A Butterfly to Share

I got a beautiful butterfly yesterday. It is not as much the beauty of it as the thought behind sharing it that makes it all the more treasurable. Thank you, Usha. It truly means a world to me.

Let me share it with the people whose blogs have guided and entertained me, both in more or less equal measure.

1. Ganga - My mentor in the world of blogging. My old schoolmate. She opened doors to this vast and exciting world that I never knew existed. She writes with a sensitivity that touches your heart strings. Her words flit around like butterflies, playful and enchanting. Here is a butterfly to the master butterfly-maker :).

2. Rekz - Thomas Hardy gave us Wessex, Faulkner gave us Yoknapatawpha, and Rekz gives us the extremely fascinating feline world of Moggies - a fun world of threesome, where she is the alpha cat, where mutinies, fights, victories and defeats are a way of life and rib-tickling laughter is always at hand. Here is a butterfly for making me laugh so wholeheartedly.

3. Arch - Our stations in life are a whole lot similar in that we both have impossibly naive three- to four-year-olds who make our lives as colorful as a rainbow. The only difference is that she etches that rainbow so vividly in her blog, where every hue is brilliantly painted with the mastery of an artist and the sensitivity of a mother. Here is a butterfly to you.

Now, these are the instructions I received from Usha, my patron :).

1. Put the logo on the blog. [I saved the picture first and later added it to the blog.]
2. Add a link to the person who presented it to you. [I couldn't really add the link. So I have just mentioned the name of the person who presented it to me.]
3. Pass this one, and link other bloggers that you'd like to share it with.

Hope you will accept this little token of gratitude and appreciation.

Hair Woes - A Sequel

I realized it was time for another of those unsavory experiences of my life – a haircut. My readers, who have been following my torments because of my rather insufferable keratinous growth, would remember how I detest haircuts. For those of you who are still unaware of the fact and have the time and inclination to suffer through one of my sagas, please click here.

I walked into a salon a little bravely this time because I presumed I have mastered the language enough not to be a guinea pig to an ambitious hairstylist’s restless fingers. After shampooing, again one of those heavenly experiences, I sat down and looked confident.

The hairstylist materialized out of nowhere with a trolley of dangerous-looking equipment. I looked at him in the mirror and inadvertently let out a gasp. I had an Emo character straight out of some hardcore punk band. He stared at me quizzically through his visible left eye. His right eye was quite hidden behind all that sleekly brushed bang of hair. Weren’t his T-shirt and jeans a bit too tight? Would their seams burst under the strain? How well can he cut hair seeing through just one eye? I wondered, a trifle panicky. He smiled beatifically though.

“Saya mau gunting.” (I want haircut)

“Style apa?” (What style?)

“Mau layer Pak. Tapi sedikit pendek. Saya tidak mau panjang.” (Okay. I will quit showing off my vernacular prowess. What I told him was that I wanted my hair cut in layer, a little short and not long.)

He set to work. I busied with a magazine, skimming through impossibly thin models sporting quite abhorrent hairstyles.

I looked up hearing a sympathetic clicking of the tongue.

“A lot of your hair is white,” he said dramatically.

“I know that, you dummy.” I muttered.

“You want to color your hair?” He asked hopefully.

I said a definitive no. I sulked. I didn’t obviously like that gray hair comment.

He went about his task without offering anymore comments. I risked a glance at the mirror and again let out a gasp. My hair was too short and standing up at all ends!

“My hair is too short!” I cried.

“Madam wanted it short,” he countered.

“Stop cutting,” I ordered, my voice bordering on hysterical.

He stopped. “One-eyed moron,” I cursed under my breath, which was quite unlike me. I usually reserve the choicest epithets to swear at myself.

Seemingly quite oblivious to my recalcitrant state of mind, he plugged the dryer and began blow-drying each hair of mine painstakingly. I again submerged into the obnoxious magazine, vowing not to resurface again.

“Madam hair is very thick,” he offered placatingly, after a while.

“Hmmm,” I was still non-conciliatory. “It falls terribly.”

“It is still very thick,” he affirmed.

I thawed a little.

After about half an hour into styling, he switched off the dryer. I forced myself to look up. I had two fringes on either side which he was proprietarily arranging to perfection. If I had looked like a poodle after my last haircut, I looked like an Afghan hound now. I creased my eyebrows.

“Madam is beautiful, this hairstyle is good,” he gushed.

Do you think so? I inwardly asked.

I smiled. I squinted at the mirror again. Maybe he can see what I can’t see. Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, I thought conveniently. My universal bonhomie returned and I sauntered out of the salon after parting with an exorbitant tip. And if my styled bangs lost a little lissomeness by the time I reached home, predicting what lay in the immediate future for my hair, I did not blame my Emo man.

Dancing Lessons

There are things you invariably learn before, during the course of, and after a classical dance performance. Some lessons are born inside you, some are learned through painful and painstaking experience, and some – to echo a bard – are literally thrust on you. But these lessons are by nature ephemeral and quickly fade off if not penned for posterity. This is an unpretentious attempt at it.

If you are not ready to lose at least 500 hairs from your otherwise fast-depleting hair treasury, think twice before sitting down for that tight bunching up of hair to the left side of the head, where it will resist gravitational pull with the help of a bottle of mousse, hair spray, and at least two-dozen pins. The immediate side effects are a splitting headache, a crick in the neck because of all that unbalanced weight, and a permanently arched right eyebrow. And of course, the lost hairs.

Never forget to wear your bangles when you dance on stage. There is nothing as unsightly as a pair of unadorned wrists amidst all the finery.

Alta (the red ink worn on hands and feet for dance) runs and smudges when you sweat. Permanent markers in red also have the same propensity. There are two options – don’t sweat or don’t touch your white costume when your hand sweats. Or you will have a white costume with red blotches. Yes, it does disguise your cracked feet and your callused hands to perfection. But don’t forget to tell your four-year-old that it is not blood.

Backstage managers are angels in human disguise. There is obviously no other explanation to their endless toiling in the darkness of the backstage – wiping sweat off your brow, arranging props, straightening jewelry, running to get Pocari Sweat for you, listening to your constant grumbling about your hair, costume, and lights, and a thousand other unlabeled tasks – for absolutely no personal gain.

Resist the urge to stop your dance and wave when you hear a familiar trill from one of the front rows, “acha, that is amma in blue” (Dad, that is mom in blue). Remember there are 300 others watching you.

Also resist the temptation to wonder whether your husband has captured you on camera when you are posing as a sinuous vine – what you consider as your best posture in the show. You will forget your next dance move and that can end in disaster.

Always remember it takes huge talent to produce a show and only a modicum of it to dance in it – especially when you are the only adult classical dancer (self-proclaimed) other than your teacher in a 50-mile radius. Also the audience who later tell you that your dance was brilliant are genuinely nice people who are either myopic or do not want to use the word “average.” You know this because you have already seen the dance video that your husband has meticulously recorded and you know that your dance was not “brilliant”.

Nevertheless, at the end of it all, you enjoy yourself tremendously. The huge success of the show somehow rubs a little on you too. And there will be some things that always make you laugh. In my case, it was this press coverage that we got for the show. I reproduce the exact quotes:

“…..with the melodies of the percussion ensemble interspersed with couple of haunting songs sung by two ladies.” (Our male singer, who has a rich baritone, went into paroxysms of frustration reading it. We are still looking for the ghosts of the two ladies who sang haunting songs.)

“…..performers took turns dancing to the music, playing with the metallic ringing produced by the bracelets on their red-striped feet.”

That alta always spelled disaster!!

November arrived...

November arrived ineluctably, all too quickly. Dawn broke. There were ominous clouds gathered in the horizon. Feeble sunlight filtered through, apologetically. I whined as wispy morning sleep gave way to wakefulness. I stretched, yawned, rubbed my eyes, cracked my knuckles, counted the fallen hairs on my pillow, swore under my stale breath, and made my way a little unsteadily to the bathroom. My husband smiled dreamily, adorably. A far-away thunder prophesied a wet weekend. I kept that needling thought at bay.

It was a busy weekend by our estivating standards. For one, our high-spirited four-year-old was still in the thralls of her previous day’s Halloween party. A credulous part of her mind believed that if she tried hard enough, she could make her toy broom fly. And she fervently clung to the notion that trick or treating extended through the weekend and carried her bag around for more candies. Our helper did a vanishing act yet again and so there were chores to take care of. And I had dance rehearsals on both Saturday and Sunday, two days of back-breaking dancing for our show next week. There was simply no place for that needling little thought.

Of course, we feverishly followed the US elections and the final F1 race. And the weekend was full of it. The messianic figure who apparently spent four years of his childhood in this archipelago got my support whereas a world champion who deserved the title did not. Among wins and losses, merciless gossip, irrational favoritism, and baseless speculations, we spent a weekend arguing, laughing, and shaking our heads, and I almost forgot that needling thought.

Come Monday and the busy week started again. Monday is reserved in my calendar for unabashed, uninhibited fun. It is the day when half a dozen of us thirty-somes gather together and learn what is quite unsurprisingly termed “Bollywood dance.” For an hour or more, we subject our pelvis and our acetabulum to various degrees of torture, at times even threatening a dislocation, all under the excellent tutelage of a teacher who is young enough to call us “aunties.” We dance without restraint, we talk without boundaries. And we go back to our homes rejuvenated. On such a Monday, I had no time for that needling thought.

My husband gave me a surprise present – a trifle early, but then, that is how surprises work – a beautiful little statue of a dancing girl carved in ebony. I fell in love with it and narcissistically thought that the svelte figure looked like me. My daughter let slip that there is a little printout of Blue’s Clues in her room that would transform into a card. It is getting harder to keep away that needling little thought.

Today, my ever-ebullient husband proclaimed that as the surprises were all over and done with way before the actual event, he would cook a special dinner for me tomorrow. “On your big day,” he rubbed it in. “Oh goody,” I said uncertainly. I have the faintest suspicion that I would be the guinea pig tomorrow yet again, like the other times when he made me the much-touted celery salad with roasted peppers or his very special avocado dip for tortilla chips. He has already enquired about balsamic vinegar and Brussels sprouts, so all I can do is keep my fingers crossed and quieten my mutinous tummy. Anyway, I have given up pretending that I don’t think my needling thought.

Because I think of it all the time. In this rush of minutes and hours and days, tomorrow is my birthday. If I had started traveling at the speed of light the moment I was born, I would be playing ring-a-ring-a-roses with Pleiades now. Okay, that might be a gross exaggeration. On a closer approximation, I would have simply reached Arcturus. But suffice it to say, I feel old, old as the stars. And that is the one thought that doesn’t make you starry-eyed – to say the least.