Dancing to Her Tune

“Darling, why did you not dance during circle time today? I was watching you through the window.” I chided my daughter with deliberate casualness.

Her reluctance to dance was looking less and less like a passing phase of shyness that I was so ready to believe it as. It looked as if my worst fear was about to come true. She just did not like dancing.

Whenever I drop my four-year-old to school, I jostle with at least a dozen other proud mothers to peep in through the rectangle windows of the gym, and watch the children do their circle time. That is to say, half an hour daily of singing and dancing in a difficultly controlled and maybe slightly overbearing environment. Most of the children do indeed dance and sing – some do boisterous gimmicks, some dance happily, some hop around, some sing at the top of their voices, some talk, some cry, some bawl out loud, and a minimum few, like my little daughter, stand with their feet firmly rooted to ground and do half-hearted little shoulder-shrugs and hand-rolls.

“So why didn’t you dance, honey?” I persevered.

“Honey ha ha,” she giggled. She has learnt a new way of cupping her month and giggling away, her misplaced dimple barely visible on the left corner of her chin.

“Tell me.”

“Do you know, amma,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “Portia smelled of fish today.” She made a silly face and the giggle came on again.

“Stop giggling now,” I said half amused. “You didn’t dance because Portia smelled of fish?” I persisted.

“Do you know? She ate fish in the morning and didn’t wash her mouth.” More giggles.

“That was not my question,” I tried again. “Why didn’t you dance?”

“Do you know? It is the same Portia who come to my ballet class.”

“Oh, is it? She comes to your ballet class too?” I asked without much interest.

“Do you know --” these days, all her sentences are prefixed by do-you-knows. They are as charmingly exasperating as her giggles.

“Tell me.”

“Portia doesn’t stand up and say good afternoon when ballet teacher ask her to,” she bent forward with the same conspiratorial air.

“Do you get up?” I asked suspiciously.

“Yes, and I say good afternoon Miss – I forget the name.” The giggles are never far off.

Now, to my indulgent readers, let me confess. In a fit of motherly anxiety superimposed by steely parental resolve, I enrolled my daughter in a ballet school about a month or so ago. My intention was quite simple. Like any self-deluding Malayalee woman worth – or maybe not – her dancing shoes (read anklets, chilanga, salangai, ghungroo – as the case may be), I want my daughter to dance. I want her to be a dancer.

“If she has inherited my genes,” my husband tried to argue, “she might not become a dancer.”

“And what will she be?” I asked petulantly.

“Perhaps she can play piano. We have a keyboard. Why don’t we start some piano classes?”

I assured him that that was in the pipeline too.

Meanwhile, we asked our now four-year-old what she wanted to be. “A drummer,” came the immediate reply. Reflecting on our thin gypsum walls and our even thinner tympanic membranes, we asked her to reconsider. I asked her whether she wanted to learn ballet, be a ballerina. She bargained for a pretty pink ballet dress and a matching pink hair band. I promised to buy her all that. I got a willing accomplice to my not-so-selfless dreams.

And thus she started her ballet classes, which going by her high enthusiasm levels so far, do not seem to be teaching anything other than rabbit jumps and frog leaps.

So, there she was, one month into her ballet class and still not showing any tendency to dance. “So, why didn’t you dance?” I asked her yet again.

“Amma, do you know –” she was going to prattle away again.

“No do-you-knows.” I admonished. “Tell me, because –”

“Because Portia smelled of fish.” She covered her mouth and giggled.

Now, what kind of an answer is that! I conceded, with reluctant amusement.

“My little dancer has two left feet,” I hugged her close.