With You I Dance

By Aarti V Raman

Meera Sagar had everything— the perfect job as a principal ballerina and a man who loved her as much as she loved him. But tragedy struck the night before her biggest performance, forcing her to come back home. To Mumbai. Now, a year later, Meera is still trying to pick up the pieces, while fending off marriage proposals from her well-meaning but traditional Gujarati family, and figure life out all over again. By starting a ballet school in Mumbai. But she has two problems. One, she knows nothing about running a business. And two, she can' t dance. Not anymore. Enter . . . Abeer Goswami. A man nursing a broken heart. Will Meera find a new dream in her ballet school? Can Abeer and Meera find their way back to each other again? And, most important, has Meera danced for the last time? With You I Dance is a warm, funny, at times heart-rending, love story of second chances, true love, and finding yourself when your dearest dream has vanished.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fingerprint Publishing
• Release date: Feb 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9788175993945

Book preview

PROLOGUE

It is the end of the world.

Or so it feels like to me.

I mean how many days can go as bad, as spectacularly bad as today? The answer: maybe the day they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or like the day NASDAQ crashed, or when India lost the World Cup final. Yeah, those days could qualify. But those days didn’t affect me directly. Correction, those days didn’t happen to me.

But today had.

Not much to recap, though.

I lost my job; the job I had worked for, for all of my life. Twenty-five years and six months. But who’s counting? I gave up sleep, food, ice cream, boys, studies, family, and friends for it. I forsook my whole life and dedicated myself to it, and then when my career’s first big moment came, I went ahead and got myself fired. Yep, fired.

This happened at about ten in the morning.

Before that occured had been ‘the night’, when I had like epic food poisoning. It basically meant that I hugged the Porcelain God and whimpered my way through a foggy haze that consisted of Valium, vodka, and of all things, Alka-Seltzer.

And before ‘the night’ had been ‘the evening’. And what a train wreck that had been.

You know the story they ran today in The New York Post about closing the performance of Swan Lake because the . . . ahem . . . prima ballerina had suddenly ‘taken ill’ and could no longer perform? That was me. I was the principal ballerina, but I hadn’t suddenly taken ill. No, sir. Also the performance hadn’t been cancelled—the press was too kind—I had butchered it. Plain and simple.

I had gone on stage to perform. But I had simply just stood there, right in the middle of the first scene—my mouth open and my hands clutching my stomach, like I couldn’t breathe—and gasped like a goldfish about to be flushed down the toilet. I knew what I was doing in front of the Vogler Ballet Company’s finest patrons was enough to flush my career down the toilet, but I couldn’t help it. The panic had hit me as suddenly as they always say it does in the books.

I mean, okay, biggest night of my life. Only my first performance as prima ballerina, and I was entitled to some nerves. Of course. There were even rumours that Gottfried Liebowitz, one of the better Russian Ballet Company directors, was somewhere in the audience, because he had heard such amazing things about this particular performance. And performer.

Needless to say, it wasn’t me he was interested in.

I was the understudy squared (lucky to be out of the corps and doing some real work, instead of bitching about how the girls with thinner legs always got the solos, because the ballerinos found it easier to lift them. This wasn’t strictly true, but I had to tell myself something to keep going, right?). And only because Andriana, our own Russian princess (she was really from Tampa, Arizona) had unfortunately broken her little toe and was out of commission for two weeks, they had given the Swan Lake performance to me. The understudy to the understudy. Because that night, yesterday night, the understudy, Tish, was down with food poisoning. Of the real kinds. Brought on by bad Moo Shoo Pork from Mr. Fong’s.

You’d think I would appreciate the karmic intensity of the events that took place in order for me to go up on stage and become Odette. You’d think I would know better than to blow up the one chance I had been hoping to get since I was seventeen and had come here to breathe ballet and become a prima ballerina. The only chance.

The last chance.

Because Nevada Jones, our company director, had been pretty clear on what she would do with me and with Tish if either of us screwed this up. Tish had been excused because medical emergencies were not something that even Nevada could refute. But me? Oh, I had written the script to my own Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and loss of World Cup final, and NASDAQ crash, myself!

I had screwed up the performance. Royally. The performance that patrons at the Met had paid a hefty sum of money to attend and applaud, and maybe, possibly diss.

I had stood there, like a lump of cow dung, and watched as the floor swam in front of me, because my air passages were totally clogged and I couldn’t remember how to breathe. And then my throat was in my mouth and then that afternoon’s meagre lunch (a cream-cheese bagel, without the cream and cheese and with half a lettuce) was in my mouth and I was spewing everything out right on the stage of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.

They later told me that there was no understudy to the understudy’s understudy, and so the money had to be refunded and the performance scheduled for next week. This was before the kindly doctor from Beth Israel Hospital pumped me full of Valium because I needed to calm down, and after Jeb, my best friend and dance partner, had filled me full of Stolichnaya because I was screaming hysterically in the ambulance as they took me away.

I don’t remember much of what they said.

Just the vodka, and the pills, and then the Alka-Seltzer to calm my upset stomach.

The next morning, i.e., today, i.e., the Day the World Ended, I was informed by Nevada Jones that my services would no longer be required by the company for the rest of the season or, like, ever. And that after last night’s stunt, I would be lucky to even think of setting foot in a ballet studio ever again. Even to sell toe shoes.

I was over. Finished.

I only heard half of what she said—as half of me was still numb from last night’s massive ingestion of pill-alcohol cocktail. The other half of me, which listened to her, was in abject pain. Both from the hangover I was expiring from, as I sat listening to her expound on my list of crimes, and also because I saw it. Like a loop, a train wreck, like a commercial that would never stop running. I saw it happen over and over again.

The spotlight comes on me. I am highlighted in the pure white dress Odette wears in the first scene. And my toes and hands are extended in the prelude to an arabesque. But I don’t move. I stand and I look at the people. I look at the nameless, faceless people and feel my panic rising. I feel my breath stopping.

And I see the lunch hurl out of me over and over again.

It was disgusting and oddly illuminating at the same time. The minute I opened my mouth to vomit, I had known my career was over. That’s why I christened this The Spectacularly Bad Day in my head.

As I exit Nevada’s office, I wander through the Vogler building, a charming little brownstone in Soho with huge studios and French windows that afforded us views of a world we couldn’t ever be a part of. I had loved it here. I had loved it for the last ten years. And I had wanted to belong to it, to be accepted here for just as long.

And now I walk out of it. For the very last time.

The place is silent. Everybody has the day off, to recover from my breakdown, perhaps and I say goodbye, without tears, for two reasons.

A: I am completely numb in the face and that means, I think, my tear glands are frozen. B: I don’t know if what I have done to myself deserves tears.

Because, as sure as my name is Meera, I know this.

When life kicks you in the face, you need balls of steel to stand up and face it. But I am a woman and I have no balls to speak of. Steely or otherwise. So, I stand there in the lobby of the life I hurled away, literally, and I make the call I never wanted to make in this lifetime.

Hello, ma. Yeah, I am coming home. When? Today. As soon as possible. Time for a little vacation. Love you too, bye.

Welcome to my life.

####

From: [e-mail]

To: [e-mail]

Subject: Blank

Hi Ji,

Excellent news. Meera is cuming home.

I think, sumething happened in New York, because she was not sounding all that theek. She didn’t say much but I felt that she is very upset and that her vacation is . . . permanant.

Woh NYT wala article mention nahi kiya.

Anyways, main soch thi hoon, maybe we should talk to Sharma ji about her, you know? After all, twenty-five ki ho gayi hai. Mummy ji has also advised me to start looking for her.

What do you think, Ji?

Yours,

Sarita

ALMOST A YEAR LATER

This can’t be happening, Meera thought.

At the heels of that thought, came the next one. I deserve this. Exactly this.

She’d known coming home was a bad idea, especially when she was so used to Manhattan and all the fashion and glamour it offered (everything they show on Gossip Girl is true). But, even she hadn’t anticipated that Mumbai would hit her like a poorly lit stage before opening night.

And to make things worse, Mumbai was home. But her ordeal didn’t end there. If the city was disappointing, what was proving to be frustrating was living at home, with her well-meaning, extended family.

The first week, after she’d shuttled out of the International Airport—she still couldn’t think of it as Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport—into a world full of honking and heat and auto-rickshaws, she had been completely oblivious to her predicament. To what this homecoming would mean to her family. She had just been plied with really great, really greasy food and endless cups of ginger chai, but had refused to indulge in anything. Especially showers.

But the next week, she had started to wake up. Even her system had stopped suffering from jet lag and the only things keeping her awake in the wee hours of the morning were her own personal demons. Or nightmares, when she was deeply asleep enough to have them.

She even ventured into the huge drawing room that served as the family room for the Sagar family in the days that followed.

Living near the beach in a bungalow should have been a romantic experience, but she’d been too out of it to appreciate it, and before that she had been too focussed on wanting to go to New York and study ballet at Juilliard.

Plus, there was her family.

The prodigal daughter’s return from America had brought the whole clan out in droves.

And she had spent the whole of her third week home saying helloji, namasteji, to all of them. And doing pranams and answering questions about New York, especially if there were any good Gujarati restaurants in town. There were. She just never went to those places. Too many carbs.

And then, one Sunday, about nine months after her listless, unexpected return, her folks, aka Mum, Dad, Bullet—the younger brother who was currently in love with his new bike, a Bullet Enfield—and grandparents (dad’s dad and mom), all had sat her down after dinner, with the latest dance reality show playing on the television in the background, and told her in no uncertain terms that it was time she decided what to do with her future.

Meera had been thunderstruck.

What future? My future is over. And she’d said as much.

"But, beta, that was just dance. A career at most." Mom, rounded and maternal and dressed in a trendy top and jeans with a traditional mangalsutra taking pride of place around her bosom area, had told her, squeezing her hands gently.

Mom, she’d begun patiently.

And one I don’t really understand why you were crazy about. Dad, the consummate businessman, had put in, in impatient tones.

Sure, the man had paid her bills and borne the expenses of the first three years of her stay abroad, but he didn’t have the slightest clue as to what art was, or dance, or what made his daughter tick.

She loved him, but he was a blockhead when it came to her.

Daddy, she’d swivelled to face him.

And anyway, Meera, you’re a grown-up now. Almost twenty-six. It’s time you settled down, Granny had put in sagely. Granny was old school; girls should get educated till college, find a steady job (since these were such modern times), and then find a nice boy, quit the job and breed nice kids.

Huh? she’d squeaked, certain she was still hallucinating in Beth Israel’s mental ward.

What they are all trying to say, Meer, is that you’re going to get hitched and there’s nothing you can do about it, anyways. The brother, Bullet, had summarised the situation for her.

"Any-way, Bull," she’d corrected him, from force of habit. Because she still hadn’t processed it.

Whatever. He’d shrugged and gone back to his PSP.

Mom, Daddy, you guys are not serious. She’d turned back to her folks and looked them in the eye.

Oh, honey. Of course, we are. You are back home, finally. Where you belong. And that stupid dance job is all over; you can’t go back. You said so yourself. So don’t you think you should at least start considering the idea of marriage? Mom had looked at her patiently, pleadingly, the same way she had looked at her when she had wanted a ballerina costume for her fifth birthday, and she had had to hunt all over the city to get her one.

Meera had been a stubborn child who knew her own mind. Nothing much had changed in the stubbornness department.

But . . .

Meera, you wanted to go to America, Dad had cut in. We let you. You wanted to learn that dance that none of us really understood and we let you do that too. And now that you have been fired from the dancing job, you come back home. What do you expect us to do?

It’s just been a few months, Dad, she’d protested feebly. Feeble, because she had been chewing the problem of her future and come up with no viable solution that pleased her, or even looked remotely attractive.

Dance was all she knew. Dance was her first great love. And she was terrified she’d danced for the very last time.

It was a situation nightmares were made of. Her nightmares.

Yes, and you’ve been in a daze all of this while, Dad had continued in a kinder tone. You sleep and you jog on the beach and you don’t help your mother around the house—

"We have Alok and Diya maasi for helping Mom out, Dad," she had cut in, naming the seventeen-year-old gardener-cum-cook-cum-general dogsbody who’d been living with them, along with his mother, Diya maasi, since he was a little boy.

And it has gone on for months now, Dad had continued as if she hadn’t spoken. Months. It’s not the end of the world, beta. You have to move on. And you have to get married; you’re old enough. Besides, it’s not like you wanted a dance job or something, is it? I mean ballet in Mumbai is not all that popular, right?

She’d bit her lip.

Dad, I really love ballet and— she’d begun one last time.

We love you, Meera. But your craziness is going to affect your chances of getting a good prospect if we don’t act fast, her mother had ended matter-of-factly, like she was informing Meera that there were samosas for snacks.

She’d looked at all of them in disbelief. Her grandparents, in one corner of the blue velvet sectional sofa—the silent grandfather clicking the remote searching for the news, and her grandmother, in a traditional cotton sari, with gnarled hands and a thousand wrinkles on her neck, her brown eyes, which she’d passed onto both her grandchildren, radiating concern.

Her dad, in a white cotton kurta pyjama set, starched and pressed, his glasses hanging on the first button of the kurta, tapping his foot impatiently, while he looked at her with concern and more than a little bit of annoyance.

Her brother, nineteen and already the spitting image of her father; all lean and strong shoulders, with a shock of black hair that was always gelled to within an inch of its life. His