Locomotoring

… I decided that I could no longer wait to find mine. After decades of sitting still at a desk, I am finally starting to embrace movement. If you asked me to describe my body’s rhythm right now, I would probably say that it is one foot after next, bipedalism.

When I was just learning bipedalism, my mom had enrolled me in a Kathak school. It was so long ago that I don’t have any memories except the ghungroo, the little bells on one’s anklets, they made sound in unison with every stomp. Perhaps my mother put the ghungroo on my feet to entice me to dance.

These bells are often strung on a red felt pad and the dancers color their feet red. It is visually captivating to see feet in red dancing with rhythm, speed and exhilaration.

I was in a small town, it had a single Kathak teacher. My mom tells me that I had to stop learning Kathak because my teacher died, he fell off his balcony while drunk. I had imagined this skinny older individual who was practicing the Chakkars (the spins in Kathak), and then fell off the balcony. I remember that when I would do the Chakkars, I would drift and get dizzy. I imagined that he did too, not knowing then that those practiced in the dance form, neither get dizzy nor drift while spinning.

I could have restarted when we moved town, and we moved across many a towns, but I was already preferring to sit still.

A couple years ago, a friend gifted us a tango class in Buenos Aires (link). I had found, not to my surprise, that I had no rhythm. But that class gave me hope, perhaps with a good instructor, I would enjoy learning to dance. Since then, I have been looking for a dance school that would be willing to train me. After some thoughts, I decided to look for a Kathak school to reduce barrier to entry. To my surprise, my feet remembered the Tatkaar, a repetitive step (right-left-right-left/left-right-left-right) even though I remembered nothing else of Kathak. I have finally found this school and I enrolled myself last month. The school graciously teaches adults, and offer synchronous and asynchronous learning sessions. Nearly every other adult in the class is more rhythmically inclined than I, but I had expected that. I am older by decades, but I had expected that too. My teacher is a delight, and I hadn’t expected that.

Apparently, the first thing you learn in Kathak is a non-trivial sequence of movements, Namaskar. Like in yoga, Kathak Namaskar is a gratitude to the lineage and to your teachers. I had to play the video in a loop a dozen times to learn the movement. For several days afterwards, my knees creaked and groaned. When I mentioned to my mother that I didn’t remember the Namaskar, not even a bit, she told me that my childhood teacher never taught me that sequence. Maybe he really was dancing on his balcony without paying tribute to the lineage!

My teacher says that I have to think of myself as a dancer now. Apparently, it will help me show up for every class, and every practice session. I am starting to explore my lineage. My Kathak lineage is Lucknow Gharana. This includes maestro Shovana Narayan, disciple of Guru Birju Maharaj. I have since learned that she has a masters degree in Physics and several other academic degrees. In addition to being Kathak maestro, she had a long career in Indian civil services. Early on, a brain stroke had left her with 50% peripheral vision. She has an autoimmune condition that gives her severe skin rashes. She has cracked knees and bad shoulders and calls pain a constant companion of hers. She describes her marriage and motherhood as long distance relationships. She also claims that without dance, she would be like an animal without tail and horns. Shovana Narayan has an absolutely stunning rendition of Drapupadi’s “Cheer haran” – navigate to 10 min 30 sec in this TEDx talk where she introduces the dance.

(Cheer haran is an event in the Mahabharatha where Dushasana, the second eldest of the hundred Kaurava brothers, attempts to disrobe Draupadi, after Draupadi’s husband, Yudhishthira, loses her in a game of dice. Draupadi was the wife of five husbands, the brothers collectively known as the Pandavas. But in the moment, it is Krishna, a spiritual mentor to Pandavas, who comes to her rescue. Krishna is God and like in a magic trick, her robe gets infinitely long and Dushasana never manages to disrobe her. One of the Pandava brothers, Bhima, eventually avenges her humiliation on the battleground of Mahabharatha by tearing open Dushasana, and drinking his blood. And yes, all the characters in the story are related. Mythologies are just that – stories that humankind wrote to tell themselves that good eventually wins over the bad. I was checking into the horrendous event that had occured in Kolkata two summers ago. No God came to rescue the victim. Hundreds of fellow human beings held many Reclaim The Night protests. The person of interest, an influential person, is living happily ever after.)

Becoming a competent Kathak dancer may take 10 years or 20. I might have the time but I can’t lay claim to the passion, at least not yet. My goal is simple enough, next time I wonder what my body’s rhythm is, it would respond with Tatkaar.