Like all little girls I loved dancing and imagined I was a Dancing Queen as I twirled around in my make believe world of kings and queens so I was thrilled to bits when my mother allowed me to enroll in a dancing class. I loved the jangle of  the brass bells strapped to my feet  as I took my first few steps  of “Thaee, thaee, thaka, thaee, ” and was excited to move my head from side to side, roll my eyes and gracefully glide my arms up and down. Unfortunately before I could graduate into a dancing diva, my teacher called it quits and I had to  hang up my dancing bells, sadly forever.

While one part of me felt sad, another part was secretly  pleased because while I enjoyed dancing, what really terrified me was the thought of  performing in public. While I am guilty of this  maternal crime myself, of expecting my own children to perform on cue and subjecting my hapless guests to their piano playing skills,  I still I remember the absolute terror that would grip me at the thought of either singing or dancing  in front of others…………

So earlier this week when Pia told me that I was supposed to dance at her daughter’s wedding, I didn’t know how to react. The last time I had danced was literally a quarter of a century ago when I was svelte and nimble and now with the pounds piling on, one for each year, I was slowly beginning to resemble a little elephant. But when she reassured me that the other dancers were novices too and equally petrified of dancing, I thought what the hell……….

I hesitantly stepped into her house and was even more disheartened to see the other ladies in far better shape than I was. All their talk of being nervous didn’t reassure me and I felt that old familiar feeling I used to have at the School Social when N and I used to spend the better part of the evening as wallflowers waiting desperately for Mr. Hero to rescue us from the ignominy of not having had a single dance that evening. I instinctively looked for her hand to hold and was even more petrified to discover that I was no longer a fat sixteen year old but a fatter fifty +…………….

Taking deep breaths to still the palpitations, I waited for our choreographer to come . I was relieved to find that contrary to what Anna Shetty had led me to believe, he wasn’t the obnoxious dance master from Kandy ( Kandivali- a distant suburb North of the island to the uninitiated) whose sharp moves matched his sharp tongue and who unfortunately was the flavour of the season but was acutally a pleasant duo of youngsters from Rishab Totlani’s Dance Academy.  The kids came in much later than scheduled thanks to Mumbai’s incorrigible traffic.

In tight blue jeans, sneakers and Black T’s announcing their Academy, the  two of them smartly pulled out their iPods and iPhones and a small set of speakers. Very efficiently they explained the brief given to them by the Bride, and showed us the steps of the dance that we were supposed to perform. Hesitantly we  put a foot forward as we tried to  glide to the music of “Navrai Majhi” from the Bollywood hit “English Vinglish”  and jiggle the hips that weren’t waisted . While our initial attempts were stiff and stilted, we slowly began to sway and strut the way our instructress taught us and by the end of the evening our frowns of concentrations turned into smiles of glee.

These kids who were younger than our own children were thrilled with our “grasp” praised us for being great students! All of us were pleased as punch and couldn’t help grinning especially this little elephant who was ecstatic to find that she could actually dance………………..