Dance to my tunes - A Short Story

Dear Maya,

Appa and I saw your performance the other day on television. It was disgusting to say the least. I feel so sad that I spent years training you to become the very best classical dancer, a bharathanatyam whiz only to see all that reduced to some weird numbers for some western songs? Is this what you want to give back to our culture? Kick it, so to speak every time you lift your legs. The legs that should have been doing Shiva Thandav and which should be dancing for thillana are now swaying to waltzes and salsas and sometimes worse, third rate folk lore. The calls we have been receiving since that shameful performance of yours in the States last week, has only disgraced us further. Looks like the entire world has caught your shameful act and now I am sure no respectful guy will ever marry you.

A very disappointed,
Amma and Appa.

Dear Maya,

Just because you choose to ignore the previous e-mail does not mean we are going to keep any quieter. I just wanted to mail in to let you know that the particular pose where you have your right leg lifted high up and bent forward resembling a silly bird was the most shameful of all poses. Both Appa and I are thankful to God that we were not there in the States to witness this “event”. Just to save our dignity we would have been forced to attend the show.
In any case take care,
Amma and Appa.

Dear Mays,

You are but a natural. I was there sitting in one of the front rows watching you transform from the girl that I knew to a woman. You looked so beautiful and graceful swaying like a bird to the music, that I just sat mystified. I was entranced by that particular pose where you have your right leg lifted high up and bent forward resembling a confident beautiful bird waiting to soar way upwards into the sky. I am just so glad that I made it in time for the show. I wanted to meet you soon after the show but I had a flight to catch and also thought you might be busy. A part of me was also unsure how you would react seeing me after all these years. Surprise, happiness, or just plain nonchalance? In fact I was not even sure if you had noticed me in the front row.
Anyways I hope to hear from you soon enough.

Warm Regards,
Mayank.

Dear Mays,

I think you are caught up again in one of your busy schedules and hence have not replied to my earlier mail. I know you have always treated me as nothing but the best of your friends and for sometime even I wanted to believe that I just like you loads as this special friend and nothing more. But then off late I have started questioning my feelings ever so much and have realized that I do love you a good deal. I know this is the last means I should have resorted to speak about something so close to my heart, but then this is the best way I could think of to let you know how my heart pounds faster every time I see your eyes dance to the music. I just love to look at your hands move with clock work precision to accompany your legs, those legs that can do wonders. I have known you for so long now but every time you dance, be it to “Asaindhandum mayil ondru” or any of the folklore, you are equally enticing. Can I but help remembering those times when you tried in vain to teach me some salsa?
I would love to hear from you, but if you feel you don’t want anything more to do with me then just don’t reply. I don’t think I can take a NO from you in print.

Love,
Mayank.

Dear Mayank,

Did I see you in the front rows? My eyes were scanning the audience much like a scavenger hunts for food, scourging those strangers walking in and rested only when I set eyes upon your lean frame seated among a sea of unfamiliarity. From that moment on everyone ceased to exist and I danced only for your eyes. I have always had this special place for you in my heart but I was really not sure about your feelings and I was scared to let my feelings out, afraid that I would be hurt. But I am so on top of the world right now. I want to sway with you to music that will move me completely.
I will call you up presently.

Loads of love,
Urs always,
Mays.

Dear Mays,

I am so amazed that we have been “going around” so to speak for almost a year now. In this one year I have only realized how made for each other we are. I wish we could be in the same city so that we could have been living together right now. There is so much that I want to tell you but I guess I shall whisper all those sweet nothings over the phone.

Love,
Ur
Mayank.

Dear Appa and Amma,

I know that I have resorted to long bouts of silence ever since I got to the US. Whenever you had sent those mails about my dance, about your dislike for my particular kind of dance, I have resorted to silence. Maybe I should have responded then, made you understand how much I love what I am doing. Maybe I should have told you that my dance is my life, and it flows in my body just as naturally as does blood. Amma, this dance I inherited from you, you gave it to me amma but sadly this has been the issue of most of our contentions. But strangely this same dance that you wanted me to abandon has also found me the other love of my life. Oh yes, you heard it right and again I am resorting to mails in favour of calling you up and letting you know how I feel about Mayank. Yes, that very same Mayank who was my best of friends all these years. The reason I am telling you about him now is that, otherwise it will be very late. We are getting married tomorrow in Chicago. That is where he is staying right now and I am taking the 11:15 flight tonight and we shall be man and wife tomorrow. It shall be a quiet affair, the way the both of us want it. I know you will be all the more disappointed but then I do not think I have done too things that you are too proud of and this is only going to add to the seething ire.

Love,
Your daughter,
Maya.


Dear Mays,

I guess this shall really be the last time that I shall write to you and I know you can never forgive me for what I am doing right now. But this is really the only way out if I have to be honest with myself.
That night when your flight to Chicago crashed, my heart nearly stopped beating. I thought I lost you, a part of myself and that drove me to desperation. Then I found out that you were in the hospital done up in a lot of plaster and I came running in to see you. What I saw shocked me into silence and I went away while you were still lying there unconscious. Yes Maya, I walked right out of your life at that very moment when I realized that there was just empty space where your right leg should have been.
This was far worse than death. In death I would have still lost the Maya I loved but now I had to live with a Maya who wasn’t even her any longer. I realized that I loved your legs more than anything else. Your legs defined who you were, it was that very same leg that turned you into that beautiful, unconquerable woman and I desired THAT woman. Without THAT you would no longer be the person you were. Dance was your life and that made you that mysterious illusion, that made you Maya, without those legs, you are hard reality and reality is something I have never been able to come to terms with. I am far too selfish to continue the relationship that we shared and at a moment when I should be next to you I am moving far, far away. Don’t ever try contacting me.

Good bye,
Mayank.


Dear Sandy,

Appa and I had a lovely vacation and we spoke so much. He told me a little story about a wonder WOMAN and her MAN’s MAN, a story that I knew all along in bits and pieces but when the jigsaw puzzle was unraveled in its full, a lot of things began to fall in place and I was able to appreciate what I had been offered. Now the writer in me comes up in full spree and you shall hear a truly remarkable story.
This story as Appa told me was about a little woman who was the greatest dancer according to him and according to half the world. Only the little woman’s parents were always displeased with her that she refused to perform “their” kind of dance. The little woman met a little boy she grew to like and even decided to marry him. But that is when life decided to play a little game with her. She lost her right leg in the very same flight that was to take her to her lover boy, her soon to be husband. He was devastated, but was such a wimp that he refused to continue playing the game they had set the rules for. He walked out of the little woman’s life at precisely the same moment that the little woman needed him so very much. She was definitely shattered, she lost her first love, her dance and her second love, Mr lover boy all in a little journey that was not her fault at all. The days in the hospital waiting for him to come, day after day, nearly drove her to desperation. She used to cry all day long and refused to close her eyes in the night because it was too dark and she could not see any future.
That was when she met Dr Shekar, who was treating her. Shekar not only taught her to get used to the fact that she was never going to have her own leg and will have to learn to walk with artificial ones for the rest of her life, but also taught her to fight right back. He used to speak to her for long hours and in the beginning she spurned him, thinking he was being sympathetic. Then she grew to respect him, admire him and before long, she fell in love with him. They married soon enough and he taught her to come to terms with the fact that she would never be able to dance again the way she did before. But he opened a dance school in her name and told her how her art shall live through so many other people’s dreams. They weaved these dreams together and she could not have been happier in her life.
That was when her husband, doctor, mentor, friend, philosopher all rolled into one revealed to her that in the accident, along with her right leg she had also lost her ability to conceive. That shattered her, and she was angry with Shekar for marrying an infertile woman, a woman who could never satisfy him fully. But that was just how remarkable Shekar was, and in his most practical tones said they will adopt a little girl, a girl who would grow up to be as remarkable as her mother is.
That little girl they named Swati, and she grew up among the best of people. Parents who taught her to love by showing how they loved and cared for the other. She wanted to look like her mom did and wanted to think and act like her dad did. Now that their little girl had grown up they thought it was time that some mysteries were unraveled to her.
Her eyes brimmed with tears, not tears of sadness that some woman had abandoned her years ago but that she was so gifted that she had found such amazing parents. What is more she was so moved that she decided to write her MAN about this and that is how she is in front of the comp typing. She knows that He will understand it all; he will love her still as much as he did before because he loves her for the WOMAN she is, not for the part time dancer, part time journalist that she is. He loves her not because of but in spite of.

Loads of Love,
Swathi.

p.s:- This post would have ended where Mayank left her had it not been for him