Dancing Girl
Arya Krishna
At home, I pile on layer after layer: the clothing, the makeup, the jewelry. Yet they don’t bury me. My handmade blue costume drapes around me like a wild river as I build dams of safety pins to hold it back. A golden fan drapes open between my legs when I reach down to perform my namaskaram, a prelude to the dancing to come. I fasten thick leather straps around my ankles, and the bells hanging from them whisper when my feet kiss the floor.
My jangling bracelets try to slip away, but they can’t get past my wrists. Fat strips of gems and a precarious net of bobby pins support earrings shoved gently through my throbbing earlobes. My hair hangs heavy at thrice its usual length, pulled down by gleaming stones but tucked into a belt that securely encircles my waist. Despite the weight, the itchiness, the uncomfortable feeling of being forced into an outfit I would never normally wear, I somehow feel safer and more like myself than ever.
At the theater, I find a quiet corner to stick my nose in a book while my mom fusses over the indent my glasses have left on my powdered face. The chance to escape to a world where I never have to make decisions distracts me from the pressures of real life even here. I sit silent and peaceful until one by one the girls arrive. As we whisper and giggle, the lingering nerves melt into excitement. It’s the eight of us together as a team.
As we run from room to room backstage, our faces fill with more makeup. Our mothers pass us around as they check that we look perfectly alike. Every mother holds a different daughter than the one she came with, and just like that we are a team of sixteen. Soon, dark kajal rings my eyes, and red lipstick brightens my lips. Standing two inches from the mirror, I carefully paint on a white crescent moon under the crimson bindi dotted on my forehead. The precious tube purchased 8,643 miles away passes from one girl to the next. We take turns staining our feet and hands with red sharpie as a stand-in for the traditional alta, attempting to let it dry until we give up and leave incriminating trails of scarlet fingerprints behind us.
Before the performance can mar our faces with exhaustion, our fathers and later our siblings take a million pictures on DSLR cameras that have come out of hibernation for the first time all year. Our aharya is apparently meaningless until we immortalize the hours of work with flashes of light. We design pose after pose, debating about who should stand where to create the most harmonious balance of color. Then, our teacher whisks us outside to run the dance. We decide on the final corrections, agreeing on which hand goes where so that we always look the same, from our makeup to our movements. In those last few minutes, we get all our mistakes out of the way with each other so that we look perfect for the real audience.
Finally, we are on stage. The lights glimmer and try to melt us into puddles, but we have to put on a show. So as we stamp our feet in a rhythm that we’ve spent months perfecting, our faces shift through a hundred expressions that cannot be put into words. We convey a story that has been passed down through generations of dancing girls, molding our bodies into the same poses that the legendary Natya Shastra describes within its ancient pages. After an eternity we exit: chests heaving, sweat dripping, minds racing with each success and every mistake.
This frenzy of Bharatanatyam is how I stay connected to my past. It’s the lifeline tugging my lost heart along on a string. The place where I’ve spent Monday evenings learning dance for a decade. The guru who lovingly taught me how to use my body to tell the secret stories of our dances. The rush of realizing that I’m carrying on an ancient tradition and that I love it. These moments are the only times when I feel truly Indian; they are where I belong, my way back home.
Key Words:
Namaskaram: an offering of prayer and greetings done before the dancing begins
Bindi: a small dot (typically a sticker or paint) worn on the forehead
Alta: red liquid painted around the feet and on the fingertips to highlight these features
Aharya: the costume, makeup, jewelry, and overall physical appearance of a bharatanatyam dancer
Natya Shastra: an ancient Sanskrit book of guidance for Bharatanatyam
Bharatanatyam: a form of Indian classical dance
Guru: Sanskrit word for teacher
