Usha, my cousin was a dancer with great potential and a student of the famed Padma Shri Dandhayudha Pillai, a badge of honour in itself. To have just survived his rigour for a decade meant that you were one of the best in the art.
My uncle was an IAS officer and at one point heading the telecom department in the country way back in the seventies. When Usha got married at the age of 24 to a businessman even the Maharashtra Chief Minister came to grace the occasion; such was my uncle’s clout in the powers that be.
Every dancer faces this dilemma: stay spinster and dedicate her life to the art form or marry and get into the family way of raising kids. My uncle got her married when she was still demurring but in the seventies, a woman by and large went along the elders.
The marriage was a happy one from the start and after the birth of a son, the joy only redoubled. Though Usha was prone to regret not wearing her dancing attire and the chellungu (the bells wrapped around the feet), she took satisfaction in the toddler’s developments. Her husband was making record profits and their household needed nothing more.
Visiting her home even in the eighties was always an aesthetic experience. The rooms would be tastefully done, the reception furnished in the right upholstery and the antiques all combined to add grace that one could just sit and sink in the peace.
Every dancer is blessed with large expressive eyes and their hand movements even while speaking so studied and amazingly wonderful. Even the voice is cultured and this is a trait I have seen in almost every dancer I have encountered.
I mentally resolved that I shall only marry a dancer!!!!
Usha was much elder to me and she would tweak my cheeks while sporting a 1000 megawatt smile. BTW, my cousin was more beautiful than Madhuri Dixit.
Her son had grown old enough to require schooling and when the school discovered that she was famed dancer, they recruited both the son and the mother. She was persuaded upon to take classical dance classes and that began a journey. She composed an item that was so popular that other schools too wanted her – she choreographed a dance movement where you can add two numbers and then the answer would also come in the dance sequence.
Usha slowly opened her own dance school and her husband was a pillar of support. She wanted to shape up young girls to international fame; perhaps to make up for what she had sacrificed. Thus was born Hasta and it’s been over a decade and the results beginning to show.
Two of her students are in US and celebrities in Bharatnatyam while there has been over 50 aregatrams (formal initiation before the first performance) of her students.
Usha is the leading dance personality in Chennai and she is so busy writing books, reviewing and critiquing performances for the papers, speaking about the nuances of dance as she manages to strike a balance between her family and passion.
As for me, whenever I see her name in the papers – which is frequent – I do feel happy that someone from the family is keeping the flag high.
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