The Man Who Loved Dancing Girls

Anjana Basu

The first movie I went to had a girl dancing. She stretched out a leg as long and sleek as a boa constrictor and flipped a hat on the tip of her pointed toe. I still remember that leg stretching all the way out to next week beneath a green skirt that hung in strips and flashed taut supple thigh. That was dancing. Oh yes, yes, I know what they say, that our culture is all kathak and bharat natyam but I could never forget that girl. All the men in the movie wanted her. I suppose if my father had known my thoughts, he would never have taken me to the movie, would probably have sentenced me to an eternity of temple dancing and condemned the decadence of western culture. But after that, I said, one day, I will marry a girl who can dance.

Time only confirmed my desire. Apart from the movies, there were the books I read: the steamy blue depths of a Los Angeles nightclub, in the heat of summer, where a beautiful icy woman stalked in to the wail of a saxophone and took the floor by storm. Total abandon and total coolness melting into one fluid shape.

I began to take dancing lessons to keep up with her. Oh, not formal lessons - we had no money to waste on things like that at home - but with the boys in the school cloakroom. The teachers thought we were perverted, watching our gyrations in the dirty mirror. They would have thought we were more perverted if they had seen us after school behind the sheds practicing the Bus Stop and talking about the girls we were sure to meet. Girls we would seduce with our skill on the dance floor.

No one tells you that life is a cheat, that all the books you read are lies and that happy endings are illusions. There should be some class that prepares you for defeat and tells you how to carry on living once you discover that everything you believed in is a lie. But no, everyone goes on with the same success, success, success story and no one talks about the madmen and the suicides that life leaves behind in its wake, as no one will talk about me. Her - well, I am sure they will talk about her, pityingly, ah, poor thing, to fall into the clutches of a madman, a beast - with my defeat forgotten.

A beast? No one would have said I was a beast. I might not have been a good student but I never failed in school. My parents didn’t have to be called in to be lectured by my teachers and harassed with suggestions of private tuition. They didn't expect me to come first in class and what I gave them in return was my remarkable talent. No, I am not boasting when I say my talent was remarkable. You can read the reports in any of the old papers. It was the one adjective that they all universally used.

I always had an eye for rolling a marble or for flicking a counter across a carom board. When did I first see a pool player with his sleeves rolled up silhouetted against a green baize table? It's odd, I can remember the girl and her green skirts and the hat on the tip of her green stiletto, but I can't remember when I saw a pool player. Perhaps there was one in the film because somehow it all ran together in my head whenever I tried to think back: a girl in a green satin dress swam into a dull green table where the coloured balls rolled across the green as smoothly as she did.

When I was older, I had the clothes that went with it. In the beginning the tailor who used to sit under the tree with his foot machine used to run the suits up: he was pre-Independence and blind from years of setting small stitches into miles of cloth. My father would take me to the local tea planters’ Club and there in my out of date waistcoat and cummerbund I would beat the best of them. And while I was sitting, waiting to play, I’d catch sight of the planters' wives in their whispering skirts and saris going to the dance floor and I'd hear the orchestra tuning with little moans and runs of violin strings screened from my view by the curtained arch that separated the billiards room from the main hall. Sometimes one of the women would throw aside the heavy curtain and walk in, flushed and glowing from the dancing, rivulets of sweat trickling down her golden skin, her heels exclamations on the wooden floor. And all the players would look up shushing and irritated at the disturbance and then the room would drop into silence again except for the tap of the balls and the distant music. It was, I thought, the place where I belonged. My home.

My real home was very different. Unlike my friends, I had old parents, being born long after they had ceased to expect any children. My father was a government clerk. My mother's days began and ended in her puja room where she prayed for my welfare. My father's days were different - they had a bitter edge to them because he felt that he had been unjustly passed over in the hierarchy of promotions. He spent his evenings wondering how he could make more money and he thought he had found his answer in my hand and eye.

When I won the Junior Billiards Championship, which carried a prize of ten thousand rupees, they thought their prayers had been answered. My father went into a series of meetings with the Secretary of the Badlapet Club and charted out a list of the most important tournaments in the North East. The Club was going to sponsor me, which meant that my clothes would come from the big tailor in town instead of from the local durzi. "Consider how much his dowry will be if he wins," my father said to my mother that evening as she served him his chapatis.

"A billiard player?" she retorted. "It would be better if he were a doctor or an engineer." She was to say that time and time again, right till the end, and every time I heard it, I resented her narrow mindedness. What would that girl who spun on one stiletto heel make of her ? Would she even deign to glance in her direction if they ever met? I didn't want a girl who would spend her days over a hot stove with the sweat dripping from her forehead and her lank hair smearing her bindi and spreading it like blood over her forehead. I saw my mother like that every day.

You must have heard how I won the North Eastern championships. My picture was splashed across the sports pages of most newspapers and pasted on the Badlapet notice board. At school I missed a few important term examinations but in the general excitement, the Headmaster ordered that I should be promoted. My mother was the only one who felt that it was not right, but even she put my billiard cue in front of the God for his blessing.

Soon a cigarette company came to say that they would be interested in sponsoring me in the National Championships. They gave me a new suit and flew me to Calcutta to make sure that it was properly tailored. I had to stay a few days in Calcutta playing a few exhibition matches and the executive in charge of Trend cigarettes - that was the brand that sponsored young people like myself - took me to a five star hotel for dinner.

That was my first disco. It was like diving straight to the bottom of a dark pool and finding music and flashing lights. In the heart of the pool were people clinging to each other. Girls with tossing hair, endless black and purple legs and skirts cut off at their thighs. The light glittered on their lips and cheeks in small starbursts. At first I couldn't take it all in. I just stood there and stared like the idiot out of the small town that I was. My cigarette executive laughed, slapped me on the back and offered to introduce me. And, while the numbers were changing, he waved at one of the girls and when she came over, he introduced her to me. I still remember her name - Sheba - though I doubt whether she would want to remember mine.

That night it was as if I had stepped into a strip of celluloid, into the heart of one of my favourite films. They danced with so much authority, so much abandon, commanding the small space on the floor, and turning their faces to and from the light as if they themselves were strobes. Soft voices promised to stay in touch, once my cigarette executive told them that I was a champion pool player. I scribbled down a few phone numbers. And the next day, my new suit and I flew back home. "I'll take you dancing again," my executive assured me, as he said goodbye at the airport. It should have faded away as soon as I saw my mother's face but no, that night at the disco stayed with me and soon nudged green stilettos out of my dreams. After I win the Nationals, I told myself, I will settle in Calcutta and marry a girl like that.

And soon even Calcutta wasn't enough - I had a glimpse of the fashion models in Bombay at a party they threw for us players. There was even time to ask one of them out, though it was only as far as the disco downstairs, I didn't have the courage to ask her out any further than that. She was 18 and she had long crinkly brown hair that she kept tossing back out of her eyes as she talked to me about her dreams of becoming Miss India. Otherwise she said she didn't dance 'close' and preferred to spend most of the evening snuggled up on a velvet banquette, her long legs occasionally rubbing against mine under the table. She left me her phone number scrawled in lipstick on a paper napkin but when I was next in Bombay and dialed it with trembling fingers, no one had heard of her there. Once she danced across my small town television screen and I heard her name, 'Mehr', but the image proved as elusive as the reality.

I was out of school by then. The results were adequate enough for me to go to college, but everyone said that it didn’t matter. Champion billiard players made enough money to last several lifetimes. My father even insisted on insuring my hands because he said he had read of a pianist doing this - and one never knew what life would bring.

"Don’t let it spoil you, "Ma often said to me. I didn't listen. Spoilt? Me spoilt? Could anything ever spoil the coordination of my hand and eye? "Don't croak, woman, "said my father. He was always on my side now. We had enough money to repaint and refurnish the bungalow with enough left over for a new car. No, it wasn't a fancy Fiat or Maruti, just a black lumbering bug of an Ambassador, but I drove it around town as if it was six feet longer with sleek vicious tail lights and a foreign brand name.

When did she come into my life, I wonder. No, I don't remember the first day but all at once, she was always there. I think it started with the round woman who startled me one day as she came out of the puja room with Ma. "Your famous son," she cooed, stroking my hair. I smiled at her, accepted the piece of wafer tucked into my mouth and walked away. But after that, Rina was always there. Soon, it was hard to imagine a time when she hadn't been there with her pale face and the white lipstick tipped teeth that broke through her smile. "Rina is a nice girl," Ma said to me. "Taste this halwa she has made." Or, "Rina's mother and I are doing a little sewing. Please keep her entertained." She liked Hindi film music and was always asking me to find a channel on the television. She even knew a few of the latest songs and one day sang Chura Liya for us in a voice that was miserably out of tune. "Everyone can't sing," Ma murmured after she was gone."But such a nice girl.. Nice girls are so rare these days."

She didn't stir anything in my dreams. I dreamt of tossing green skirts and legs that stretched sinuously for what seemed like miles. The girl in Bombay, the girls in Calcutta, a starlet out of a film shaking sequins that mirrored more shimmering girls shaking in a thousand splintering images. Sexy, sexy, sexy. No one would ever have said that of Rina. No, she wasn't ugly. If she had been ugly, it would never have happened. "She has a dowry," my father announced one evening. "Her parents are willing to give ten lakhs with her."

"For my son that's the very least they should do," Ma said. I remember that evening. It was in early winter - the sun had sunk leaving a sindoor trail over the sky. I remember thinking it was like sindoor - and then there was this talk of dowry to make it more appropriate. "Think about it, beta," said my father. "Ten lakhs. We could buy a flat in Calcutta or somewhere." His eyes were alight with dreams in a way I hadn't seen them before.

I agreed, not immediately, but in the end. I don’t remember protesting much. That's odd, the fact that I didn't protest. Nowadays, when I think over what happened, backwards and sideways and upside down, my assent seems blotted out in a complete blank like a fog. All I know was that one day Rina and I were engaged and I found myself touching her mother's feet and promising that I would make sure her daughter would never want for anything, while Rina stood beside me and smiled that unending smile of hers. A dentist, I thought to myself, as soon as I get her to Calcutta, I must take her to a dentist. The ten lakhs were to be handed over in two installments: the first on our wedding day and the second as soon as my parents found a suitable flat. My father called one of his clerk friends over to witness the agreement which he had written out on court paper. I was prepared to like her for the sake of that flat alone. I could see it in my mind's eye; two bedrooms, a living-dining. It would be small, perhaps - even my cigarette executive lived in what he said was a pocket handkerchief of a flat - but it would be in Calcutta.

Rina's parents liked to pretend that they were very liberal. They said that there was no hurry to get married. After the engagement ceremony I could take her out and we could get to know each other better. We started with the movies. I drove up one evening in my Ambassador and found her waiting outside the door. She was wearing a frilly white salwar kameez with a green and orange veil in some sort of flimsy material clutched convulsively across her breast. Her mouth was daubed generously with pink lipstick. "Do you like it?" she asked anxiously, as she climbed in. I sensed she was nervous, because she had never been alone with me before. "It's all right," I mumbled. Then, thinking, I was being ungracious, added, "It suits you."

Throughout the film that patriotic white and green and orange image kept coming between me and the dancers. She hummed the tunes, burst into off key songs and crunched popcorn throughout the interval. A few of my friends stopped by and I had to introduce her. I saw by the look in their eyes that they were surprised, that this what not what they expected of me.

I tried to hint her into the clothes I had expected any girl I was involved with to wear. On our long drives I told her how pencil thin skirts did wonders for a girl's figure. How she had such wonderful legs that it was a crime to hide them. "Oh, no," she blushed, "I couldn't show my legs." When she blushed the red spread across her face in great unsightly patches like some disease. "Try," I said. "After a while you'll get used to it. Everyone wears short skirts - all the fashion models in Bombay. When we move to Calcutta, we'll have to socialise a lot. I want people to think my wife is beautiful."

That tact was a strain and it achieved nothing. One evening her mother arrived and went into a huddle with mine. After she left, Ma was wearing her most determined air. "Rina," she announced, "is a modest girl. The sort of girl any house would be proud to have as a daughter in law. I am glad she dresses conservatively. I hope you won't try to change that, beta."

"Our son does attend a lot of social functions," my father observed mildly. He had an album of clippings of me in various five star hotels.

"There is no harm if a girl dresses modestly," Ma retorted. And that was pretty much the end of that except for the fact that she bought a pair of bronze high heeled sandals as a sort of compromise.

The first time I took her to a party, she tripped over those new sandals and sat down hard in the middle of the dance floor. People had been drinking. A few of them laughed. I pulled her to her feet, asked her if she was hurt and took her home immediately. When I returned to the party people asked me if my fiancee was given to drinking. I felt very stupid.

She creaked through the next party, which consisted of a few would be sponsors, in squeaky shoes and everyone turned around to see who was making that noise. What am I going to do, I thought, if I play a tournament in Bombay and I have to take her with me ? "People need to be impressed with me if they're going to spend money on me," I told her. "I need a fiancee to help me do that."

Tears instantly gathered in her eyes and spilled over onto her flat cheeks. "You're not pleased with me?"

What was worse was, I caught a glimpse of a girl who looked like Mehr on TV that evening. She swished down a catwalk on high heels with a river of silky material flowing from her and she did it as effortlessly as a spring breeze. Ten lakhs, I told myself grimly. Ten lakhs and I could move to Calcutta and watch the Mehrs dance in front of my eyes any evening that I chose.

I went briefly to Calcutta to play in small tournament and stopped at the five star hotel boutique to buy her a blouse and skirt, thinking blindly that if I gave it to her, she might wear it. She did, of course. But the light died out of her face the moment she opened the bag. And when she wore them, I almost wished she hadn't. She protruded in strange places and her hair, left loose in the way I had requested, tangled with sweat and clung to her face.

That night, I drank far too much and almost ran the car into a tree. She kept clinging to my arm and crying and asking me what was wrong. She could have gone home and complained to her mother but the next day my picture was flashed on the front page of the paper and Ma was too busy showing it off proudly for anything to be said. "See," her face said, "my son is worth every paisa of that ten lakhs."

Rina forgave me. She told me how everyone in her college raved about how lucky she was to be engaged to a celebrity. "The girls said you were quite good looking," she confided, snuggling up to me. "They'd give anything to go out with you." And I, I thought, would give anything to go out with one of them. But I couldn't say that. If I did, that ten lakhs would probably vanish like a mist and with it all my big city dreams.

"Rina's not like these flighty young girls you get these days," Ma was always telling me. "I agree she's not westernised, but she'll make you a good wife. That's why I agreed to it." And she had Rina around the house making cups of tea and preparing elaborate sweets out of a book just to demonstrate her good housewifely qualities. The sweets were rich in saffron and dripped sticky sweet honey. I sat there eating them and saying how marvellous they were, how they were even more delicious than anything Ma ever made. Hour after hour I sat in that kitchen trying to postpone the moment when I would have to take Rina out.

Because you see, she couldn't dance. She couldn't dance at all. That was the part that hurt me most. I saw other men walk in with their girlfriends or wives on their arm and dance with them through a long club night, wrapping them in their arms for a slow or changing pace for a fast, twirling them backwards and sideways and around, perfectly in step. And I walked in with this badly dressed girl who tripped, trod all over my feet and at the most managed to shuffle awkwardly from one foot to another. I tried to get her to dance slow where, in the dark, her awkwardness might not be so noticeable but she refused because her mother wouldn't approve. If I got together a group of friends and their girls she would sit out the evening on a folding chair sipping an orange squash through a straw and I would have to keep her company because there was no way I could dance with another girl while she was there. Occasionally, out of sheer politeness, one of my friends would ask her to dance and sometimes, to my embarrassment, she would accept. After the dance, my friend would return her to me with a false smile pasted on his face and I would realize that he hadn't enjoyed the experience at all.

I imagined myself with a flat in Calcutta and a wife I would have to leave behind every time I was invited to an official function. Walk in to a five star hotel disco with her? I could already see people's pitying looks. I would be back to my original small town self, the one who gaped at the strobe lights and hardly knew how to move his legs in the steps he had picked up from the films. The one whose eyes watered at late nights and cigarette smoke. Rina coughed and spluttered every time a cigarette came near her. Of course, she smoked to please me. I used to take a lit cigarette from my mouth and put it into hers. "Don't be silly," I said, "your mother will never find out. Everyone does. Look, don't you see everyone doing it?" It made her sick. She had to run away to vomit. "You'll get used to it," I persisted. Girls twirling long cigarette holders as they advanced aggressively in a chorus line in my head towards the waiting men. They used them as effectively as as a lipstick. Certainly they were as at home with them. Well, perhaps it was in my head or perhaps it was in a film. Certainly it made no difference to Rina.

I think she desperately wanted to be a celebrity's wife, to have people turn around and say, "Look, there goes .......'s fiancee, you know the champion billiard player." Any other girl would have given up a long time ago. And any other girl would have realised that I was gradually beginning to hate her with a passion. Our evenings together were growing on me the way a toothache grows and grows into agony. The worst thing was no one dared commiserate with me openly. At the most my friends said, "She's very conservative, she's very shy," and greeted her the way I'd watched them greet elderly cousins and aunts. They handed her politely into chairs and beached her there for the whole evening while I, equally beached in her company, juggled with the attentive plates and glasses that convention demanded of me.

Every morning I would wake up and, for a minute, as the sunlight streamed golden onto my eyelids, think I was free to choose a dancing partner again. Then my eyes would open and as the room in all its concreteness came into focus, so did the knowledge that the evening would bring Rina, as surely as the day brings the night. It was growing so that I could predict exactly what she would wear next: the drab olive silk with the bronze embroidery and a cascade of bronze net down one shoulder; the magenta chiffon with emerald green spangled dancers; a hair net that released a flight of white butterflies, flowers and silver drops into the air. Her mother told me airily that they had spent days in consultation with the tailor before deciding on these creations. "She's rich," said my father approvingly. "Those clothes aren't cheap." A sentence that stopped my words of complaint in mid utterance.

She was destroying me. The sight of that flight of butterflies made me miss an easy pocket and lose three unnecessary points. I heard people who knew murmur, and one of my sponsors gave me a look that made my palms sweat. Throughout it all she stood there smiling and uncomprehending, smiling even when I missed, as if I were something she had bought.

I knew she wouldn't understand. And she didn't, because she took it as a tribute to the power of love or one of those other stupid things, deepening the colour in her cheeks and simpering. Didn't she realize that our eyes never met in any kind of complicity?

There were evenings when Rina wanted to walk beside the small lake on the other side of the golf course. You took girls there, if you had the sort of the girl who wanted to be taken there. I took her because no one would notice her clumsiness. Mostly we sat on the dampening grass together and looked at the gleams in the water. On certain nights, usually club nights, you could hear giggles from the thickets, but otherwise, except for the yap of a wild dog or a fox, there was utter silence.

We sat there and talked about billiard matches and flats in Calcutta or what the family priest had said was a good date in January, while I looked into the waters of the lake and thought of a lifetime of inanities and clumsiness. I knew that from time to time she would stop in her chattering and look across at me hopefully. If I turned my head I could catch the avid gleam of her eyes. It was the only time when she allowed any kind of abandon to animate her being. Once her damp hand clutched at mine after an especially breathy giggle and she whispered, "I wonder what they're doing." She was close enough for her breath to be hot on my face. And I wondered wildly what to do as the universe seemed to tilt and centre on her glinting avid eyes. "Will your mother approve?" I asked, throwing her excuse to avoid slow numbers at her.

"She can't see us," she said. An image of Sheba came at me out of the waters of the lake and I thought of being lost there with her, or with Mehr, with the glitter powder on their round cheeks as soft as starlight. It helped, except in the end I revolted at kissing that shrieking red mouth and kissed her cheek instead. The first and the last time. After that, I sat looking into the water and let her chatter on unheeded. If there were giggles in the bushes, I was deaf to them.

I thought wildly that there had to be other ways of moving to Calcutta without Rina's ten lakh dowry. "They're getting along so well," murmured Ma every night as I came home and my father sat in his chair on the corner of the verandah counting her money over and over in his head. The priest came for long consultations and sat and ruffled the pages of his tattered old almanac. They had apparently set a date in winter. Rina's mother came to talk about details like gold cufflinks - she’d seen a pair in an American magazine and was planning to have the jeweller copy them. She and Ma went into huddles in the corners of rooms while Rina stood self consciously in the centre, pretending to talk to me. "What shall we give her?" Ma asked me in the middle of her conversation with Rina's mother. "Such lovely cufflinks. They will go so well with your suit...We must give her something equally suitable."

"Gold butterflies for her hair," I answered and Rina dissolved into a shower of giggles.

If she'd had the curve of an ankle it might not have happened... If she'd had a waist like water... Or if she was the girl in all the detective films taking over the nightclubs of my mind. Instead, she was Rina who made a fool of me.

I had to get away from her hot wet hands and her stupid feet. To find a girl wet in sequins and hold her through the night while the music swelled blue and gold all around us and her silken hair clung to my wet face.

The answer came to me one night beside the lake. It was a hot still night that weighed down like lead. The grass was damp from the afternoon's rain and few couples had walked out to dare the wet. As we walked down to the water, the hot air wrapped itself around us. Rina giggled and pressed herself close to my side - in that heat all that hot sweating flesh was unbearable. I pushed her away a little harder than I intended and she went sprawling on the grass in a clumsy heap. She got to her knees whining in surprised complaint - I don't think she was hurt, not then. She said something about her tunic being crushed, being stained by the grass.

Looking at that inky sheet of water a play flashed into my mind the way it does looking at the arrangement of balls on green baize. People have commended this ability of mine to read a play and change it into something totally different through a deft angling of my wrists. A flick, a knock and the ball rolls into the pocket. I didn't think of anything except a pattern of balls knocking each other into place. In the beginning she thought I was suddenly being amorous and she was eager for it. In the end - well, I don't know...

I walked back to the car park taking a detour and avoiding the Club House. It was already late and I could hear the band playing the last slow number, always the same number, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. It was the signal for all the romantic couples to cling to each other...