The Other Language (31 page)

“We have a word for them, you know …,” the playwright said with a hint of a smile. The choreographer joined in and finished his sentence.

“We call them Indonostalgics,” he said, and everyone laughed.

Indonostalgics, he repeated, savoring the word, and making a mental note. That was exactly the kind of inside knowledge he enjoyed.

“Isn’t your wife joining us tonight?” the prince asked.

He had completely forgotten to mention her. She had decided to stay in the room. She said she wasn’t in the mood to talk to lots of people tonight.

“Unfortunately not. She wasn’t feeling too well. She might come for dinner, otherwise she’ll order room service, if that’s not a problem for the kitchen.”

And as he said that, heads turned toward the opposite end of the terrace. A woman had appeared and was walking toward them.

The men stood up.

“Ah, here she is, at last,” the prince said and went over to embrace her.

There was a suspension, while everyone in turn greeted her.

“This is Ushma Das, our greatest dancer. She is to perform for us tomorrow night,” the playwright said.

The woman wore a short red cotton sari over green
shalwar
pants. The sari was neatly pleated in the front, as in the temple sculptures. She was barefoot and her anklets made a lovely sound as she moved.

“I’ve just finished a brief rehearsal with the musicians,” she was saying. “I was going to bathe and change before joining you, but then I heard your voices and …”

She turned to him, surprised to find him there.

He introduced himself, and she looked intently at him with her big, almond-shaped eyes penciled in black kohl.

“Very nice to meet you,” she said, and let him hold her cool, bony hand.

“Please have a drink with us now, dear. The light is so lovely,” said the older ex-dancer with the diamond studs in her nose. “You can freshen up later. We are having cucumber martinis.”

“You know I am not supposed to drink, Auntie,” Ushma said with a little smile. Everyone rebutted at once. Of course she could have a small drink after rehearsal. It wasn’t going to get her drunk at all. They would make it very light. She took another look at him; he was standing speechless in front of her beauty.

“I’ll have a club soda, that’s all.”

Then she sat down in the chair, erect, with royal gravity.

“And where is home, for you?” she asked, tilting her head toward him with what he took for sincere interest.

Earlier in the day, while her husband was on his inspirational promenade on the
ghats
, she had been staring at his laptop screen, open to Skype, while beads of sweat ran down her neck. The sun came straight through the bay window and the old-fashioned ceiling fan didn’t help against that heat. She had typed the ex-lover’s name in the space that said “enter name or e-mail address of the user you’re looking for” and had clicked on
search
. Only three names like his had appeared, and next to them a green icon with the + sign. One lived in Buenos Aires, but the other two were actual possibilities. One in Paris, the other in San Francisco. More likely, he would be the one in California, but she might send the same message to both. She had been staring at the green icons for a while now. What if he was happily married with kids and his wife would intercept her message? Would that be a problem? She should write something so neutral and blameless that even his wife could read it and think nothing of it. The wife could ask him, “Who is that?” And he might say, “Just someone I knew ages ago when I lived in Italy.” He might reply to her innocent message in a similar tone, something like “Hey, how’ve you been?” although he wasn’t the type that would ever write “hey.” After a lot of composing and scribbling on a scrap of paper in order to get it just right, she typed the message into the space. She stared at it. Then erased it. This was a mistake. He’d probably completely forgotten about their affair. But then she thought, What if he wasn’t married, what if he had had the same dream or he had been thinking of her too? What a wasted opportunity, right? She typed the message again. It read, “Are you the Tyler I think you are?” signed with her name. She stared at the words again, then, after what seemed an agonizing amount of time, she said out loud,
What the hell
, and clicked on the green icons next to both Paris and San
Francisco. She jumped up from the chair as if it burned. She felt exhilarated, as though she had just sent a missile into space from Cape Canaveral.

Since that moment she had been feeling hopelessly anxious, as if time had taken on a completely different speed. After lunch by the pool she’d waited for her husband to leave the room so she could check her Skype page. She could’ve easily checked the same page on her cell phone but she just couldn’t make herself do it with him in the same room. He had decided to read his book in bed, had fallen asleep, and woken up and ordered tea, which they took on the terrace together. He asked her to take a walk with him in the village, after which he took a shower and changed for evening drinks. Finally she had gotten rid of him, if only for a few hours. The minute he was out the door she ran to check the laptop. A tiny red light was blinking next to the Skype icon. Her heart leaped.

“Yes, it’s me,” the message said. “When can we talk?”

In the meantime, he’d learned quite a lot about Ushma Das. Once the older guests had retired for the night, the two of them had lingered at the candlelit table in the courtyard and then moved onto the terrace to watch the moonlight over the river. He had had a couple of more drinks to oil his conversational skills, whereas she’d stuck to tea. He asked her about Odissi dance, wasn’t it one of the oldest forms of dance? Yes, she said, dancers are found depicted in bas-reliefs dating from the first century BC, and the
Natya Shastra
, the oldest surviving text on stagecraft in the world, speaks of this dance style. He told her he had seen the temple sculptures of the dancers in Puri only a week earlier, as if it had been his idea and not his wife’s. He also said he’d been moved by the gracefulness of the postures depicted on the bas-reliefs, although he only vaguely remembered them. Ushma seemed pleased by his enthusiasm. She explained how the
devadasis
, or temple girls, at
the time of those sculptures were highly educated courtesans who lived with kings and held an elevated social status. They had to learn music and singing, study poetry and scriptures. Under the moonlight, now that she had changed into a maroon sari and had combed her hair in a tight bun, she did look like an ancient courtesan from some rhapsodic Indian tale. She moved slowly, with extreme awareness, and he was completely engulfed by her beauty and her seriousness.

“Where do you live?” he asked her.

“In the countryside outside Bhubaneswar. I have a school there where I teach and live with my students. Dance is all we do. We wake up at dawn and dance all day. It’s what I’ve done every day of my life for the last twenty years.”

He showed surprise. Twenty years of monastic life? That seemed like a waste to him, for a woman this beautiful.

“You are not married?”

She gave a little laugh and turned her face away from him, as though the question had embarrassed her.

“No, how could I? I’ve been married to my guru and my students are now married to me. Ours is a never-ending chain, we have no time to devote to anything else. This has always been the way knowledge and artistic expression has been taught by our gurus for centuries.”

“It sounds extremely demanding.”

“It has been my choice. Of course it is hard. But we are rewarded when we dance.”

She relaxed her face into a softer expression and smiled, as if letting him in on a secret.

“There is nothing like it.”

“I am sure. It must be”—he searched for an appropriate word and then said—“pure ecstasy?”

Her face remained neutral, almost grave. “Not exactly. It’s more like a feeling of oneness.”

Oneness. What a beautiful thing to feel, he thought.

There was a moment of suspension, as if she were going to add something, but then she looked away.

“I am afraid I have to leave you now,” she said. “Tomorrow we have a long rehearsal and I must go and get my sleep.”

He had had way too much to drink, that was clear the minute he opened his eyes the next day. However, despite the hangover, he stirred in his bed, pleasantly excited. No trace of his daily dose of mortality awareness to greet him today. He got up, full of resolve and expectation.

His wife lay in bed, still asleep, which was unusual, but he took the opportunity to take a quick shower and sneak out of the room before she got up. He was hoping to run into Ushma Das at breakfast and be alone with her again, so they could continue the conversation they’d had the previous night. Actually, he realized, it was more than just hope—he was dying to see her again. She was nowhere to be found, but the faint sounds of a tabla and a bansuri flute wafted through the Fort’s numerous courtyards and reached him as he walked into the terrace garden.

He sat at the empty breakfast table. He saw the prince cross-legged on a chair at the end of the terrace, facing the pale sun rising above the Narmada. He was taking his usual morning shave in front of an old-fashioned portable mirror. They said hello to each other but didn’t engage in a conversation. Men, he thought, had far less need to affect unnecessary familiarity between themselves than women did.

He was restless, so he had only a cup of coffee and didn’t bother to eat his fruit salad, but got up and began to walk around the labyrinthine courtyards of the Fort, following the sound of the music till he could make out Ushma’s voice; it sounded as if she was giving sharp instructions to someone. He stumbled into a small open space he hadn’t seen before, with a shiny red cement floor and wooden pillars. The musicians sat on a long pillow and
three young girls, in the same shorter sari and pants he’d seen Usha wearing the day before, moved around the space with their hands entwined over their heads, their torsos tilted in a diagonal line. Usha was sitting next to the drummer, clapping her hands to the rhythm while giving the dancers the tempo in quick staccato spurts.

“Taka-taka-taka-tee-takatee-takatee-taa-taaa!”

He slid quietly inside the space and sat in a corner, attempting a semilotus position, though his knees hurt.

“Takateeta deena, takateeta deena, takateeta deen!”

He beckoned her, tilting his head in what he thought would be an appropriate gesture.

“Stooop!”

The music ceased, the dancers’ poses came undone.

She rose quickly and came over to him.

How lovely she looked! A strand of fresh jasmine was tied to her braid, and she was wearing a green kurta and purple pants with a scarf around her tiny waist. Her cheeks were flushed, she exuded heat from the exertion and a subtle scent of musk.

“I’m sorry but you cannot watch the rehearsal.”

He rose unsteadily and dusted his trousers. How foolish of him.

“I am so sorry … I had no idea. I am really sorry.”

Then he saw that she was smiling.