Inside the Mirror by Parul Kapur

Author:Parul Kapur [Kapur, Parul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000 FICTION / Literary
Publisher: Nebraska

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The sisters were careful to talk softly at night. Every evening Jaya drew the curtains between their half of the bedroom and Bebeji’s alcove in the enclosed balcony, to keep from disturbing her. These days Bebeji slept very early, an hour after taking a frugal evening meal. The growing conflicts at the shanty colony had discouraged her despite her small success in bringing two handpumps there. The twins were sensitive to their grandmother’s need for rest and didn’t talk long. But the evening Kamlesh learned about her arangetram, she told Jaya everything she could not tell their parents, and they spoke till late in the night. Masterji had offered to train her like a true dancer, in the way dancers traditionally prepared for their debuts. After her exams in April, she could shift to his home, share his daughters’ room. For four to five hours a day she would practice new dance pieces, sit with him and learn his interpretations of the slokas and shastras, the dance theory in its detail. He would teach her singing, and his wife would instruct her on playing the veena. Learning an instrument was important, he said, because dance in its purest form was considered a visual embodiment of music. Jaya kept sighing in awe over such an intricate and elaborate discipline, enchanted by Masterji’s ideal. “To become a true dancer,” Kamlesh recalled her guru telling her, “a girl’s surrender to dance has to be complete.”

“I wish you could live like that for a few months,” Jaya said. “It would be out of this world. I can talk to them for you.”

Kamlesh was hopeful but remained silent. She doubted Jaya would succeed in persuading their parents to let her take residence in Masterji’s flat, yet she’d already started fantasizing about shifting there. She could take her books along to study for her exams, dipping into Hazlitt’s Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen and De Quincey’s Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow and Dickens’s Bleak House while she learned the new padam to Shiva.

Jaya asked again if Kamlesh wanted her to speak to their parents about Masterji’s proposition. They always felt more courageous to speak up for each other than for themselves. Jaya had not said a word to their parents about her exhibition. As long as Daddy didn’t forbid her from participating, it seemed to Kamlesh, she could go on imagining she would create her Shakti Cycle of paintings and hang them in the Jehangir Art Gallery.

“Why don’t you ask about your own exhibition first,” Kamlesh said as gently as she could.

“I’ll have to tell them soon,” Jaya conceded. “I suppose I should tell them the whole thing.”

When Kamlesh asked what she meant, Jaya murmured that Sringara had offered her the use of her flat to paint her exhibition pictures. She would have more privacy and space than on the balcony; she could spend an hour or two there every afternoon after college. “And Sringara could look at my paintings and give me her advice,” said Jaya.

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