It’s a moonlit night. The white swans flit tentatively to the centre of the lake as the Russian Prince Siegfried stares transfixed at Odette. As her puffed out white tutu sways, taking her higher and higher, Tchaikovsky’s music slowly morphs to a menacing drum roll. Something terrible and dramatic is about to happen. And there it is. Hovering over the edge of the lake like a black curse – the evil sorcerer Von Rothbart with his painted face and black wings.
I was four years old. It was 1977. In the life of post-Independence India, those were dramatic days. A big black crow had flown off-stage and over our skies, in the shape of the Emergency. With no accompanying drum roll, Indira Gandhi had been ousted from her prime ministerial chair. But the Russians were still our best friends. And my mother had taken me to the ballet that was performing in Delhi.
In the days leading to the screening of the ballet that year,
my mother had put on the 33 RPM record in our living room and told me the story of the swans who want so desperately to be human. Doordarshan was playing the most famous version of the Bolshoi ballets at the time and we saw the astonishing ferocity with which dancer Rudolf Nureyev’s face and body contorted on television when Von Rothbart tore his beloved white swan Odette away.
Now, 40 years later, there is no USSR. The person who drove us to the ballet on that moonlight night – my father – had also passed away. My mother and I needed our own dreamscape to face the Von Rothbarts in our lives.
The new swans
It was raining in Delhi as we approached Siri Fort auditorium on Saturday. Just like the old days, buses and cars were stuck. I felt like I was waiting for my school bus driver to pop his head out of the window and declare a rain holiday, but I was forty-four again.
This wasn’t the Bolshoi ballet powered by the mighty (and in hindsight, lopsided) Russian state. It was the co-production of a private ballet company called the Royal Russian Ballet and a production house called Navrasa Duende. The owner and creator, Dinesh Singh, told me he had first tried to tie up with the Bolshoi. They had been through some difficult times after the splintering of the USSR, but were now back in form. “But it’s very hard to deal with the Russian state,” Singh said.
The present-day Siegfried looked a tad frightened. Maybe like so many lost Soviet souls he was searching for something well beyond his grasp. But Odette and the entire cast of 40-odd swans made up for him – their synchronised pirouetting set to the most sensorial music transported us. We were frozen in ice in a punishingly cold Siberian winter. Shimmying our crystal tutus in search of our Siegfrieds. A cat skulked past our feet. The girl in the next seat giggled. The curtains closed for the next act.
Are we in present-day India still strangely tied to our Russian friends – both hurtling off the political precipice? My mother and I argued about that. I told her about a highway taxi I had taken from Uttar Pradesh just the day before, when discussing the state of the nation, the driver told me: “We are sunk like the Russians.” Our dreams have turned to dust. My mother didn’t agree. We were not in the dying act of a grand opera just yet.
The smoke machines backstage coughed violently like consumptive patients. Five minutes of these strange, non-Swan Lake sounds and we were back in our private reveries. It was the third act. A tall dancer tip-toed onto stage. A long blonde Rapunzel-like braid swished around her knees as she walked on the tips of her toes…the swan trying to become human. Perhaps, no one understands drama like the Russians do. Even now, they tell the best stories. My mind wandered briefly to the Belarusian writer-journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s Second Hand Time. She writes:
“My mother died in the war, and my father died before that, from tuberculosis. I’ve been working since I was fifteen. At the factory, they’d give us half a loaf of bread a day and that was it. The bread was made of cellulose and glue. One day, I fainted from hunger. And then it happened again. I went down to the conscription office: ‘Please don’t let me die like this. Send me to the front.’ They approved my request…Russian people need the kind of idea that gives them goosebumps and makes their spines tingle.”
We understand that so well, us desis. Living in Bollywood idylls and then killing each other over hate. We know all about spinning dreams and belching out nightmares.
Von Rothbart hovered hideously over the swans on stage. His ugliness amplified by his constant and desperate flapping of giant wings. Is Odette dead? The Siegfried on stage performed despair but you couldn’t feel his anguish. Perhaps in the new and private company ballet, the aching emptiness and punitive hours of pre-performance work are no longer possible. The deep pathos is gone. We have to be content with some carefully crafted method. But I am being melodramatic. My mother is transfixed. I look at her and then copy her expression. Soon, we are both lost. Dreamers, both. The swans swooned over the despairing Odette and Siegfried and all was well with the world.
Should we stop looking for the drama – the thunder roll, the crash of the cymbals – that accompanies the big epiphanies, the revelations of evil, for instance? Or does the expectation of such grand unmasking come from the same innocence that dares to dream and hope? Maybe both, we said, as we made our way out into the night. The rain puddles had disappeared. The last buses were making their way to the depots. I was back to being forty-four.