginning to arrive, a fashionable crowd. Two women in silk: one in black and white, one in a blue-green, both with tall hair, came and spread a dhurrie in the space in front of us and tucked themselves into beautiful shapes upon it. The lift of their hair left their napes clear, their cholis cut low in the back so their white necks looked long in the last of the light, soft and long, like panes of moonlight. The tones in which they spoke their English resembled my husband’s, warm, but formal, and with only the barest traces of an Indian accent, which expressed itself more in the cadence than in the vowels.

  Black and white: “Yes, the next one’s her. You’ve never seen her dance?”

  Blue-green: “No, dance or otherwise. Is she very good?”

  “Very good dancing and otherwise, if the gossip is to be believed. You know Sachin keeps her out there in Versova all year.”

  Tongue click. “But she doesn’t mind Versova? What am I saying, doesn’t his wife mind?”

  “She must, but what can she do? Even still, Sachin is so possessive, you know, she used to have a very handsome tabla player and he made her change to someone older.”

  “Well, perhaps he was right to; women like that can’t be trusted around any man.”

  It was then that my teacher took the stage, and the women fell silent, as if she could hear them. I felt full as I watched her luminous body cross the stage to its
center: full of what precisely I could not say, tenderness or sympathy for the years of gossip that drifted wherever she appeared: but it was more than just that. She was dressed in gold silk. Through her makeup I could see her face—in fact, the thick makeup she wore seemed to clarify it rather than obscure it, its elegance and the softness of its features, the characteristic girlishness I imagined she’d wear long into old age. The program began in the traditional manner: she passed through the vandana and then the slow, expressive movements of the nikas, using, as she always did, her face as an instrument to capture interest, her eyes especially, bright as they tracked the movement of her hands or kept them fixed in front of her. It seemed then that she danced out of her eyes, that her gaze served a double purpose, capturing the audience with its liveliness, but also capturing her own interest, as she fed herself on the crowd’s delight. She had it, like she had had me, from the moment she arrived on the stage. The rhythm quickened with the aamad, then grew even more complex with the chakradar: her eyes didn’t waver, and her face seemed to grow more serene the more complex the workings of her feet, seemed to soften with her body’s love. Then the music ceased. The singer, who had thus far been articulating the bols that the feet followed, came now to join the dancer at the center of the stage. She held in her hand a strip of black cloth with which she bound my teacher’s eyes, erasing them, and erasing us from her, and returned to her seat. Thus the kavita commenced, explaining the strange action through the words of the poem the singer spoke: my teacher was dancing as Gandhari, the wife of the blind Dhritarashtra, who willingly took blindness into her healthy eyes and wore a blindfold until her death. It was a story I did not care for, valorizing as it did women’s sacrifice, one-sided, for no one would ask Dhritarashtra to bind his sighted eyes for Gandhari’s blind ones.

  Yet, though the piece was supposed to be narrative, enacting the stanzas of the kavita, my dance teacher’s movements grew abstracted, and she began to incorporate the complex sequence she had danced with sight during the chakradar. Without her gaze, the meaning of her body shifted, what had at first seemed opulent, almost voluptuous, now became austere—her body moved with a strange tenderness, following the tabla as the rhythm raced forward, time itself speeding forward. There she danced, her gaze gone and us vanished, in a world built wholly of movement: instead of serenity what lay across her brow was something even more difficult to articulate. Her arms whirled around her, conscious, now, of the substance of air. She was stripped clean: free: no desire, no wanting, not for anything she did not have, only a reaching out with her strange dance to whatever lay beyond it, a vision that the dance reflected like an imperfect mirror. To be a mirror—to be—nothing—

  For all my desire for a clean, new life, I crossed often into the territory of my old life—not the chaali that I had fled, but the theaters in which I performed, and the concert halls I had begun to frequent with my husband, and the homes of the rich girls to whom I taught dance. I had had trouble finding an engineering job: my prospective employers were startled, even offended to see that the V. on my resume obscured a woman’s name. They were sure that I would quit as soon as I married, and, upon learning I already was, that I would soon leave to have a child. I was tired of the interviews where comfortable men sat behind desks, not even pretending to look at my qualifications, but openly examining my breasts instead. So I went another way.

  Like a needle I slipped not only back into my own life but into the old life of my husband, for every Wednesday I would take the long journey to Malabar Hill to give lessons to the daughter of the Ghoshs, whose house was in the same neighborhood and even on the very same street as my in-laws’ mansion, mutually shaded from the other’s gaze by their respective walls topped with high glass, crushed, over which mango and guava trees spread casually their branches, and dropped their fruit into each other’s gardens, and onto the road. This house was difficult to get to from our cottage, a journey that required a three-kilometer walk and three buses each way, but one I quite stubbornly refused to give up despite my husband’s entreaties. From where the last bus dropped me off, I began to climb up the hill, and it seemed, though my effort increased, that the air became cooler and more pleasant, scented with the many unseen flowers of the neighbor’s private gardens. From the rooftop of my childhood I had gazed at this green hill: it stood to reason that the reverse would be possible too, but so shaded was the street I walked, by the trees and walls, that I could not make out anything more distinct than the haze of the city, its chatter and stink very distant from this serene place.

  As the door of the Ghoshs’ residence opened to me and I was shown inside by a servant, I would try to imagine myself the daughter of the house, returning home from some pleasant activity—horse riding, swimming at the club, or an afternoon at the cinema—being greeted affectionately as “baby” by the servant, instead of the infinitely more distant “madam.” My clothes would be western, my hair cut short, my face neatened and made coherent—made fairer and luminous—by the makeup I would expertly apply, the everyday makeup so different from what I wore onstage, and subtle enough to require an artist’s hand, though in its own way very theatrical. “Some nimbu-pani, please, Madhu, it’s beastly hot outside”—it was not just the words they used with their servants, but the tone; though when they issued commands they did so without the severity or even the formality the women in the chaali used to address their bais—there was almost an affection to it: for being so far above their servants in station, there was no need to forcefully assert their superiority, and their address was genial and relaxed, unless a mistake had been committed that required a scolding. My imagination was too thin to fully inhabit this other-self or, perhaps, there was something that stopped me from imagining an alternate life too fully, a feeling I thought might be disgust, though its object—whether it was myself or my surroundings, or the Ghoshs themselves—I could not discern.

  Susheela, my student, would often be waiting for me in what I came to think of as the Music Room; in it, various instruments were kept in specially made glass cabinets—two sitars for the elder daughter, and a collection of violins Mrs. Ghosh had played in her youth, hung by their necks. The furniture in this room was heavy, darkly carved, unlike the modern furnishings of the downstairs parlor where sometimes after the lesson I was served tea, but the windows let in enough brightness to make the room feel spacious instead of oppressive. Susheela reminded me of saffron, if not the color, then the scent and texture, the luxury of its flavor. Her eyes were large and dark, wounded eyes that doubtless captured many hearts, and sometimes I wondered in idle moments if one of those hearts might once have been my husband, or at least, his mother. It was easy to be charmed by a girl like Susheela, to whom, like my husband, the world had been so kind, and who therefore had the ability to approach any person with the friendliness of one who doesn’t anticipate hurt. Sometimes, as she danced, my eye traveled to the window, where, past the border wall and through the many branches of trees, the top of my in-laws’ home could be glimpsed, blinding in the late morning sunlight, white, and crusted with ornament. Now and then a figure could be seen on the balcony, a servant shaking out and beating a brightly patterned rug, or someone leaning over to water the potted flowers that lined the balustrade in great profusion—a woman whose face was too distant to make out, but which, through her bearing, I could only assume to be my mother-in-law Mrs. B herself. My hand still slapping my thigh in the beat of Susheela’s lesson, or even chanting simple bols, but I was calling Mrs. B with my gaze, wanting her to straighten for a moment and shield her eyes to look out across the wall into her neighbor’s window. From such distance, I could still see the sheen of silk her saris gave; the way even light touched her was gentle. Then she would disappear again behind the glass doors, polished by the sun into mirrors, and I would turn my dazzled eyes back to my student.

  Why my husband wanted me to give up these lessons was obvious: he had grown up with Susheela’s elder brother, and he had liked the Ghoshs, wh
ose motives were unclear. Had they employed me in order to show him their support or to anger his mother? It seemed to me the former, for Mrs. Ghosh would take tea with me from time to time in the air-conditioned parlor, asking after my husband and after Susheela’s progress, but she could scarcely be ignorant of my mother-in-law’s displeasure. No matter how respected, I was, after all, simply another employee on the family payroll, which opened a third possibility—that this position was intended as a slight to my husband himself. And why did I so fiercely defend my right? He was protective of me, of my dignity, wanting me to enter these houses as his wife or not at all—he wanted all rooms to be open to me, and all the paths of the gardens, as they were for the daughters of the neighborhood, as they would have been for me if we had been correctly married. He would have liked to show me the neem tree whose branches had held him in boyhood many evenings aloft, and to bring me to the cool inner rooms of the family home, from which there was a pure, seemingly endless view of the sea. But he did not want me there, on these terms, alone. I had jammed my foot in the door but could not quite kick it open; I had stuck my finger in the wound—why did I do this?

  We fought about it. Once uncapped, my anger was immense and surprised us both, for what did I even have to be angry about—wasn’t he the injured party? I could feel myself using my face like I used it onstage, putting all of my burning feeling into my eyes. In contrast, my husband’s anger was cold, so much so it was hard to even recognize as anger, and he had on his side a powerful command of English, his mother tongue, in which he could express many logical statements with a particularly wounding edge. The language I reached for was Gujarati, but I never let it pass my lips. What more did I want? I couldn’t say. Not in English, nor the language of my body, for it was bitterness that moved me, a bitterness I did not want to express. When I left the Ghoshs’ house, walking back along the mostly empty streets, descending, it felt, into the heat, chaos, and stink of the city, the city’s many grasping hands, I had a taste in my mouth like the aftertaste of sugar. I was looking again, in vain, for Mrs. B, wanting her to not only know but to witness my successful infiltration, wanting to see in her eyes some measure of the humiliation she had dealt to me. For it was she who had shown me so clearly how I could never assimilate into my husband’s life, her cutting words delivered with such a serene countenance that they were doubly destabilizing. That I could not hold a fork and knife properly, that I had failed to present myself to her in the appropriate attire: these were just small things that showed the bigger problem, a problem, surely, I had to see too; I could recognize that this marriage would be the cause of my own unhappiness. I was dark, overeducated, unpedigreed, and worse, unskilled at the tasks that a daughter-in-law would have to fulfill, tasks that could not be studied for and could not even be taught or learned, as they depended on her native grace, beauty, and unfailing poise. “But it’s done,” I had said in slight wonder, “we’re already married.” She had not yelled, the beautiful Mrs. B, though color had rushed into her fair cheeks, nor did Mr. B, a neat little man in a stoic gray suit, make any sort of angry declaration, he had only called to the servant to get his lawyer on the phone, first for the purpose of having the marriage annulled, and then, when my husband made it plain in his parting words that he would not consent, to make an update to his will, a conversation that, I can only assume, happened shortly after we left with the same odd calm in which the entire conversation had been conducted.