The dancer

Right In The Middle

I sent my first piece to DH in the fifties. There was no middle column then, but the placement carried a miscellany of tidbits, a poem and an anecdote under the caption New Writing. I remember Raja Lakshmi from Bombay whose short sketches were fascinating. Before feminism was even mentioned, she was a feminist writer and a fine stylist too. Not in the Jane Austen mode but rather like V Woolf. Well, I aspired to write like her.

My very first piece was a miniature portrait of a young dancer, who actually was my friend’s daughter making her debut on the Bangalore stage. Barely eight or nine she had undergone training under the famous dance maestros from Pandanallur. My friend, a purist, had wanted her daughter to learn from the best Bharatanatyam teachers. She had arranged for ‘sirs’ to leave their village and make their home in the city for a two-year stint during which she would be responsible for their upkeep from accommodation down to food and funds and the fresh betel leaves they chewed after lunch. So this dhoti-clad pair had become a familiar sight to the residents of Shankarpur and a few among them became beneficiaries as they engaged the gurus to teach their offspring as well. Bangalore became home to a crop of young Bharatanatyam dancers and many ancillary dance classes had sprung up on this wave.

Came the day for Chitra’s arangetram. Invitations were posted well in advance and the eight-year-old prodigy was in for a gruelling three and a half hour repertoire. Since my friend had assigned the duty of master of ceremonies to me, I was an important participant. The arangetram was the culmination of the two-year training Chitra had undergone, indeed a test for the artist as well as the masters which both parties seemed to sail through with laurels. The classicist audience had hailed the Pandanallur masters as superb and kutti Chitra as a promising dancer with a great future. I write this today in homage to my friend and her daughter, both sadly no more, for the modest contribution they made to the fifties art scene.

The piece called The Dancer appeared a week after the arangetram and my excitement to see my name in print indeed knew no bounds. Everyone I knew congratulated me and I felt as though someone had given me a golden crown or that I myself had turned golden like Midas’s daughter. I was paid five rupees for my piece, for which I felt indeed grateful to DH. It was not the money but the fact that someone had recognised my writing that gave me wings as it were to fly into the high skies. Five rupees. I think I put it in the hundi at the Dodda Ganesha temple for having set me on the journey of writing.