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.