Was there anything that Uday Shankar regretted in life? ' Yes. 'It never occurred to me that one day I would get old, and be helpless,*' he said. When he did grow old, he became helpless. Unwanted, too. Or, so he believed. For one who only yesterday had the world at his feet. the fall was, to say the least, shattering. On stage Uday Shankar moved like a god; off stage, he was nobody — and now nowhere. His collapse was attended by a host of ailments. Also. by emotional tantrums. Step by step he fell to pieces.

But why, and how, did Shankar disintegrate? Because he could not come to terms with himself; because he continued to see himself as the eternal hero. He saw himself as the man divine. He saw himself as irresistible to women. While the going was good, he lived wildly, thought nothing of his excesses, and was blind to the passage of time. When the collapse came, it came like an avalanche, leaving him no escape. It had never occurred to him that one day he. too. would be old and helpless. These, apparently, were reserved for others. When the going was good he never thought ahead. Uday Shankar had exhausted his energy. Not through dancing certainly, for dancing gave him energy; but through dissipation. He was reckless, to the bone. Eventually of course this life took its toll. He became a very sick man. Worn out. Used up.

He had his first heart attack when he was touring Assam in 1966. And two more attacks in later years, one of them coupled with cerebral haemorrhage. Even when working on Shankarscope, he was tottering. Now he was worn to a shadow. His face changed. The look, the expression. So did the skin. Gone was the golden glow. Now he looked withered, leathery. Uday Shankar had only to look inward to know the truth about his ruin but he did not dare to do so. "It never occurred to me that one day I would get old, and be helpless." The thought constantly haunted him. A sort of paralysis set in: he willed himself into being a special interest in dance or music. I also lacked confidence. Thus I remained merely an onlooker, having fun watching others at work. One day Dada — as we called I'day Shankar — came to me and said: This won't do. You are not going to remain idle here. And he pushed me into class. Our most interesting classes were the ones that Dada himself taught. There was the general class for all the sixty-plus students in which, for the first four to five months, he taught us how to walk. Yes, walk! He made us find out for ourselves how to be natural and graceful in movement.

Trained dancers in the school were not exempted from this exercise. He would sit with the big nagada (drum) and beat rhythmically upon it. Whenever he stopped we had to freeze in a position that very moment and look at ourselves, our posture, the way we held our hands and so on. We realised how difficult it was to shed self-consciousness and walk naturally. Dada insisted on discipline which meant not only order but beauty in everything. He would be furious if he saw a pair of carelessly flung sandals and dismiss the culprit from class. He explained the reason for his rules, sometimes in an impressively novel way. He would order the students to throw their sandals wherever they liked and then ask them to take a look at the result! He would not tolerate even the slightest lapse from punctuality. In these general classes, Dada also taught exercises for each part of the body, from the head to the toes, to increase flexibility. Perhaps, these were devised as a result of Western influence. Later he would give us a theme and expect each one of us to enact it through mime or dance.

You are having a bath. Somebody inadvertently opens the door. What is your reaction? We had total freedom of interpretation. Everyday he would give us a different subject, a different idea and a different approach. He would beat on the nagada while we depicted the theme, one by one. It needed patience and a deep interest in each student to adopt such methods. Some of the students could not dance at all and others were frightened by the "public" attention. "Dada, I can't do this," they would wail. He would deal with them separately and make them do it in private. He knew each one of us and gave us individual attention. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of each student within a short time and then concentrated on the strong points.

Thus he invariably brought out the best in each. At nights, there was a similar gathering in the "improvisational" class he taught where, again, we mimed, enacted or danced but this time to the theme that each one chose for himself or herself. We would sit in a semi-circle; one by one we would perform and the others would offer criticism and forthwith we would come to know ol our flaws and get suggestions for improvement. Then Dada himself would tell us how he would have interpreted what the dancer had portrayed. Each one of us had fixed ideas about how a thing should be done. But when we saw that sixty others had sixty different ideas, our horizons widened, and we saw the scope that a particular theme offered. So the class was an enriching experience taking us out of our narrow confines: Dada considered the capacity for close observation and concentration to be most important. He was constantly setting tests and traps. He would ask such questions as How many steps are there in the staircase at the Girls' Hostel? Or What is the colour of the ceiling in the studio'? Or Did you see the clock as you entered the class} What was the time then? In variably he knew the answers, he was himself that observant. It took me six months to get adjusted to the centre and the way of life there. After that, it was like a dream to me. Those three years under Dada's guidance were the best years of my life. I used to await each day with delicious anticipation. Most of us felt the same way.

There was a student from Germany, Miss Marsten, who had come for a two-month course. But she just stayed on. She was not a young miss, she was sixty-three, but Dada did not consider her too old to dance. What fun we had doing the Ramleela shadow play! The idea came to Dada during one of our night classes. There was no electricity at Almora and we danced to petromax lights. These lights cast giant shadows on the walls and one day Dada, who had been watching these shadowy shapes, announced that he was going to experiment with a shadow play. We were stunned! He made us rehearse for seven or eight months until we were perfect. I can tell you from my own experience that it was tough to put up a shadow play.

The performer had to present his profile all the time. A slight change of angle on the part of the performer and the shadow fell flat or got distorted on the screen. Dada would sit far away with a box of pebbles by his side and watch us practise. Every time we erred he would fling a pebble on the screen and we would correct ourselves! When he couldn't get a scene correct, he would pace up and down, smoking cigarette after cigarette. I can see him doing that even now in my mind's eye. Suddenly he would exclaim: Ha! I've got it and clapped his hands in joy. One such idea was to waft saris behind the curtain to simulate waves.

It was marvellous how his ideas which seemed simple led to stunning effects. Ther e was around Dada always an aura of the excitement of creation. He was full of eager joy and almost all the money he made he spent conducting costly experiments in choreography, like Shankarscope. He roused people to ecstatic participation in everything he did. He insisted on precision and perfection. The time of the rise and fall of curtains, the number of namaskarams we did at the end — even these were carefully considered and prescribed beforehand. His dancing was a blend of different styles with Kathakali as the base, a blend in which the final product was smooth and original. While he mixed different ingredients in his recipes, he understood the spirit of what he wanted to convey and so it all seemed quite natural. T h e way he absorbed Kathakali was interesting.

He would ask guru Sankaran Namboodri to dance. While watching him. he would stop him at one point or another and request a repetition of a particular movement Then he would oiler a movement inspired by Namboodri's. but Dada's own would be different, evoking another mood entirely. In Labour and Machinery, he juxtaposed Western balletic movements for the machines and Indian dancing for the labouring villagers. He even used politics as a theme in Rhvthrn of Life and made it appealing. His genius fashioned things anew contemporized dance without sacrificing its essential beauty. Dada was so endearing in so many ways. He loved to do things for students and surprise them. He was adept at magic and did a whole ballet using the magic motif for our enjoyment, just like that for fun. Sundays were holidays, but if he thought of anything he would send word and all of us would race to the studio. He would do something new for us — perhaps a pencil sketch — and tell us what to look for in it. He had a sense of humour too, and was deeply involved with and concerned about people.

T h e closing of the Centre after a lifespan of only four years was a heartbreak to many. If only it had continued, India would have had something to be proud of today. But the dream felt apart.... Dada never thought about the petty problems of life. When I went to see him a few months before his death he said: Kamala, get me some young person to work with. It doesn't matter if he or she is not a good dancer. I am bubbling with ideas and would like to give life to my thoughts through somebody who is willing to cooperate since I myself can't get up and dance anymore. Feelings choked me as I assured him that I myself would be his student again and do whatever he wanted, recording his ideas for posterity. Later I nursed him in mine. house for a month. By that time, he was too sick to teach. Time passed. I could not keep my promise to Dada as I was travelling a lot then... A few months later he died... Right to the end, he was aglow with the desire to create, with the need to express himself... So you see, when I think of Dada, I don't see the gloom or the grey shadows of decline; rather 1 see the sparkle and the light of the creative spirit.