A Time to Dance (8 page)

LOOKS

Clunking along the bleak school corridors,

I must look as asymmetric

as a heron balancing on one leg.

I wish it wouldn't take Jim so long to make my prosthesis.

I hate announcing my arrival on crutches

—stomp, clomp, stomp, clomp—

loud enough to make every head turn in my direction.

When lessons are over

everyone pours out onto the sports field.

“You could coach us, Veda. Please? Come?” Chandra pleads.

So I go.

The other girls from the cricket team gather around me.

A few mumble that they're sorry,

their nervous eyes politely stuck to my face,

wary of accidentally straying too low and catching a glimpse

of the space beneath my right knee.

Some welcome me back in extra-bright voices,

saying it's nice I'm back

though they hardly know me.

Silent, shy, following Chandra,

at school, I was her shadow.

Only at dance did I shine in my own light.

Listlessly

I listen to girls whack at the red cork ball with willow bats.

Mekha, a vicious girl, who plays so well

Chandra's forced to keep her on the team,

walks past me.

“Hey, Veda, I was pretty lame today. Wasn't I?” She giggles.

Her twin, Meghna, peals with laughter.

As they walk away, I hear Mekha say,

“Veda's so sensitive!

Are we supposed to stop using certain words

because she's handicapped?

Should we give cricket stumps

a new name now that she has a stump?”

The girls fall on each other, laughing some more,

and their taunts echo loudly in my head

long after I leave the field.

NAMES

Chandra stops by in the evening. “Why did you leave early? Without telling me?

What happened? I was worried.”

Words spill out of me, fierce as tears.

“I'm sick of being a cripple.

I hate hearing people talk about me.

And even when they're not talking about me,

ugly words are always around:

stump, lame, handicap.”

“If people are calling you names, I'll take care of them.”

Chandra makes fists.

“You're just more advanced than we are.

I saw this TV show about how, maybe, in a hundred years,

we'll all have implants to make our bodies stronger.”

I slap at a crutch. “This isn't an implant.

It only enhances my weakness.

I'm going to drop out of school.”

“Veda, you never give up.

Not even at cricket,

which you don't care much about.

You know why our team won so often?

Because you inspired me.

However desperate a match seemed,

I could read in your face

that you refused to accept defeat.”

She's right, but her words surprise me.

“How do you know?”

“Maybe others can't see your feelings.

I, however, have X-ray vision.” Chandra makes a funny face,

sucking her cheeks in and rolling her eyes.

My teeth feel stuck together

like I've been chewing cashew candy,

except my mouth tastes bitter, not caramel sweet.

It's work to get my jaws unstuck and laugh

but I'm used to challenging the muscles of my body.

I do it for Chandra's sake. Because friendship is about laughing

when the other person is joking to make you feel better.

Even if you don't find her joke all that funny.

EXPOSED

Dr. Murali removes my stitches.

I make myself stare

at my

bare

residual leg.

As healed as it ever will be.

Below my knee, above where my leg now ends,

a grotesque smiley mouth leers at me:

a C-shaped scar.

Looking at my uneven skin

exposed

hurts

worse than salting a fresh wound.

Closing my eyes, I turn

away.

Dr. Murali sings the praises of prostheses so enthusiastically,

it's as if he's encouraging

Ma and Pa to cut off their legs and replace them

with “marvelous” artificial limbs

that are “so much stronger” than our own.

Dr. Murali says, “We will give you a shrinker sock

to compress your limb

into a conical shape so it'll fit easily into your prosthesis.

Wear it as much as you can over the next month

so your limb doesn't become

dog-eared or bulbous.

Roll antiperspirant on the skin beneath your sock

so the area stays dry. Keep it clean.

We don't want it getting infected and smelly.”

My cheeks burn with embarrassment,

as if I've been playing cricket in the heat.

Bad enough having Jim

see this part of me, naked,

without imagining it

dog-eared, bulbous,

stinking, swollen, disgusting.

Jim kneels by my foot

so close I could rest my chin on his golden head.

“Hey there.” Jim's normally buoyant voice is soft.

One of his knuckles, rough as a cat's tongue,

brushes against my inner thigh

as he helps me pull on my “shrinker sock.”

His accidental touch tickles,

sending an uncomfortable flutter through my stomach.

“Veda? I'll make you a leg you can dance on.”

I feel dizzy as if I'd stood up too fast,

though I get up slowly on my crutches.

Dizzy at the sight of him kneeling by my foot,

dizzy at the thought of Jim and me alone in his office,

his dazzling eyes watching me dance

on the leg he's promised he'll make me.

IN
the
EYE

I'm at the table finishing my homework

when I glimpse Paati in our kitchen

wiping beads of sweat off her brow

with the edge of her white sari.

“Paati, let me help.”

“I was going to make you some
uppuma.
”

“I'll cook my own snack. You do too much for someone your age.

Chandra's grandmother sits in front of the TV all day.”

“Don't criticize your elders,” Paati says, but her eyes twinkle.

“Paati, I'd never criticize you. You've done so much in life.”

“Didn't you tell me Chandra's grandmother

raised eight children? I only had one.”

“You raised Pa all on your own!

You became a schoolteacher!

Most widows of your time didn't dare leave home!”

“Finish your homework.”

“Done.” I stuff my books into my schoolbag,

clunk over to help her.

“Veda, you look tired. Go and rest. I enjoy cooking.”

“I'm not tired,” I lie.

“I'm old, not blind,” she says.

“I wish my classmates were blind.

And the people who ride my bus, too.”

I warm a blob of clarified butter in a pan.

The smell of melting butter fills our kitchen.

I toss in some black mustard seeds.

They crackle. The sound reminds me

of Mekha and Meghna cackling. “Everyone stares at me.

All the time.

Everyone looks at Chandra, too,

except that's because she's pretty.

In my case, it's because I'm not.”

“Chandra's pretty,” Paati says. “And so are you.”

“Only if I'm dancing.”

“Veda, onstage you sparkle with confidence.

But your body doesn't transform

offstage.

Your curls are just as long,

your back just as straight,

your figure and face just as lovely.

Your hands flutter whenever you talk. And you

move so elegantly.

As delicately as a butterfly flitting between flowers.”

“Not on crutches, I don't.”

“All

the

time,” Paati says.

She's my grandmother.

No wonder she believes I'm always graceful.

Beauty, as the proverb says, I now understand,

is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder.

WHO DANCED
Ahead
OF ME

“Did you get those just because of me?”

I motion at the rows and rows

of books on Bharatanatyam

stacked on Jim's bookshelf,

in his sunny workroom on the third floor of a redbrick building

on the forested campus of the technology institute

right in the middle of the tar-and-concrete maze of Chennai city.

“You bet, kiddo.”

The hair on Jim's hands is powdered white

from the plaster of Paris

he's mixing with water

to make a mold of my residual limb.

I can't believe he's taking so much time to learn

about what I most love.

I feel flattered—more than flattered—by his interest.

I want to say how deeply

his care and dedication touch me.

Instead, all I do is sneeze from the dust Jim is stirring up.

Jim motions at a wall.

“Got those in your honor, too.”

Posters of three dancers, all

one-legged.

“Let me introduce them to you, ma'am.” Jim points

at a handsome man wearing a suit and shoes.

“He's an African-American tap dancer.

They called him Peg Leg Bates. He danced with a wooden leg. Way back in the 1920s and '30s.”

Next, Jim shows me an Indian man named Nityananda,

dancing a classical style similar to Bharatanatyam.

Nityananda balances on one leg, his residual limb hidden

beneath the graceful drapes of his white veshti,

his upper body naked except for his golden dance jewels,

his arms raised, palms together above his head,

eyes closed.

But it's the third dancer

off whom I can't take my eyes:

a dark-haired, round-faced Indian lady.

“Sudha Chandran,” Jim says.

“She danced your own beloved Bharatanatyam

with a simple, inexpensive artificial limb

created in India: the Jaipur foot.

The prosthesis I saw on my first trip to India

that inspired me to design artificial limbs.

We'll be making you a far more modern leg

with greater flexibility and range of motion.”

I dream of my picture

hanging next to Sudha Chandran's on Jim's wall.

As if he can read my mind, Jim says,

“One day, kiddo, I'll add your poster to my collection.”

I love hearing the pride in his tone,

love his certainty,

love how he

hears my unspoken words.