Threshold...Memories
Dear Sunaina,
Am hoping this note finds you in good health and spirits and not too surprised at seeing a letter from me who must have passed into the realms of mere memories.
I am sorry I had to disappear without notice and didn’t have the time to even inform you about my plans before leaving. But even as time has flown like water under a bridge I have never forgotten you and at every turn in my life I have mentally checked back as to how you would have viewed my decisions and actions.
Since childhood you have been my conscience keeper and it was a pain to keep my plans to myself before I left home and then not to touchbase with you once I had gone away, knowing that your concern for my well being will make you share my details with my family. They would have lost no time in dragging me back to that quagmire which I had escaped. Its been so many years and I can finally be in touch again.
There is so much to tell you and so much to ask after. Your son whom I had seen last as a toddler must now be in school and joined by atleast another sibling also. I am hoping your husband has got a better job and that you are now comfortable in life.
As for me, I had run away to Mumbai and am now established as a dancer of repute, though nowadays I do more choreography than real dancing. When I had come here it had been my dream to be just an extra dancer on film sets and earn 200-300 rupees per day.
After much knocking on doors I had finally been accepted into the troupe of my guru and in a few months had become the favorite disciple. This led to many petty rivalries to crop up for there were many students who had at various points in time been the guru’s favorite. Being upstaged by a small town girl did not go down well with them. They employed various strategies to ensure that I would leave the group but I resolutely stuck to my goal and ignored them as best as I could.
I stayed on for almost a year and a half, performing in various programs where the troupe was invited. We traveled extensively to almost all the big cities of India. My position in the group was consolidated and I was one of the lead dancers and even the posters that were printed started carrying my picture and name. My happiness knew no bounds. This after all had been my childhood dream. I felt there was nothing else I wanted to do in life. However I was naïve and failed to see the catastrophe that was slowly but surely creeping up on me.
Like I mentioned I had become the favorite of my guru and he treated me like family. I was used to his calling me to discuss some point or show me a new step he had thought of. On one of our trips to perform in Delhi we were traveling by Rajdhani, when I received such a call from the guru asking me to come to his cabin, (he always traveled first class while me and the girls were in third AC compartments) I found it nothing unusual. It must have been around 10.30 at night and dinner had been served and most people were turning in for the night. I was quite sleepy but pushed myself to go. I went upto his cabin which was some way away from ours and knocked on the door. I heard him cough which was an indication that I may enter. I slided open the door and walked in to find him sitting up on his berth with his eyes closed seemingly meditating. As I walked in he opened his eyes and nodded at me to sit. As was my practice I sat down at his feet and he put a hand on my head and started speaking slowly.
He told me all about his life and how he too had to struggle to find his place in the world. As he spoke his hand slipped from my head to my shoulders and he kept it there, I felt a little uncomfortable but since he seemed totally oblivious, I didn’t have the heart to tell him to remove it. He went on to tell me how he had been married as per the custom of his community at the age of 14 and once he had found some respectability in Mumbai he had been pressed upon by his family and in-laws to bring his wife to live with him. His wife neither shared his passion for dance nor had anything in her personality that would bind him to her and he single mindedly pursued dance as his one and only love in life.
It was only now in his twilight years that he had started missing the great experience of true love. He was afraid he would never reach the pinnacle of his art because he felt his performance though complete and par excellence in all respects failed to live up whenever he enacted scenes between lovers for he had never experienced them.
I felt sorry for this man who was at the top and yet so lonely and I had turned to him to ask if having danced with some of the most beautiful and talented woman of his time he had not felt drawn to them.
He said most of those women interacted with him as professionals whose families he frequently met with socially, so there was no chance of such feelings to develop. Also most of them were in a manner of speaking his rivals and forever seeking ways of getting him to spill some his secrets which made him wary of them.
I found this logic a little far fetched but then who was I to argue with him and I was also reminded of my own experience with fellow students who instead of behaving like one large family were steeped in petty jealousies and slandering each other.
Asking me to get up from the floor where I had been sitting the Guru asked me to sit beside him and when I refused he said he had something important to tell me and this he wanted to share with me as an equal and not a disciple. I was puzzled and intrigued at the same time and got up to sit beside him on the berth.
He took my hands in his own and while holding them looked at me for a long time as if struggling with his own thoughts. Then he looked away outside the window and sat still holding onto my hands. I didn’t know what to say and when a long time had elapsed and I was about to ask him what it was he continued saying that at last in his life spanning five and a half decades he had found true love but he was hesitant to say anything to the person concerned as he wasn’t sure how such a declaration would be received.
I was relieved to hear this as I had thought he had some grave thing to tell me and I easily advised him to go ahead and speak his heart to the lady concerned and anyone would consider herself lucky to be the object of his love and affection and since his wife was no more there hardly seemed any problem in his achieving his desires.
He seemed gladdened by my suggestion and asked me quite a few times if I really thought he would be able to convince the lady and it would not be ill received. On my again reiterating my point, he excitedly got up from the berth and started nervously pacing the cabin. Then he suddenly grabbed me and made me stand up and then looking straight into my eyes told me that he was in love with me.
In fact he had fallen in love with me the first day I had walked into his dance class and his desire for me has burned bright since then. All this time he had been afraid of how I would receive such an advance and had therefore carefully kept his feelings hidden but he couldn’t hold it any longer and my encouraging words helped him speak his mind for the firt time. He told me that though he knew I didnt share them and must be deeply disturbed to hear all that he had to say I must find it in my heart to give him a chance and he would make me the happiest woman on earth.
He was right it had been a big shock for me and I had not known how to react to his disclosure. But he looked so forlorn and desperate that I didn’t have the heart to say no and in a bid to calm him I pulled him to sit down and told him to lie down as it was late. He behaved like a child and did as he was told, all the time looking at me and holding onto my hand as if fearing I would vanish if he were to so much as blink. I had never felt so adored before and it was not altogether an unpleasant feeling.
I told him to sleep and he said he would if only I promised to stay by him, I promised I would and he lay down quietly. I had planned to quietly slip away once he was asleep but I too had been exhausted by the night’s revelations and dozed off. The next thing I knew someone was knocking on the door and as I moved I found my hand firmly held in the Guru’s.
It brought a smile and I slowly disengaged my hand to open the door. The attendant looked in and gave me a knowing look, he had come with tea. His smile made me realize the foolishness of my action for I had spent the night in a cabin with the guru and my absence must surely have been noticed by the girls.
I walked out of the cabin in a daze and walked to the wash room, freshened up and walked back to my own compartment. As I feared a few of the girls were already up and discussing something and fell silent when they saw me.
What happened next is easily told. I faced a stony silence from the girls and those few who had spoken to me also now stopped speaking. The guru in his turn would keep asking me to join him on one pretext or the other and slowly without knowing when, I got accustomed to being his lover. He was always courteous and respectful and I came to love and depend upon him too.
Almost a year went by in this manner when I realized I was pregnant and shared this news with him. His eyes glazed over and he didn’t speak for some time when I asked him to explain his behavior he went into frenzy and shouted at me saying all this was a ruse to get money out of him and to harm his reputation. He piled abuse on me and even said that women from small towns were always trying to trap men like him into such compromises. He wasn’t even sure who the father of my unborn child was.
As I heard him out in silence much like his first declaration of love, too stunned to react, I realized how I had been taken for a ride and how this fatherly looking man had cleverly used his charm to keep me in his troupe while also enjoying my body.
I walked out of his house with the few things which belonged to me and hit the road. I didn’t have many friends in the city having lived in the guru’s house for the past year and a half and the few I knew socially would have hardly helped.
I was walking aimlessly on the streets not knowing what to do, when a car stopped besides me and someone stepped out. Though the face was familiar I was so engrossed in my own problems that I didn’t register who it was and kept walking. Someone called me by my name and that’s when I stopped to realize it was Amit, son of a competitor of my guru and a rich businessman in his own right.
He took me to a nearby coffee shop, asked if I would like to share my problems and having heard them out came up with the most unusual solution. He said that he wasn’t inclined to marry a woman and his family was insisting that he did. He couldn’t tell them his secret which was that he preferred men and was afraid of the slander that would rise if he was not able to perform his martial duties. He offered to marry me. He said that I need not worry I would not want for anything and my child would have a father’s name and if I found this suitable we could work out a deal.
His candor and honesty bowled me over and I agreed to his proposition.
I don’t know what you will think about me but this is the truth of my life. I am a renowned dancer and am the wife of an equally renowned man. I have an adorable daughter who studies in a Mussourie residential school and on the face of it I lack for nothing but look beneath and my soul is unfulfilled.
Let me finish here, I hope to hear from you i.e if you would like to renew our friendship. I sincerely hope you do for you are the only person I can unburden myself to and share my thoughts unhindered with.
Sincerely yours,
Sujata
Am hoping this note finds you in good health and spirits and not too surprised at seeing a letter from me who must have passed into the realms of mere memories.
I am sorry I had to disappear without notice and didn’t have the time to even inform you about my plans before leaving. But even as time has flown like water under a bridge I have never forgotten you and at every turn in my life I have mentally checked back as to how you would have viewed my decisions and actions.
Since childhood you have been my conscience keeper and it was a pain to keep my plans to myself before I left home and then not to touchbase with you once I had gone away, knowing that your concern for my well being will make you share my details with my family. They would have lost no time in dragging me back to that quagmire which I had escaped. Its been so many years and I can finally be in touch again.
There is so much to tell you and so much to ask after. Your son whom I had seen last as a toddler must now be in school and joined by atleast another sibling also. I am hoping your husband has got a better job and that you are now comfortable in life.
As for me, I had run away to Mumbai and am now established as a dancer of repute, though nowadays I do more choreography than real dancing. When I had come here it had been my dream to be just an extra dancer on film sets and earn 200-300 rupees per day.
After much knocking on doors I had finally been accepted into the troupe of my guru and in a few months had become the favorite disciple. This led to many petty rivalries to crop up for there were many students who had at various points in time been the guru’s favorite. Being upstaged by a small town girl did not go down well with them. They employed various strategies to ensure that I would leave the group but I resolutely stuck to my goal and ignored them as best as I could.
I stayed on for almost a year and a half, performing in various programs where the troupe was invited. We traveled extensively to almost all the big cities of India. My position in the group was consolidated and I was one of the lead dancers and even the posters that were printed started carrying my picture and name. My happiness knew no bounds. This after all had been my childhood dream. I felt there was nothing else I wanted to do in life. However I was naïve and failed to see the catastrophe that was slowly but surely creeping up on me.
Like I mentioned I had become the favorite of my guru and he treated me like family. I was used to his calling me to discuss some point or show me a new step he had thought of. On one of our trips to perform in Delhi we were traveling by Rajdhani, when I received such a call from the guru asking me to come to his cabin, (he always traveled first class while me and the girls were in third AC compartments) I found it nothing unusual. It must have been around 10.30 at night and dinner had been served and most people were turning in for the night. I was quite sleepy but pushed myself to go. I went upto his cabin which was some way away from ours and knocked on the door. I heard him cough which was an indication that I may enter. I slided open the door and walked in to find him sitting up on his berth with his eyes closed seemingly meditating. As I walked in he opened his eyes and nodded at me to sit. As was my practice I sat down at his feet and he put a hand on my head and started speaking slowly.
He told me all about his life and how he too had to struggle to find his place in the world. As he spoke his hand slipped from my head to my shoulders and he kept it there, I felt a little uncomfortable but since he seemed totally oblivious, I didn’t have the heart to tell him to remove it. He went on to tell me how he had been married as per the custom of his community at the age of 14 and once he had found some respectability in Mumbai he had been pressed upon by his family and in-laws to bring his wife to live with him. His wife neither shared his passion for dance nor had anything in her personality that would bind him to her and he single mindedly pursued dance as his one and only love in life.
It was only now in his twilight years that he had started missing the great experience of true love. He was afraid he would never reach the pinnacle of his art because he felt his performance though complete and par excellence in all respects failed to live up whenever he enacted scenes between lovers for he had never experienced them.
I felt sorry for this man who was at the top and yet so lonely and I had turned to him to ask if having danced with some of the most beautiful and talented woman of his time he had not felt drawn to them.
He said most of those women interacted with him as professionals whose families he frequently met with socially, so there was no chance of such feelings to develop. Also most of them were in a manner of speaking his rivals and forever seeking ways of getting him to spill some his secrets which made him wary of them.
I found this logic a little far fetched but then who was I to argue with him and I was also reminded of my own experience with fellow students who instead of behaving like one large family were steeped in petty jealousies and slandering each other.
Asking me to get up from the floor where I had been sitting the Guru asked me to sit beside him and when I refused he said he had something important to tell me and this he wanted to share with me as an equal and not a disciple. I was puzzled and intrigued at the same time and got up to sit beside him on the berth.
He took my hands in his own and while holding them looked at me for a long time as if struggling with his own thoughts. Then he looked away outside the window and sat still holding onto my hands. I didn’t know what to say and when a long time had elapsed and I was about to ask him what it was he continued saying that at last in his life spanning five and a half decades he had found true love but he was hesitant to say anything to the person concerned as he wasn’t sure how such a declaration would be received.
I was relieved to hear this as I had thought he had some grave thing to tell me and I easily advised him to go ahead and speak his heart to the lady concerned and anyone would consider herself lucky to be the object of his love and affection and since his wife was no more there hardly seemed any problem in his achieving his desires.
He seemed gladdened by my suggestion and asked me quite a few times if I really thought he would be able to convince the lady and it would not be ill received. On my again reiterating my point, he excitedly got up from the berth and started nervously pacing the cabin. Then he suddenly grabbed me and made me stand up and then looking straight into my eyes told me that he was in love with me.
In fact he had fallen in love with me the first day I had walked into his dance class and his desire for me has burned bright since then. All this time he had been afraid of how I would receive such an advance and had therefore carefully kept his feelings hidden but he couldn’t hold it any longer and my encouraging words helped him speak his mind for the firt time. He told me that though he knew I didnt share them and must be deeply disturbed to hear all that he had to say I must find it in my heart to give him a chance and he would make me the happiest woman on earth.
He was right it had been a big shock for me and I had not known how to react to his disclosure. But he looked so forlorn and desperate that I didn’t have the heart to say no and in a bid to calm him I pulled him to sit down and told him to lie down as it was late. He behaved like a child and did as he was told, all the time looking at me and holding onto my hand as if fearing I would vanish if he were to so much as blink. I had never felt so adored before and it was not altogether an unpleasant feeling.
I told him to sleep and he said he would if only I promised to stay by him, I promised I would and he lay down quietly. I had planned to quietly slip away once he was asleep but I too had been exhausted by the night’s revelations and dozed off. The next thing I knew someone was knocking on the door and as I moved I found my hand firmly held in the Guru’s.
It brought a smile and I slowly disengaged my hand to open the door. The attendant looked in and gave me a knowing look, he had come with tea. His smile made me realize the foolishness of my action for I had spent the night in a cabin with the guru and my absence must surely have been noticed by the girls.
I walked out of the cabin in a daze and walked to the wash room, freshened up and walked back to my own compartment. As I feared a few of the girls were already up and discussing something and fell silent when they saw me.
What happened next is easily told. I faced a stony silence from the girls and those few who had spoken to me also now stopped speaking. The guru in his turn would keep asking me to join him on one pretext or the other and slowly without knowing when, I got accustomed to being his lover. He was always courteous and respectful and I came to love and depend upon him too.
Almost a year went by in this manner when I realized I was pregnant and shared this news with him. His eyes glazed over and he didn’t speak for some time when I asked him to explain his behavior he went into frenzy and shouted at me saying all this was a ruse to get money out of him and to harm his reputation. He piled abuse on me and even said that women from small towns were always trying to trap men like him into such compromises. He wasn’t even sure who the father of my unborn child was.
As I heard him out in silence much like his first declaration of love, too stunned to react, I realized how I had been taken for a ride and how this fatherly looking man had cleverly used his charm to keep me in his troupe while also enjoying my body.
I walked out of his house with the few things which belonged to me and hit the road. I didn’t have many friends in the city having lived in the guru’s house for the past year and a half and the few I knew socially would have hardly helped.
I was walking aimlessly on the streets not knowing what to do, when a car stopped besides me and someone stepped out. Though the face was familiar I was so engrossed in my own problems that I didn’t register who it was and kept walking. Someone called me by my name and that’s when I stopped to realize it was Amit, son of a competitor of my guru and a rich businessman in his own right.
He took me to a nearby coffee shop, asked if I would like to share my problems and having heard them out came up with the most unusual solution. He said that he wasn’t inclined to marry a woman and his family was insisting that he did. He couldn’t tell them his secret which was that he preferred men and was afraid of the slander that would rise if he was not able to perform his martial duties. He offered to marry me. He said that I need not worry I would not want for anything and my child would have a father’s name and if I found this suitable we could work out a deal.
His candor and honesty bowled me over and I agreed to his proposition.
I don’t know what you will think about me but this is the truth of my life. I am a renowned dancer and am the wife of an equally renowned man. I have an adorable daughter who studies in a Mussourie residential school and on the face of it I lack for nothing but look beneath and my soul is unfulfilled.
Let me finish here, I hope to hear from you i.e if you would like to renew our friendship. I sincerely hope you do for you are the only person I can unburden myself to and share my thoughts unhindered with.
Sincerely yours,
Sujata
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