On an apparently slow Sunday afternoon at the Festival, we — meaning the wife, our nearly-four-year-old and me — were the attraction for a reasonable crowd at the amphitheatre. It went like this: they were playing rocking Bollywood tunes, but they had nobody on stage to dance to them. I don’t know if this was a planned gap in the performance schedule, or if the performers for that slot decided to stay home. Either way, the two young emcees on stage wandered about, pleading into their mikes for people from the audience to climb up and dance. “The best dancer will win a prize!” they said.
Eventually, a slender young man in a maroon T-shirt and glasses leaped up. Handed over his glasses and began srutting about, pointing periodically up at the trees and sky, once falling onto his back and pointing from there. Yet it was all in time to the music, strangely graceful, and refreshingly different from typical Bollywood dancing.
Five or six more young men — only men — flooded on, some of them clearly trained and accomplished gyrators. But the most endearing was a thirty-something man with a thick moustache and a definite belly, moving about the stage, shaking an arm, shaking a leg, with abandon. When the song was done, everyone jumped off the stage, except him. He commandeered a mike and told us all: “I’m just an ordinary engineer! I just got up here to express myself! You all should come up and express yourself too!”
Only, it sounded more like this: “I’m just … I just … express myself … yourself too!” This was because he was waving the mike about as he spoke, and only the occasional word made it into the PA system. My sharp ears had to strain for the rest.
The emcee worked the crowd again, this time asking for couples, and women by themselves, to come up and dance. Spotting wife in the crowd, she pointed and urged: “Please join us up here!”
Well, to cut a medium-length story short, we clambered up on stage, introduced ourselves to the engineer (Vinayak Naik, his name). When the next song began, he and the two of us, and our daughter firmly clasped in wife’s arms, bopped along. He with considerably more elan than me.
Our daughter thoroughly and tearfully disapproved. So we stayed on stage for only one song. But by the end of it, some two dozen others were bopping too, the majority of them women.
Back on terra firma, at least four different friends we ran into over the next couple hours told us they had been in the audience and seen us. I noted that none of them chose to hail us at the time, from within the audience. I noted that all of them spoke to us in whispers, looking around to be sure nobody noticed them admitting to knowing us.
***
T-shirt-message department:
God Save the Eliminator. Motor Mayhem Division.
Maintain Downwind Safety Zone.
First Never Kite Surfing in Congested Area.
Never Kite Surfing in Conditions too Extrem.
(My grateful thanks to alert friend Rob for pointing out the second of these).
***
In the bus we took to the Festival one afternoon, I was in an aisle seat, trying to read whenever I could. Noticed the man across the aisle fidgeting about, looking at me every few seconds, shaking his head and once even clucking in dismay.
Eventually he couldn’t take whatever was bugging him any more. Leaned across and tapped me, pointed to the man seated behind me. Asleep, this man had his left foot on his right knee, which positioned his brown shoe close to my elbow.
I looked at the sleeping man, then inquiringly at the man across the aisle.
“Be careful,” he said, “or you might touch his foot!”
Sania Mirza came to mind.
***
The cab we took from the Festival late one evening began weaving at high speed, as cabs seem programmed to do, through the traffic and people milling about. Cowering in our seats, we bleated at the driver: “Please slow down! We’re in no hurry!”
He complied, but looked at us in surprise. “In ten years driving this taxi in Bombay,” he said, “you’re only the second fare I’ve had that’s asked me to drive slowly. Everyone else always asks me to go even faster.”
Was he complimenting us or being scornful? We haven’t been able to decide. But he drove at a speed some distance short of breakneck, the rest of the way.
