Ma launches into her usual lecture. “Dancing is no career for a middle-class girl.
You need to study something useful in college so you can get a well-paid job.”
I sigh extra-loud.
My dance teacher, Uday anna, isn’t rich. But
his house is larger than ours.
Clearly, he earns more than
Ma at her bank job and Pa at his library.
Ma goes on and on.
Back when I was younger, I’d struggle to be better at school
for Ma’s sake.
But numbers and letters soon grew too large for me to hold
and I grew far away from them
and Ma grew out of patience.
Paati places steaming sojji, my favorite snack, on our table.
The sweet, buttery smell of cooked semolina is tempting
but I leave the plate untouched.
March into the bedroom Paati and I share.
Slam the door.
Pa knocks. Says, “Come out, Veda. Eat something.”
“Leave her alone,” Ma says. “She knows where to find food if she’s hungry.”
I probably shouldn’t have slammed the door.
But Ma never even said congratulations.
She’s never pretended my dancing made her happy.
But never has a performance mattered more to me
than being chosen for the finals of this competition.
All my life, Ma’s been
hoping
I’ll do well at science and mathematics
so I could end up becoming what she wanted to be:
an engineer.
All my life, I’ve been
waiting
for her to appreciate my love
of the one thing I excel at:
Bharatanatyam dance.
SPEAKING
with
HANDS
“Steps came to you early. Speech came late,” Paati said.
She’d tell how she watched me pull myself up by the bars
of my cradle at eight months,
eager to toddle on my own two feet.
Months before others my age, she said,
I could shape thoughts with my fingers.
My body wasn’t shy.
While words stumbled in my throat
losing their way long before they reached my lips,
like lotus buds blossoming my hands spoke my first sentences
shaping themselves into hasta mudras:
the hand symbols of Indian classical dance.
Paati said, “It was as if you remembered
the sign language of Bharatanatyam
from a previous life you’d lived as a dancer
before being reincarnated as my granddaughter.”
Paati always understood everything I said with my hands.