Barefoot

“You have not written in a while you know”, he smiled at me.

I looked away from his face and thought, indeed, I have not. I guess it is partly because of all the mess I have been in lately. In these last couple of months, I have moved from Texas to Maryland. A change of cities, home, school, friends and grocery stores. Indeed, when in grad school I believe these are the most essential 5 components that comprise your humdrum day-to-day life. I had barely known the word as a simple collection of four letters of the English alphabet before, until this one month revealed to me partially what it actually means. A simple act of moving from one place to another is not simple after all.

The decision of moving closer to each other after spending a lifetime apart, was taken on a sultry summer night of late May this year, by two fidgety souls who had grown tired with all the distance and the consequent complications. After an episode of agitated arguments, complaints, revelations and confessions, we realized, we had both become capable of all that life had planned to throw at us. Just one change was needed perhaps; instead of fighting the odds individually with 1500 miles between us, we decided to combat them together. I sent out a couple of emails and like an absurd story of quintessential coincidence, things materialized within a month and I got admitted to the same university as his as a transfer graduate student. Things have not been the same since then. I still feel new to the city. Home is the only place I find peace. With this I realize, if I go on writing about my emotions in the new city, which I am very much leaned on to doing, this post will be nothing better than a page from the diary I write. I have no intention of making blog posts about all that is going through my head lately, which might probably fill up volumes in the form of a book or script to a movie someday. However, I do have one particular idea I distinctly remember to have thought about a couple of times even after the incident.

The International Education Services (IES) which is the body dedicated to support the international students at the university by facilitating all the academic initiatives had organized an event for the incoming new students.  The event was about participating in the Swing Dance Trip to the Mobtown Ballroom which was somewhere in the downtown area of the city. I could see how excited he was when I told Aniruddha, sitting on the sofa, that I wanted to go with him. He was looking at all the youtube tutorials for dancing correctly. He even proposed to try it out with me once before going because that way it would be easier to follow the instructions on the dance floor that evening. He is a man who believes in practice! But, impulsive as I was, I was more interested in choosing what to wear and how to look. Perfecting the steps was not on my platter for then. He wore his dark green trousers and white collared shirt with blue freckles all over and black formal shoes, while I put on a black flared short skirt with a peach blouse and accessorized it with long trailed earrings and heeled pumps. I was too happy about wearing those shoes and equally worried whether they would be comfortable to dance in.

“You can dance barefoot if they hurt too much,” he suggested.

It was late in the evening when we reached the ballroom. The cab missed the location at first and drove us round the next block and back to finally drop us at the right spot. We crossed the road and checked into the hall. I stepped in and looked across the hall. Everybody stood in a huge circle with their partners. A few stood away from the circle, a little disheartened, I believe, by the fact that they did not find any partner. In the middle stood the two instructors, a girl in her mid-twenties and a guy about the same age. We found a spot in the circle and then the instructors started. They introduced themselves as Jared and Leena and showed us the preliminary steps. In swing dancing the man is usually the leader and the girl follows him and so is the follower. However, the pattern is subject to change with the course of the dance. Aniruddha got all ready, held my hand and tried executing the leader’s steps. I tried following him. This went on a couple of times and then Jared exclaimed, “Change”. This was the call for changing partners. The idea was to let everyone dance with everyone else in the room. At this some of the sad souls at the corner of the room who stood deprived of partners, gained some courage and stepped forward to join. We however, did not want to change yet.

The next few steps crawled in and I soon realized that Aniruddha was a perfectionist. He would redo a step every time we missed one and start from the beginning. He was of the idea that we do not really need to follow the instructions exactly but we need to do the steps, whatever we do, with clarity. So, he would do a virtual tour of 1,2,3 where he would revise the steps and then carry them out in one go. I was trying to follow him through this until I reached a point where I wanted to go wrong and still keep dancing. So, I told him, “You know what, let’s change for once. Maybe we will get a better hang of the steps that way”. He agreed and we changed our partners the next time.

He got paired with a rather middle-aged woman with black and white floral printed dress, while I was greeted by a bearded man by the name Anthony. He greeted me with a flashy smile from the back of his beard and said, “You can call me Tony.”I nodded lightly and swung into the dance immediately. Now, this man seemed pretty trained himself. He held my hand in a perfect position and did the steps in the right rhythm. My body seemed to have been set into a motion so well synced with his, it was as if his moves controlled me. He finished the dance by swinging me into the perfect roundabout move until he held my back to stop me from swirling at the right spot. He then smiled at me once again and said, “Thank you. It was a pleasure.” I looked at him and with the next instruction of Change, went on to the next man in the circle.

This one was an Indian guy, Prithwish. He was rather short and had put on one of his sharpest smelling perfumes. He introduced himself and said, “I am so confused right now with all the steps.” I smiled at him and placed my hand on his shoulder to dance. Jared and Leena performed a step where the follower’s hand went past the head of the leader and rested on the other side of his shoulder until the leader took her waist and pulled her back to the starting position. The step looked interesting to me and I glanced at Aniruddha across Tony. He looked back at me and smiled pleasantly. I could say he wanted to dance with me. But somehow it was too late to switch right now. So, I went along with Prithwish, and as my hand brushed against his head, I realized his hair was all sweaty with the dancing. I instantly understood the role of the sharp smelling perfume on him.

With the next switch I landed with a man who barely wanted to hold my hand. I introduced myself and I think he said his name was Sebastian. I turned to dance and I saw Aniruddha standing without a partner, looking at me. I quickly switched across the circle and landed back with him. As Aniruddha took my hand, it was something I felt that made me write this post today. It was not excitement. It was not a breeze through my hair. It was rather the opposite of it all. It felt home. Familiar. He still counted his steps into the dance and I tried following him. At the end, Jared instructed to dance the whole piece in a go and evidently none of us in the hall had picked up all of the steps accurately or even if we did we did not remember them all to execute in the right order. Everybody went everywhere and so did Aniruddha and I.

I wanted to rest for a while after this. As we moved towards the seating area, I saw a mother dancing with her kid. They danced playfully and once in a while the kid would bump his head into her belly and still keep dancing. And then they stopped for a while. The mother seated the child on one of the chairs and went on to dance with a man. The kid kept staring at her for some time, and then spread a deck of cards on the table in front of him and started playing. I believe he spotted me staring at him and looked at me with a jolt. I saw he had blue eyes and black hair. He held me in a constant stare and as I smiled at him, he pursed his pink lips into a shy smile and looked beamingly at Aniruddha. And then after few seconds he dropped back to his cards.

Soon the mother came back and kissed the child on his forehead and smiled at me.

“He is adorable. What’s his name? ” I asked.

“He is a sweetheart. He is Javier.” She said.

I looked back at Aniruddha.

“You have not written in a while you know”, he smiled at me.

I looked away from his face and thought, indeed, I have not. We sat there looking at people dance. The room had an energy, a positive vibe about it and it was all because of the faces that went swinging from one end of the room to another. As for me, I was tired after dancing and was resting beside the man I could dance barefoot with.