The American Girl

Gitanjali Kolanad was born in India but grew up in Winnipeg and Thunder Bay. While in Madras at the age of 16, she first saw a bharatanatyam performance and began to study the dance style. It became her focus for more than 30 years, during which she performed in major cities around the world. She now lives in Toronto and teaches the Indian martial art form of kalaripayattu.

BY GITANJALI KOLANAD
PHOTOS BY SHAYNE LAVERDIÈRE

Fresh off the boat from Paris and India, Shayne Laverdière, who created the art for this piece, is a self-taught photographer making a name for himself in travel and fashion photography. His work has appeared in Zink, Flare and L’Uomo Vogue. shaynelaverdiere.com

I had heard about the American girl even before I met her: “She is very beautiful, but a bit of a perv.” The American boy lying next to me, in Madras to study folk theatre, was telling me this.

“What do you mean, a perv?”

“A nympho. She’ll sleep with anyone. She’s slept with me.”

I had too, almost, except that close to the crucial moment he’d said, “I should warn you, I have a very small penis,” and somehow we’d stopped right there before I’d even had a chance to see how small a very small penis was. Now it was too late.

“And she’s some kind of musical savant. Maybe the two go together.”

So when I was introduced to her, I was surprised by how plain she was, and how serious. Beautiful? She had very beautiful breasts.

There seemed nothing savant-ish about her either. She worked harder than me and all my friends put together, getting up at sunrise to practise finger exercises on the terrace before her class, coming back home to transcribe her lesson, singing the sol-fa syllables, then the Tamil words, before picking up the flute to play the song over and over and over. Not only that, the flute was always in her lap, so that throughout the evenings she picked it up and played when the conversation lagged or when she took a break from the book she was reading.

In my mind she was “the American girl,” though really she was a woman, in her late 20s, eight or 10 years older than me. She had been in Madras for three years. Her Tamil was better than mine, though I was the one who had spoken it as a child.

The gossip about her amounted to this, that she had slept with one or two or more, depending on who you listened to, Indian men. But all the foreign girls in Madras studying veena or Sanskrit or bharatanatyam slept with Indian men, young men who spoke English and wore jeans and went to IIT or Madras Christian College. The men she was supposed to have slept with were of another kind altogether – I heard gardener, rickshaw puller, bus conductor. The words we needed, but knew we shouldn’t use, were words to do with class and caste. I had noticed these men too, with the attention one pays to tigers or peacocks: their skin like dark grapes, their muscular bare torsos glossy with sweat from hard physical labour, fine small heads with chiselled features like the Chola bronzes come to life. Now it hit me that they were beings in my world, my species. Their sexual signals were meant for me.

We were going to Tanjore because her master was being given a prestigious award, the Crown Jewel of Carnatic Music. We dressed in the half-light for the train at dawn.

“You’re wearing a sari,” I said.

“Just for the train. Easier to pee.”

So I started to put on a sari too.

“Not with panties,” she said. “That completely defeats the purpose. No bra either.”

Through the thin cotton blouses, our nipples showed dark. She adjusted my sari. “Wear it the way the hijras wear it.” She was talking about the men who dressed like women and sashayed and pouted as they sang songs full of lewd double entendres. They wore their blouses tight and short and their saris tied low, just on the hip bone, and so did she.

In the sari, I could see in what way she was beautiful, like the librarian in movies who takes off her glasses and shakes loose the hair from her bun.

At the station, we met the master and his whole entourage – his wife, his students, the drummer. We took up a whole compartment. The train left Egmore Station and moved south through the bowels of Madras, past mean tin shacks, naked big-bellied children playing between rivulets of black sludge, pigs rooting with their hairy snouts through the morning’s fresh piles of human shit. I could smell it too, a sweetish stink.

“Don’t you hate this part of India?” I asked the American girl, who also looked out the window while her fingers moved as if covering and uncovering the holes of the flute. She shrugged. “Everybody has to shit.” Long pause. “But I do avoid pork.” I repeated her words over and over in my mind, so that I could answer just like that the next time anyone asked me that question.

Now we were in the countryside. I could see villages of thatched mud huts, brightly painted gopurams of roadside temples with blue-skinned gods and big-breasted goddesses. Children herded goats, women walked with brass pots on their heads. A dark-skinned man in a hot pink shirt carried ducks by their yellow feet, two in each hand. Iridescent blue kingfishers swooped from trees into ditches.