delays n detours

morning and i am feeling helpless. such hair i have grown, long and dry and falling out in the heat, in the stress, in the everything, and all i want is someone to get it under control for me cuz i don’t know what to do with it anymore. i dilly i dally and then i sally forth to the neighborhood hairdresser... to find it closed at almost-noontime. i revise my schedule. i do a little more studying and sit around wondering where it is all going to. i give the hairdresser another try. still closed and the guy repairing shoes by the entrance shrugs it all off, who knows when it will open? i had been sure the french girl had told me it was open from morning. why isn’t it open from morning? or, why does always no place here post their hours? sometimes i feel like i am flying about in circles always hoping for one thing on the circuit to work, feeling hopeless and out of control like a puppet train jerked around on the rails by invisible strings. it is no good that today is feeling hopeless already anyway even without the failure to get a haircut..... me hopelessly struggling at my tabla, hopelessly trying to cram bengali into brain that is just like no more give me vacation, hopelessly trying to explain first hopelessness and then nandigram and other issues of west bengal politics which i dont even understand to schmabil on phone but he is i think hopelessly wiped out by his own fight against deadlines, final papers, the end approaching...

afternoon and i am with my bengali tutor, as we labor laboriously thru a sad story of caste n class, some poor guy caught stealing a fish from the zamindar’s lake. outside the wind is whipping up the dust and dirt, rattling at the shutters, and in the air u can feel the rain coming. and in a moment, it does come, it is there, sudden and complete as always, dropping and drenching and spraying and splattering, reaching us where we sit with a rumbly roar through the walls of the house. i would be going, but she won’t let me—how can i go in such rain? instead i wait for tea, the clock ticking away thru the minutes, my sense of time drifts. inside there is my inner voice freaking out again, i will be late for dance class! but i try to suppress that, i cannot run out on a sweet old lady who has me waiting for tea, chill schmemma chill they are only minutes...

i am already twenty minutes late for a class that is thirty five minutes away. but my taxi driver is delighted by my miserable bengali and goes tara-tari when i tell him to get me there tara-tari, so soon enough i am skipping about over potholes and puddles down the block to dance school. pishi (guruma) is in a mischevious mood, and teaches us makan chori, the thieving baby krishna after the butter, announcing, today there will be a thieving of butter! she is excited, and so her english begins to fall apart. we are krishna’s mother, milking the cow and then churning. pishi directs us, us who are having trouble cuz we cannot help but giggle when she says, "this this, what is this? milky! yes milky, first you do milky, first milky then pitchering... then you bosh on floor again, legs crossed, bosh bosh, put down pitcher."

she feeds us fried eggplant, sitting in front on the divan with her big newspaper packet of 30 baingan for only ten of us... students plead but pishi will have none of it, pishi will feed and then overfeed each and every one of us. towards the end of class she gets clever, there are only a few of us left in the class and she still has some eggplant to get rid of, so she tells me oh these are still hot they have not become cold hold one see! i say and what will happen then? once i am holding it? no i will not hold it. but as usual there is no point protesting, since she refuses my refusal, calls me the goonda of bhawanipore, tells me today i have been so naughty, too naughty, and has the eggplant given to me by another student. happily, she has emptied her packet.

then i am stolen away by k-di, a tiger lady. she is older, i think sixties, and she is always coming to these dance classes to sit and watch in the corner, protesting that she is old and cannot be dancing so much. that is until she sees something she doesn’t like, and jumps up and shooing everyone in front where they can see, shouting at the poor tabla and harmonium players to do it right, she tears into whatever bol is at hand like some crazy tornado, occassionally stopping halfway thru the bol to yell again at the musicians who are half cowering half breaking out in laughter that they are doing it wrong, and when she is finished she says, there, that is it, now you know. and there is no saying no to her. k-di also happens to live near where i live, and every so often she gives me a ride home. today again she did this, but when we got out of the taxi said to me, you want soup? in a voice that would accept no nos, and so of course i said yes. but then she decided that first we would stop by her home cuz of course i would need to take rest before i went off for eating and sleeping. she took me into her home had me recline against the cushions as she arranged them, telling me she would show me how to relax, turned on the fans opened the windows dimmed the light and told me to relax for a bit, then we would go. the position is a little awkward but i go with it, and close my eyes at her instructions. in a few minutes, she is back in the room and with no warning starts wiping ice-chilled rose-scented water all over my face, saying, eyes closed eyes closed! i surrender, even my giggles i surrender, maybe this is normal i don’t know. she finishes, tells me still to rest, and then goes out again. ten minutes, and she is back, and we are ready to go.

by the time i get home it is after nine, i am full of soup and smelling of the bel phul garland that k-di has given me to sweeten the air, the day has been whispered away and i will have to get it all done tomorrow. so i push all my plans a day further down the line like i always do, and crawl into my bed, garland of flowers beside my pillow, the familiar sounds of dogs barking and goods carriage tata trucks rattling by lulling me into sleep.

pictures from rabindra sadan performance, 27 april 2007

on the 27th of april, us students of guru bandana sen and senior disciple suchandra banerjee put on a show at rabindra sadan, a pretty big-time stage in kolkata. us intermediate students performed a bunch of bols (short dance compositions), some tatkar (footwork), some gat, some thaat, all the mish-mash of a standard kathak performance... but with some eccentric choreography by suchandra-di. then some of the elder students performed a tharana, which i guess you could describe as a bunch of bols and footwork woven together with a sung verse it keeps coming back to.

it was crazy and chaotic. the stage was squishy. the lights were blinding. the dancers were underpracticed. i was exhausted, half-sick, dehydrated... but it was pretty amazing. somehow it all came together, somehow there was no catastrophe... anyway, here are the pictures.

posing in the green room.

spinning on the stage

ta dum! we make it thru another bol.

senior students do tharana

more senior students, more tharana.

my deal

right now... spending a year in india on a fulbright grant, based in kolkata aka calcutta, studying dance, researching dance, learning bengali, and doing my best to learn hindi also in this anti-hindi town. i just finished getting my BA last year so this is an added year of education, of postponing choosing what to do with myself for the rest of this life, and so, of course, also of confusion. vascillating between things.

but what i am doing here is really exciting--the dance form is kathak, a classical north indian dance form that is unique from other classical indian dance forms in that it represents a fusion of hindu and islamic culture that emerged out of the mughal courts. it is fast. there are spins. pirouettes. footwork that will set your feet on fire if not the stage. intricate, mind-boggling, but also playful rythyms. and hands that move through space with incredible softness and grace, delineating directions, circles, lines, figure-eights, hands that make arcs in the air. eyes that tell stories. a dance that is all elegance, grace, delicacy.

so, i am spending most of my time trying to get a handle on all these beauty, struggling at it every day at dance school. when i'm not doing this, i am visiting other dance schools to do observations for the whole research thing, wandering the city in search of the perfect cafe, studying bangla as best i can, going to language class, washing my laundry in a bucket in my bathroom (no, no washing machines, and the washerman that comes already wore out half my clothing the last time i was here in only four months... i trust my own hands better), reading the telegraph to get the news on the latest bollywood or to a lesser extent hollywood gossip, reading, trying to get sounds out of my tabla (the drums that accompany kathak... trying to learn trying trying), taking walks in the quieter areas, listening to hindi language tapes, shopping for fruit and vegetables because everyone seems to love to feed me a diet of bread rice potatoes noodles sweets and eggs and so i sort of start wondering where my health will be going, napping when it is too exhausting, rehydrating with endless liters of water, and daydreaming.

so there is a lot. and what with all the tea breaks the days pass fast. i'm sure before i know it it will be all over.