Dancing & Navratri

http://picasaweb.google.com/theLastCP/Navratri

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIQL9B2Jz6I

These are the sort of nights that makes Chevrolet donate money to scholarship funds, Gatorade declare impact performers of the week, and Vodafone hold press conferences on the pitch after the most thrilling match of the year. During action like these cameramen sweat, anxious that they are not capturing all the action, that they might miss the play of the century that could happen at any approaching moment. The air is right for history to be written. Bulbs flash and cameras click, the beauty of each movement so perfect, so fluid, executed from a subconscious muscle memory that wows the on looking crowd of wide-eyed fathers, tip toeing girls and boys and admiring mothers. Only the archivists rest, well aware that this night will not be stowed in any dusty drawer or computer file. The people’s champ -- with an ending suited for a leader returned from exile, a sports great retiring after his/her last game, triumphant, carried off on the shoulders of two total strangers to the beat of blaring music and the hearts of my supporters gathered in hordes. Triumphant.

If only. Reality speaks: I am just a white guy who showed up at a garba on a Saturday night, was in the right place at the right time and got love for the audacity to dance, not the dance itself, respect for my energy, not my steps, the intrigue of a gangly foreigner. Still, it was the most memorable of nights – a night of improbable, fortuitous connections that could not have ended better.

An old friend from high school, and by that I mean someone I hadn’t seen since graduation but once, 3 weeks earlier in Delhi. Alumni grapevines put us in touch, and her free weekend brought her to Ahmedabad. Her name is Anna and because she is a she my landlord prohibited her from staying at our flat. So, on the Wednesday before her Friday arrival I emailed a girl I met on Sunday to politely and oh so subtly just see, just ask, if she had space in her dorm room. No Kevin Bacon, but as the small world of fancy college students turns, the would be host, Shubha, and Anna lived in the same dorm last year.

Anna arrived safely and on Saturday night we three went to Amanda and Conner’s apartment– two people Shubha knows from an arts academy in Ahmedabad. One of Conner and Amanda’s coworker’s uncle had passes to a garba (dance) so we packed into his pimped out 4x4 and were on our way. Like a big family sneaking kids into a drive-in movie, our car swam passed the guards and into the parking lot. Exiting through the drunk, I was handed a pass to the Academy Awards – or the garba equivalent, and though I was not up for any awards or had any business being there my shoulders back and sauntered in like any New Yorker would – like it was my party – taking photos on the red carpet, waving to onlookers, tossing my pass to the guard.

Membership at this club is $10,000. It is nice, replete with every luxury imaginable. Thousands of people dressed in traditional costumes swarmed about, buzzing, dancing, calling, eating, judging, fawning. I walked into a rainbow, but was in the midst of it, able to walk through the gradations of color change in the costumes all around me, seeing the difference between periwinkle, salmon, coral, pink, rose, and magenta – each obviously discrete members of the color wheel and each requiring a different complement, shade of show, bindi, and accompanying henna. Wearing dirty cloths from the U.S., I was the sore thumb. Bullied by the massive sign over the entrance to the dance floor – TRADITIONAL DRESS ONLY – I kicked it with Juice on the side.

Juice is the man who got me into the party. Juice is not his real name, I don’t know his real name, but he has a video screen for a rearview mirror. Juice.

With my hands in my pockets I stood watching the concentric circles of dancers in step with the beat, my head rotating occasionally, awestruck and overwhelmed. Juice was checkin’ out the babes. I soon joined him, traveling through the world’s Springs to see the most colorful flowers blossom, the most evolutionarily isolated courting rituals unfold right in front of me. The roles of the sexes switched, biology informing the costume’s colors, the women the suitors and many mates they did attract, with a grace, an exposed back, a maddeningly simple beauty. Women who whose curves spite the perfect shape of the Os of gorgeous, whose hair is a more perfect tale then than the y of beauty. Birds of paradise in a rhythmic circle, the taste buds of my eyes accosted by the colors, flavors, heat and spice captured in the vibrant chili pepper coloring of their clothing, the fleshy brightness of the inside of every fresh fruit in the world immediately after being cracked open, the stark contrast between jet black of seeds and hair at the center with the glow of a color that pulses with life.

I was happy watching.

As the night went on, prizes were given out, children dragged their parents home early, that bully of a sign sat lording over me popping the urges to dance as the bubbled up inside of me.

Then, my jam came on. I had never heard the song before, but watching one round of the dance that accompanied it was enough of a rush to launch me to an irrationality of revenge on all the times in the E.G. program I got picked on. No more bully.

Sprinting onto the converted cricket pitch to join my buddy Conner, we danced. A crowd gathered. We danced. For this dance, everyone squats while there is a lull in the music. Then it builds. And builds. And builds to the point where at one specific beat everyone jumps up and goes crazy, dancing like possessed beasts, happiness raining down like gum drops and world peace. Danced we did and happy we were.

The crowd grew, with each round of the dance, more and more people gathered, some to dance, most to watch. Cell phone cameras. Stares. Laughs. Smiles. Cameramen. Video cameras on a live video feed to the movie-sized screens all around the venue. The lull. The build. The build. Explosion and joy. We just danced and loved it. Before I knew what was going on, I was in the air, on the shoulders of two men. I just smiled and kept bouncing my shoulders.

As the music ended, the energy didn’t. I was on top of the world. Walking out, drenched in sweat, grown men walked by and thanked me for dancing. I was the king of the world.