I.
Tatta Adavu
Tapping is first. Tapping is always first, from the first infinity to the last. Tapping is the crux of dance and dance is the crux of life. Learn to tap, your guru says, and everything else will follow. That’s why the first skill you learn in class is that of counting under your breath. “One, two, three, beat. One, two, three, beat.” You have to say it out loud; your hot breath mingles with sweat and confusion. But if you don’t, the numbers don’t form fully and rhythm eludes you. “One, two, three.” After time, the numbers slip from your mouth easily and you learn to expect the count in the same way a pianist anticipates the notes before pressing the keys. Congratulations, your guru tells you. You’re on your way.
But don’t forget to bend your knees. Make sure your hands are behind your waist and that your palms bend outwards.
Tapping matters. But not as much as you thought it did.

II.
Natta Adavu
Stretch; stretch until your calves ache and quiver, until the balls of your feet feel like heavy lumps of metal melded to the rubbery floor. Vibrations from focus will wobble you, ground you in the now, and you will lean as the Earth leans.
By now, you are a dance veteran. At four, you joined the class with your horde of friends since birth, all smooth feet and curls. Indian parents have a love for pushing their children: karate for Karans and kathak for Kirans. But as their feet grew blisters and their hair grew frizzy, your friends started to vanish, one by one, until it’s just you and five other girls in the dingy gym rented from the local basketball team for one hour, Wednesday nights only. Five other girls who don’t mind standing on their tippy toes until their nails crumble and peel. Five other girls who don’t mind tightening their buns until their heads ache and throb. Five other girls who, like you, know that these things don’t matter.
Because when you can tell stories with your eyes and hands, how could anything else matter?

III.
Visharu Adavu
This is the step where you begin to wish you were really a goddess and not just playing one, so that you would have arms enough to accommodate these steps. It’s the hardest part, according to your guru. If you can do this, you can do anything. Balance your arms in the lotus position; they may burn and shiver, but that just shows that you’re doing it right. Slowly, you realize that your hands are no longer part of you; they have a will of their own. After a while, they move to the beat before instructions reach your brain. They remember the steps faster than you can. You’re impressed and slightly taken aback by this – for the first time, you don’t have to think to dance.
Today is the first day that your guru pats your back. “Good,” she says, and her smile is not forced. She is a dancer herself, so she knows the value of this moment. You wouldn’t be able to tell if she hadn’t told you, though. She has grown rotund with the years and wears her hips luxuriously, so that they bob of their own accord, and every inch of her is tucked in tight, like a bed-sheet. Her eyes are still the eyes of a dancer, however; they are dark and expressive, like yours should be. Open wide when you smile. Lashes flutter when you demur. Closed loosely when you finish.
After a year, you can wear a sari like an expert and shame on you if you haven’t yet mastered the art of kajal. Stories are important, your guru says. But you need to look the part as well. After all, Princess Sita would never have been seen with smeared lipstick.
Oh, and don’t forget to smile.

IV.
Tattimetti Adavu
After the stretching comes the balance. You stand in the same position for so long that you begin to feel twinges in places you didn’t know twinges could happen. Your backside cramps every day, but your mother ices your spine and you harden your mind.
This is the year that your dance class moves out of the gym and into a small red-brick building all to itself, with an official sign and business cards to its name. Suddenly, your guru is more serious about everything. No stray smudges of mascara, no tiny tremors of positions. This is her business now, and you are her client.
You wonder what happened to the woman your mother used to invite over for tea.
You dance in a studio now. The walls are hospital white and the girls are as distinct and untouchable as shadows on their surfaces. You walk a line, and you dance against the light beating between the earth and the sky. There are mirrors everywhere, panes upon panes of mirrors. Your face is reflected six, seven images deep until you can no longer pinpoint where you really are; if you look at yourself in the middle of a pivot, your smile will be scattered into a thousand glass shards.
The first time you mess up a performance is an unforgettable feeling. It’s just a wobble, and you’re at the back of the row, but your heart sinks into your stomach and a tight knot of twine settles in your throat as you plunder clumsily through the rest of the steps. Your guru doesn’t scold you afterward; instead, she looks at you with hooded eyes. Somehow, this is worse.
Your mother couldn’t come to watch this show; she is the on-call nurse at the hospital and your father is away for business in Singapore. Before she dropped you off, she kissed your cheek and told you that you looked like a princess in your costume. You disagree – in a burgundy sari with uneven black layers of trim, you think you look like a red velvet cupcake – but you smiled back at her anyway. So now you wait in the parking lot, watching as proud parents hug accomplished daughters and drive off into the hazy afternoon sun.
Small brown birds perch on the edge of the sidewalk besides your battered flip-flops. Their claws scratch out old languages in the mud as they pick at snails and wait for a better season.

V.
Teermanam Adavu
The finish has to be the grandest part of the show. This is the way it has been ever since dance was born from the rhythmic pulse of the earth. This is the way your guru teaches you now. “Big smiles,” she says. Her hair is newly cut and highlighted with streaks of light brown, so she has to blow it heavily out of her eyes when she criticizes you now. For some reason, this softens the blow of the insult. “This is the happy ending. You want your audience to feel the emotion in the story.”
The endings are always happy.
As you pose for the ending, arms raised high in the air, you feel the weight of an invisible book in your hands. If you were to open it, the pages would glow in the dim light of the hall. You can’t read the words inside, but you can imagine the sound the book would make as you open it.
You presume you came from somewhere, but this is all you get in a dream: the noise of lethargic applause, the sense of something before, and something after.

VI.
Sarikal Adavu
It doesn’t seem logical that you learn to slide after you learn to finish. Your guru tells you that this is because there is a grace to the slide that can only come from experience.
This is a lie, you learn quickly. The slide isn’t an art; it’s a calculation. It converts dancing into symbols, generic to the contours of a form. Your body is linear, the x-axis of a Cartesian grid, and the three points of your head, chest and torso are distributed evenly and vertically. Symmetry matters. Poetry doesn’t. Counting becomes timing, in the form of strokes and beats in line with the plane of your body. The directions of the slides lie in the angles that point your legs; forty five degrees for a bend, ninety for a stretch. Triangles stand in for limbs, rectangles for feet.
Your dance is boiled down into degrees of enveloping space.
Before, school was a temporary station in between dance classes. But the quiet boy two rows down from you in your history class has changed that. He is like no one you’ve ever seen before, with steely eyes of hardened wind and a face of planes and angles. You watch him in the way that women watch men who do not know that they are beautiful. Sometimes, you think you catch him looking too, but then you realize that’s just because you were wishing too hard.
In chemistry class, you learn about entropy. “The universe is dying!” your teacher proclaims excitedly, trying in vain to hammer the concept into the brains of summer-ready students.
The universe is dying, you think. It wants to go from one state to another, the way that glass wants to be broken, that ice wants to melt. It is easier to be many things than it is to be one.

VII.
Kudittametta Adavu
The final step is the jump. This is a dancer’s pride and joy; this is the step that differentiates mediocre from good, good from excellent. The day you master the jump, your head spins in giddiness. This is it. You are a dancer. It’s done. You know you’ve nailed it, because after a performance, a bird-like woman with bright lip gloss and a floral dress hands you a business card. “Dance is an art,” she tells you. “We need young dancers like you, people who dance in prose.”
Your guru offers you a tight-lipped smile. “Congratulations,” she says, and for the first time you can remember, her eyes are empty.
After the woman walks away, you pointedly throw the card in the trash, making sure that your guru can see. She pretends that she can’t.
The boy’s name is Alex, and he likes football. You realize the minute he asks you out that it’s a mistake, but you say yes anyway.
Sweaty palms. Nervous giggles. You kiss like a rooster, thinking: “I lost my feathers in the fight.” Your eyes are wide and muted as you dress yourself in papier-mâché.
After you end things, you quit the dance school. Her eyes remain empty. They’ve been empty for weeks. You can see echoes of who you used to be reflected in their hollow spaces. Two weeks’ notice leaves you with one last chance, one last dance.
You know that the last dance in a set is always the hardest, the deepest. Your ankles ache and your body is sore, but you force your body to move, because you understand that under the harsh white light of the stage bulbs, you are dazzling.
Your last dance is more than that. Your last dance is simply the most.
The studio has a heartbeat, blood lines. The darkness lights up with a blue and red pulse. An organ in each wall. There’s a sense of loss, a question, about the room; its vacant space is organized into a riddle. An answer is imagined and discarded.
Out of the corner of your eye, you think you see the shadow of a dancer, a woman. She’s turning into stone, although she thinks she’s turning into air.
Stillness.
You’re finished, and you’re home. Your costumes and jewelry are tucked away in the dark recesses of your closet. Your mirror is made of memories, and you look away. You guard your wind-chime bones.
He asked you why you left him, all those weeks ago. You shrugged and said you were busy. You lied. Blink on, blink off, memorize your script and play it like a record scratched. How long have you been dead?
Your life is a dance and you no longer know the steps.
But hearing the music is only a matter of counting under your breath.