Eyes Speak Lies ...

It was a party he had been loathe to attend. He did not like late night parties. Not that he did not enjoy them, but he could never relate to them as others did. He always felt out of place, detached. Even when he was at his most active, he was having a semi-serious sort of discussion in a group of two or three people. Being a teetotaller, he’d always be outside the inner circle of friends who had the ‘real fun’. He was on the periphery, smiling, brooding, undecided in whether to stay on or leave. Then the music began to play. First lightly, then a little louder, louder and louder till it reached a crescendo.

It wasn’t a blaring kind of music that made you feel that your ears were some sort of a gong being hit by hammers. He took an instant disliking to that. This had a rhythmic quality to it which made him tap his feet when no one was looking. He never had danced. A few attempts that he’d made had been enough for him to decide that it wasn’t his cup of tea. He’d rather stand and watch the swaying, gyrating bodies than be on the floor. Yet, he connected to dance very deeply. Every time he saw someone dancing, oblivious to the surroundings, he lost himself and he was the one who was dancing. He regarded dance as the highest and noblest form of sensuality. It always transported him back to that time, that day when he’d seen her dance.

It was a few years back and they were in a room, sitting together. It was an office room where they were supposed to spend the night. It barely had a table and a few chairs, but the room was large and comfortable. They were squatting in a corner, chatting away. She’d been his friend for well over an year and they connected well. With nothing to do, it started getting boring after sometime. He moved to another corner of the room and lay down quietly, thinking over the events of the past few days. He hardly had time to revisit his actions, and with nothing to do presently, he decided to make the most of the time he had. He lay quietly on his side, thinking, when she suddenly got up and began practicing a few steps. She was humming slowly, a tune he neither liked nor disliked.

He started observing her closely as he’d never done before. Every movement of her body seemed to be magnified manifold. She was wearing a shining black men’s shirt that accentuated the pure white color of her skin. She’d unbuttoned the first two buttons of the shirt. The frayed edges of the jeans peeped out from the single fold she’d given them. She was barefoot, her shoes lying just beside where she was dancing, dodging them as she moved from side to side, getting into a frenzy of steps, segued into a continuous feline motion. Her short, cropped hair looked like ripples in the sea waves at night, dark and beautiful.

He had always liked her in a dull, retrospective sort of a way. But now, as he saw her, agile, fiery, her face red with the strain of maintaining the rhythm, her eyes focusing on the blank wall, sheer joy radiating from her whole being, he felt as if drums were beating within his own body. There was silence all around, but he could feel the rhythm of her steps within him. He’d always known that music made people feel like dancing. He felt otherwise. It was as if her dance had generated some sort of a music in him, that was all joy, hers, and all melancholy, his. His mind was spinning furiously as the surroundings all melted away and his vision was confined to her feet in a blur of motion, repeating step after step, landing on the concrete, kissing the tiles, the arms swishing and cutting through the air, as the synthetic material of the shirt rustled, rubbing against her body. Her earlobes were the color of plums and the lips were pursed together in concentration.

As time slowly passed, her passion increased but her body started to tire away, the feet moved as elegantly as before but the ferocity lessened. Slowly, after a particularly strenuous step, she stretched her arms hugging the knees as she bent, stretching one leg far out and spun around using the heel of the other as a pivot and suddenly came to a stop as she faced him. Seeing that he had been watching her all along, she gave him a friendly, matter-of-fact smile, got up and moved under the fan, rolling the sleeves of her shirt to dry her sweating self.

That was an experience that he’d carried with himself for all these years and a memory he could never relinquish. It had been his closest encounter to what dancing could do to a person. And he’d only been watching. As to the effects on someone who was dancing, he could not even comprehend the thrills that must be experienced by them. As he saw the multitudes of faces, heads bobbing up and down on the dance floor, he could only see her face, her attire, her feet and there was no music around but what she’d given him.

posted by Swetank Gupta @ 10:21 am