There’s a flower I am still yet to find again, that I saw once when I was too young to commit necessary details to memory. It was outside my favorite temple in god knows where in some southern part of India where large banyan trees grow for centuries and become immortal.
I believe in gods and goddesses the way I believe in Freddie Mercury or any member of One Direction. I look up to them and lean into them in times of particular chaos and need, but I don’t expect anything. They’re intangible entities. Placebos. They feel close but I’ve never seen them and I probably never will and that’s what makes a deity, a deity. That blind proximity.
It was white and yellow and small and it smelled like what was missing in the beliefs my mother taught me growing up. It smelled like what I needed, which was strange because I have never known what I needed, I’ve always just been aware that I was in need. It’s a kind of self-pitiful approach to analyzing memories but perhaps that’s why I don’t actually believe in gods and goddesses, because that puts the weight of the world on them instead of on myself.
Before I lose the chance—and I can’t even begin to process what it would be like to lose it—I told my grandmother that I wanted her to write the name శివశివ for me on a piece of paper because I secretly want to have it tattooed. I want to tear away that piece of paper she wrote on like a reverent magazine cutout and keep it in my wallet. I want to stare at it and press it against my chest and feel it turn damp from the heat of my hand.
I don’t think I will ever actually get married. But whenever someone asks, I instead wax on about all the plans I’ve pondered and come up with in my mental binder of ideas. Plans to get married in an ancient temple because I hate the lack of spirituality in crowded ones. How I want to say my vows on a boat out at sea, but will also say them on land because I want my grandmother’s sister to attend even if she has swollen feet and has shrunk to half her size since the last time I saw her (I’m afraid she’ll be invisible by the next time).
Because I don’t want to disappoint. And also because I hate expectations and hate doing things the way everyone has done them before me.
Maybe Aunty understood that and maybe that’s why she stood in the basement with me the moment I felt like giving up and said, Let’s start over. Maybe that’s why she compared me to her dance-prodigy daughter and told me I was terrible and threw my incompetencies in my face, and then hugged me and told me it was okay when she saw the hours-old gash on my temple.
There’s a picture I keep in my camera roll. The scene is fuelled, expectedly, by more incompetency but instead of making me want to cower and keep my head down, it fills me with a new kind of affection and makes me wish I could live in that time of my life forever. It makes me want to frame it and send it to her and tell her I have no idea what I would be without her and hope she’ll always love me a little more than as a student. In it, she’s fixing my eyeliner. Her hand is framing the back of my head carefully and I like to think it’s out of gentleness even though it’s because I have my hair done up with heavy ornate jewelry and flowers that are meticulously held in place by a hidden army of bobby pins.
She told me I looked like a doll and I smiled so big the ruby dangling from my nose ring touched my teeth. I liked the pictures I had with Aunty, and my mom, and Aunty’s mother, and Aunty’s aunt, more than I liked the pictures I had of just me. The fact that we had to pin the waistline of the blouse by an inch or two was everything. The fact that my arms were two inches smaller in circumference than they were when we had the blouse stitched, was everything. Dancing for hours on end everyday to a point of mental and physical exhaustion, because that was what was necessary, was everything.
We used two of my grandmothers’ sarees for two of the costumes, and my aunt bought the other to total three. Aunty told us to buy a long necklace, but instead I borrowed a friend’s. Aunty told us to buy all of the jewelry from a store in Chennai but instead we hunted shops in Bangalore and bargained for deals. Aunty told me to practice while I was in India the summer before I was supposed to perform, but instead I sat on the bed with the fan on and stomped my feet on the ground while playing the songs, as if I were dancing.
Aunty likes jasmine flowers, likes garlands of them to keep in her hair. We have a small jasmine tree in our sunroom and it blooms and smells like loveliness and memories, and sometimes I’d bring a hand sewn garland of them in a tupperware container and give them to Aunty at the beginning of class, and she’d smile and get excited and thank me and I’d feel a fragile sort of happiness and tell her it was no big deal.
Aunty used to tell us that if we got our periods before a performance at the temple we should just ask God for forgiveness and dance anyway. Because things were meticulous. Maintaining formations, giving proof to practice, performing something that people could marvel at—all of it was more important than following tradition. Sometimes, no matter how devout, belief is triumphed by what we think is sensibility.
Aunty could never remember the choreography she gave us for the songs we performed. It was there once, in glory, and then it was gone. All of us mourned that but she would laugh and look around with a smile and insist that it was a good thing. Because remembering would be like a cage. I didn’t realize until later that what I should’ve taken away from that is not blind agreement, but knowing how to say fuck you to things that make art harder.
I wish I learned how to say fuck you to things that make art harder. For now, I just meander until there’s no way forward, and then I say fuck you to the entire world. If I had learned, maybe then I would be in a different position. Maybe then I would be doing more than wishing Aunty a happy birthday and a happy new year every January and pretending to have the time of my life when she asks me how I’m doing.
People say that my arangetram isn’t real because every arangetram has a varnam, and mine didn't. I would lose my memory when I tried to dance it and forget where I was and stand in front of Aunty in complete panic. So instead Aunty scrapped the original varnam and reconfigured a song about Siva that I had learned years ago and knew like the back of my hand, added my mother’s favorite song at the end (that was also about Siva) and named that my varnam. I still danced for 35 minutes straight. I still almost lost my memory and stood on stage in visceral panic. But people say my arangetram isn’t ‘real’ because it didn’t have a ‘real’ varnam.
I think the reason it’s always Shiva for me, is because of dance. Because he is the deity of dance. And I think the reason I sometimes wish I was still with Aunty, is because the moment I saw her in the artificial fluorescence of the basement when I was seven years old, I thought she was a deity.
Aunty called it tenacity. I danced while actively suffering migraines. I danced at 5am before school and then again at 5pm after school. I danced in her kitchen while she boiled ghee and made curries.
She called it tenacity and for once in my life, I felt like I’d achieved something grand. When she stood up to the podium, pulled me into a side hug, and told me she was proud, the rational side of me knew that pride came with every student, but the prideful side of me believed I was special.
Aunty was a deity and perhaps, unfortunately, I treated her like one, too.
Whenever someone asks me if I believe in God, I laugh because ‘God’ is a million stories I’ve accumulated since the day I was born. ‘God’ is the person I become on stage when I flash my eyes and sweep my legs in long, insurgent strides while holding a phantom spear. ‘God’ is the character I workshop when discussing desires and motives and expression and body language. ‘God’ is the lover I yearn for as I mouth the lyrics to the song I’m dancing to. ‘God’ is the embodiment of who I am when I exercise any one of my many passions.
People still talk, and there’s something to be said about defending someone you love when people around you are criticizing them. But I recently realized that there’s something more to be said about criticizing someone you love, with love, especially when people around you are talking shit about them (no matter how true that shit may be). Aunty was—is, I should probably say, since she still exists even if I haven’t been her student for years—flawed but she was a figurehead. And every figurehead in history, in the world, is flawed. It’s probably more unfair of us to expect her to be perfect than it was for her to allow what she did.
Aunty knows how to say fuck you with the grace of a goddess. She knows how to keep what is important and throw away what isn’t. She knows how to make things seem pretty even when they’re steeped in pain. She’s a master of it. But I guess that’s just the art of dance, is making things seem pretty even when they’re steeped in pain. I guess that’s just art as a whole.