a handful of musings...

This has mostly to do with my new-fangled relish for hand creams, and partly also to do with goddamn Dilli ki sardi, but these days I find myself relapsing way too often into my longstanding pondering about hands. The last time I thought about them real hard was on Onam day when I almost lost my right hand index finger by putting it in a live mixie (7 non-stop hours in the kitchen can do that to me; wonder how many Sylvia Plath spent before she put her head in the oven?!). Now I catch myself looking at random people and thinking about their hands.


Some people have hands you couldn't have imagined (since you've seen the rest of them). Big people with baby-sized palms, tomboyish girls with dainty fingers, greek goddess beauties with roguish hands. Pink pea-shaped nails with inverted white half moons near the cuticles. Perfectly ripe Mounts of Venus. Long, sloping fingers, curled gracefully, lying sideways, unconsciously beautiful, on restaurant tables. Hands that move and touch and perform with measured absorbance, like that of a glassful of water, filled to the brim. So much character, in those hands; definitely more than the sum of those ten fingers and two palms.


My maid, she has tiny hands. Like, very very small, pretty much like the rest of her. And she uses them deftly, especially this one kitchen duster-scrubbing thing that is so unbearably time- and space-efficient on her, and so clumsy when I try it. I rub my hands warm and smell apricot oil, as I watch her rinse hers in cold, cold water at the kitchen sink. I catch myself wondering, are her hands always cold? How do they feel when she caresses her daughter's cheeks? Do they still feel calloused, even when they are brimming with love?



I once met an itr wallah, in Purani Dilli. He had a miniscule shop, the kind that seemed like it would end as soon as you enter it. But inside, that small space was dense and deep and maddening, because it was full of itr aromas that were evoking moods and memories and emotions in me that were way, way bigger than that shop in time-space quotient. Maybe it was my semi-hypnotised hallucinatory state, or facial moles really have some scientific connection with attractiveness, but in that moment of conversation, the dirty pajama-kurta clad, shifty-eyed, mustachioed dark man with fez cap I had seen entering the shop with swagger, seemed suddenly, hmm, capable of being charming. He had a cotton wad nestled inside the folds of his right ear. He took it out and showed it to me, telling me that this was his itr-soaked mood-enhancer for the day, and his ear was the best pocket for its safekeeping. We had an oddly choreographed, strangely poetic conversation, like First City interviews can be most of the time, and I left soon after, stepping into a muggy, hot, wipe-skin-off type sweaty July day in crowded crowded Turkman Gate area. But the itr shop's residual itr-moodscape wouldn't leave me; I could smell gulab when I turned here, chameli when I sunk into my car seat, sandal when I climbed the office stairs, hell, even the sesame oil base at random moments, like in the loo. It was as if during those 30 odd minutes, those strong, heavy aromas had permeated the first layer of my skin, and were now playing hide and seek with my nose. I wondered again - that grimy, chauvinist, rogue-ish itrwallah (clearly, as you can see, I was back to my lucidity-about-men mode, now that was out of the black magic zone of the itr shop), he spent days in that shop, for years. If I was smelling like itr after half hour, he must be sweating and shitting itr. He could be smelling as mesmerisingly divine as that itr shop even when he was beating his wife, or telling her she's a whore. His rough, wrinkly muddy brown calloused hands, would always smell like desire of maddening depth. And then I told myself ten times over, how I am a very sick child to imagine these things. But I do hope, like I did that day, that his wife is nose-dead. No one deserves such mindfuck.

There was also this pedicurist I met (err...had contact with? Is a pedicure-interaction called, simply, meeting?) once, (and have blogged about experience in terrible detail here), and he was really a very boring type man, but his massage techniques were maddeningly good. His hands were extremely detailed in touch; he didn't just do a mechanical routine of slap-squeeze-kill, like most pedicurists. If I closed my eyes, it was as if his fingertips were sometimes, mmm, searching, or giving me sweet head-pat equivalents on the foot. Sometimes it was as if he'd found nodal switches for the nav rasas, in my calf. But when I opened my eyes he looked so bored and such a sullen pouty morose creature, I remembered feeling sad for the wife he told me he had. And then, (how horrible, I know), but just as a lot of fiction writers do (I assume), I tried to imagine how he'd make love to her. Would it be automatic for him, those fingertip movements he was doing on my calves, doing them to her? How would she feel, to be touched that way by a husband who was so sullen pouty morose with a pencil moustache in the day, but whose hands moved so gently at night, always smelling like a beautifully groomed woman, even if he'd been groping sour-smelling bus railings on the way back home, and he never washed hands before or after eating? I mean, that aromatherapy cream was deeply, perennially in his pores with everyday overuse, just one step short of reconfiguring his DNA.

It's been in reverse many times. Potters work their hands with soft clay (a mud pack for the hands, everyday!), but they braise their skins spinning that wheel, baking the pots in kilns. Can a hand be both, soft and abrasive? I have met many a sweet carpenter whose hands look like they're clothed in sandpaper, not skin. Can a hand that rough, that scarred, that calloused, that crude, still convey melting tenderness in touch? What kind of touch would that be? I have a friend whose hands are perpetually the texture of half-healed burns, and the touch of that is a strange kind of double-edged touch. I am most aware of its quiet messages, because I can feel its abrasion on the surface of my skin. Sometimes when a perfectly soft, gentle hand does that, the feeling is lost because I take for granted, the difference between the surface and depth of a touch.


How odd. And how exhilarating. And how very unending, this Sherlock Holmesy fascination for faces and voices, in namelessly silent hands.
　
　
　
　

the JNU assignment that began to read more like a punky-goes-to-shrink blogpost...

Hmm... so the edited version, where it belongs....


Spillage: The Body in Dance and Life

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
- From Among School Children, WB Yeats, 1928

Yeats did it for all dancers when he wrote this one. Suddenly, after these excessively quoted last two lines, dance was reaffirmed as aspiration for a Keats-ian negative capability, which continues to date, as dancers choose to highlight in their interviews, this ultimate aspiration: of losing one’s sense of being-in-the-world in dance. A utopian sublimation, expiation. Matter dispersed into the rhythms of space. A moment of the layerless fusing of finite and infinite.

It is a beautiful state to aspire for, and I will confess I chase its ephemeral shadows myself, as a performer. But what I want to explore, is the residues of this chase. The tangible remnants I tend to brush aside, while my glance searches upwards. How indeed, I wonder along with Yeats, can we know the dancer from the dance? Is the dancer all mind and spirit? At what cost? Where is my dance lodged? In the mind and spirit? Or in the body? And what does the chasm between the two look like? What is the spillage between life and dance?

Looking at the Body in Life.
The gaze in the mirror.


I think for many of us - well, for most of us - well, maybe for all of us - there is one particular part of our body where the badness manifests itself, our thighs, our butt, our breasts, our hair, our nose, our little toe... It’s as if they’ve been given their own little country called their body, which they get to tyrannize, clean up, or control while they lose all sight of the world.
(The Good Body, Eve Ensler)

I grew up in a house with full length mirrors in every room. And each mirror showed me my body differently. In one I had a near-flat stomach, in another I had sallow skin, in yet another I looked like I couldn’t look any better. One trip across the rooms could leave me in complete existential doubt about who I really was. I would obsess over the fact that I will go through my whole life never really knowing what I look like, because my elementary mode of reflection – the mirror – is an unstable one. Compliments from people are subjective; standards of beauty are mercilessly unflexible; the only leniently objective gaze of the mirror too turned out to be a hoax. And so I learnt to look at myself in parts: waist, shoulder, eyebrows, hair, thighs. Problem areas. Gifted areas. Dangerous areas. Never in totality. Because totality was frightening. More than the sum of its (body) parts.

But when I started learning dancing, I had to look at my body in the mirror to learn. So I learnt to look at my body as a whole, and yet not at my­­ body; rather at the form it was making. Not very different from looking at myself in parts, in the mirror. It is an absurdly double vision, alienating even. But to look at myself would be too explosive, too engrossing, too narcissistic an activity; I would never be able to zoom out of that to learn and give myself to a movement. I focussed on shapes and outlines when I danced the sensuous Odissi against a mirror; a bent knee straightened, a torso bent to an extreme for sculpturesque effect, a head tilted enough to suggest impishness. If I were to hold my gaze in the mirror, I would have to confront my own sexuality, which had been warped with years of memories. Memories of hiding my body’s flaws, despairing over clothes that don’t fit, don’t suit; with gazes that don’t approve; with groping hands in public buses that don’t stop to violate this body, flaws or not.

How does one even begin to address these tangles of memory and body in a performance, I wondered?

Looking at My Body in Dance.
Bodily memory. Is it all in the Mind? Is it all in life?

What happened when I turned away from the mirror to dance? Freed from my mirror gaze, I had to now use an internal gauge to measure my body’s form. I learnt how to see my body from the inside now, through vision that does not define the way the eye does; its definition is in feeling. Akin of the sense of touch, from within. To know a movement, was not to identify its form in the mind and then let the body copy it. To know a movement, I realised, meant to hold it in the body, identify its particular inner form in my body, and then let its feeling transfer to my mind. And so, I found elation in certain pure dance movements, without them being abhinaya pieces, without being told this was sringara rasa/ bhava. My body knew it was that, because its feeling was being transferred by movement, not ideas. My body was the first register of experience, the first receptacle of the ‘spirit’ of dance, the first site for that Yeatsian fusion of dancer and dance.

My mind had its fleeting moments of euphoria in the act of dance, but my body – I carried it out of the classroom, and into life. It found a way to be in dance all the time, and it found a way to spill the dance, tip it over, into my mundane emotions. My slight hunch was gone in a few years’s time; my body’s natural way of resting and standing would now be a dubhang, without my knowing; I used the tilt of the head and chest while talking; my body was swaying more in talking, standing, walking. I was not conscious about my body the way I would be earlier, those years of schooling in defensive posture, a desire to be unfeminine, even invisible, as I walked crowded streets full of men, everyday. I didn’t brandish any feminine gesture as submissive anymore; didn’t judge submissiveness as necessarily unworthy a feeling. After ten years of dancing, I can be somewhat sure of what I have gained, and I want to talk about this affirmation when I talk about my dance. But what about that which my body has lost? My hunch, my defensive stance? I realise that my body’s loss is also worth remembering. Because why should the magic in dance always be about what we rush to grab? It is also about what we choose to drop. I might choose to not remember, but my body remembers all. Bodily memory, it’s my new entrypoint into my dance. It’s where dance is played out, not just in the mind. It’s what I display on the stage, not just my body’s form and how my mind animates and sublimates it.

Dancing through the body, and not just with the body, always has this dual consciousness of being at the core and at the edge. Of acquisition and loss. Of the part and the whole. The spillage of the two is as much the core of a performance, and a dancer’s process, as the separateness. However lofty and sublime it may seem, ultimately, it is futile to try and know “the dancer from the dance”.