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My dance partner and I have a combined age of 85. Sometimes we complain about this. He will say, “I’m an old man now,” rising from the floor, bones clicking. Or I will clutch the small of my back, where my kundalini supposedly resides, and grimace. We always give each other encouraging smiles, as if to say, Go on! Your limbs are made of plasticine, you can push through! But we never go overboard with the whinging because commiserating with someone else’s body pain can only last a few seconds, after which, it becomes tedious.
When we began dancing together, we had the combined age of a spritely 57. I remember being an eager traveller then. Whether we were taking the Navjeevan Express to Vadodara, or whether we were going to perform in Taiwan, Japan, Australia, I was always excited about going somewhere. These days I’m more anxious. If travel is about tricking the body into believing that night is day, then dance is also a kind of trickery, and sometimes, it is challenging to do both.
It's Easter, and we are in Heerlen, which sounds like the name of a lissom Punjabi lass, but is in fact a small town in the Netherlands. When we arrived I sauntered around the network of streets around our hotel. The most exciting thing I came across was a window display of a mannequin in a faux leopard bathrobe with a matching throw pillow, and a sign for Miss Poppy’s Tattoo parlour. Who in this town is going to come see us perform? I kept thinking. Then I trudged back to my hotel room to think about it some more.
The hotel is the kind of place that has fake tulips in the lobby and a TV playing the Dutch version of Pop Idol on loop. The rooms are so narrow that every time I attempt to do a Surya Namaskar I end up whacking a wall. Compared to your average Dutch person I’m a bit of a peewee, but I don’t hear my neighbours collide into anything. In the morning I gather my limbs and gaze out of the window into the kind of grey sky I imagine drove Vincent van Gogh a little loopy and sent him running to the South of France. It is almost depressing enough for me to want to write a poem about it. Still, it is bracing to be a stranger in a town where there is little to do. I feel I’m adrift in my very own existential novel without the trauma of having killed anyone.
The cold sends the body into lockdown mode. This season is what’s optimistically referred to as the European spring. When you’re packing your bags in the 34 degree centigrade sauna of Chennai, gawping at your North Face boots — even the idea of their fluffy existence seems preposterous. Once you land, you can’t snap those boots on fast enough — on they go like two baby penguins, following you everywhere. Except in bed, in the shower and on stage. On stage I go barefoot, in skimpy Fabindia kurta-pyjama, scrabbling about on a vinyl floor, longing for sweat between my toes. It is the antithesis of our theatre at home with its warm stone floor and ambient sounds of crows, motorbikes, and the sea. Here then is challenge #23 of the travelling performer: to recreate the geniality of their home theatre into whichever black box they are thrust into.
Before embarking on our five-city European dance tour my Italian mother-in-law worriedly asked, “I hope people won’t confuse Sharira with Sharia.”
This, after the bomb blast in Brussels.
She had a point. There is only a tiddly 'r' that differentiates the Sanskrit concept of the unending body (title of our dance work) from the religious legal system governing the Islamic Faith. “Hopefully, people will see the promo photo and get the difference,” I say.
I have found a motto for March: The iguana is my cousin.
I chose this motto not just for its surprising qualities, but because it can be inserted liberally into most conversations.
I stole it from a documentary made by Wim Wenders about the photographer Sebastião Salgado.
The close-up of an iguana's paw seems ... doesn't it resemble our very own's structure? ~Photo: Sebastião Salgado
In the Salt of the Earth , Wenders takes us through Salgado’s extraordinary career. You wouldn’t think that a documentary consisting of so many static black and white images can grip you but when you see these photographs your eyes are going nowhere. In fact, the stillness of Salgado’s photographs is more powerful than anything Wenders can do around them. They glisten, these pictures — whether it’s the gold mines of Brazil, or glaciers in Antarctica, or the close-up of an iguana’s paw. Salgado speaks of connectivity, of how despite the fact that we are the most terrible of animals we still have the capacity for kinship. “Looking at the structure of the hand, I see that the iguana is also my cousin: we come from the same cell.”
Hearing this, something in me clicks. This is an answer to a question I ask a lot. Why am I here? Why did I come here? Where am I going? Why am I going there? Who are you and what the hell are we collectively doing? Particularly if I happen to be in a place called Heerlen.
Once I lock into iguana philosophy there’s no stopping me. At every juncture I feel its prehistoric wisdom gushing over and around me like a geyser.
When Fritz, our companionable and very tall Dutch driver, deposits us in Heerlen before scrabbling back to Amsterdam, and tells us how after his girlfriend broke up with him he started taking Yoga lessons and, soon after, found a better house and a better job — how one thing just led to another, I am tempted to say, “The iguana is my cousin.”
When our musicians request Fritz to drop them off at their student’s house en route, he agrees. And when they say, “Why not stop and have lunch with us? We are going to cook daal chawal ?” He agrees again. When I look at their student Deborah’s wooden house in the middle of the Belgian countryside, and wonder how she travelled all the way from here to Bhopal to study Dhrupad for three years; when she brings out her old Holi photos because today is Holi and we are far from home; when she holds her pregnant stomach and tells us how she was on the metro in Brussels fifteen minutes before the bomb went off, a radioactive shiver goes around the room, and I’m thinking “iguana iguana iguana”.
When I sit alone in the wings before a show begins, listening to the audience shuffle in — the scrich-scrich of their shoes against the floor, chairs creaking to receive their weight, I think of the offering we are about to give. I unfurl myself in the dark like a small South-American reptile, trying to keep limber and warm, and I try to breathe evenly.
