Hope We Dance..

This year was the 10th anniversary of us having left the place we owed everything to. So we came back to school for the annual reunion after having run out of all sorts of excuses. The kind boring adults usually make. "Busy" featured in most of them.

We were ambling down the corridors that we'd spent 7 years of senior school in. This is where we tested our wings as we fought our way through the crazy teens. Corridors. We'd raced through them, sat doing last minute revisions in them, soaked the sun in those precious few spots during winters, stood in a line for punishment because we'd forgotten to do homework - yet again - and were turned out of class. I think more memories were made in the corridors than in the classrooms! We had so many dreams then, but we'd settled for drab corporate existences. Jobs, that paid us well, but featured nowhere in our "things to do" list during school.

As the three of us passed the activity rooms, we came to a standstill as we heard the familiar sound of a wooden thalam  - an instrument used to keep the beat in the classical dance form of Bharatnatyam. Accompanying it in perfect harmony, was the sound of ghungaroos. The three of us had been part of countless school performances. None of us though had pursued dance once we went off to college. Too many responsibilities, we told ourselves. Too many distractions was more like it.

We tiptoed to the room and stood with our noses squashed against the glass door - like kids looking into a candy store. The teacher had changed, and the student was a young girl, who looked no older than twelve. But the grace with which she danced surpassed some of the much more experienced dancers we'd witnessed. The jumps, the twirls, the dips - everything was perfect. And with each step, we found ourself getting sucked into the past - when it was the three of us dancing in that room without a care in the world. The performance ended and the girl, having caught our eye, blushed and went to get some water. We turned away with heavy hearts. But there was a tinge of hope too. Maybe all that was needed to make life happy again, was to go back to things that made us come alive. We swore we'd come back to school every year.