Illuminating Sisyphus

Watching lovers, handholding, KDrama and an ancient verse Indian classical dancers live by.

“It was our hands that were supposed to be full, of the future, which could be held, but not seen.” — (The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood)

Lovers are my favourite people to watch. And by that I do not mean private moments of people in comfortable, fully-reciprocated, socially accepted, well-named relationships — I mean the lovers in the wild, out in the open, thrust into worlds that roll eyes, leer, disapprove, tch-tch their way around them.

Look closely and you’ll find these lovers in public everywhere, even in a hardened city like Delhi, famously full of hard-bitten ruthless people who do not possess any affection for strangers. We’re all aggressive islands in this city, but you’ll find lovers here nevertheless, craving connection. They're arranged like a tableau of paired colour and entwined limbs: dotting the crowded streets, perched on random bike seats in parking lots, on the slim ledges of shop windows. So many lovers locked in some kind of a twosome embrace: held hands, secretive gazes, heads leaning on shoulders, arms draped over thighs. Leaning into selfies at the mall. Breaking up in the Delhi Metro station corridors. Glowing with a rush of blood and a desire to touch, across a restaurant table.  

I love staring at these lovers shamelessly. It’s a love paralleled only by my other love: that of watching scenes of hand-holding in KDramas. I hate to admit that despite being a jaded veteran in romantic-comedy-watching, these cliched scenes still move me, much more than perhaps they should’ve in my adolescence (when feeling-tsunamis were actually supposed to hit while hands touched).

The hyper-focussed very-very-close shots of just hands in Kdrama series are so ubiquitous (as opposed to the passionate kisses that are so rare, I have to binge-watch them on loop separately, in order to catharsise my pent-up voyeurism). It’s odd how by zooming really close, these hands appear to have expressions, rhythm, micro movements, character. Sometimes they lie on each other awkwardly, sometimes just the pinkies touch, sometimes fingers are threaded with such certainty, sometimes palms lie so flat against each other, like a kind of solidarity in the face of life in all its madness.

I find myself marvelling at these hands like they’re people: some are small and delicate, some have papery skins, some have bunions, some are pale, so pale. (Some are so red, I’m a bit worried, concerned even.) All of them are warm, and most of them are so androgynous, I am surprised to match them to the face they stand in for. 

Hand-holding is a cliche, but what it evokes in me is the remembrance that cliches exist for a reason. Stereotypes are also sometimes, archetypes dressed in plainspeak. They address something mythical in us, a yearning ache. We return to the cliches like we return to our sweetest pain. Sometimes that’s the only way forward.

Classical Indian dance is obsessed with hands. There are reams and reams of ancient scriptures prescribing the many ways to use one’s hands, fingers, arms in complex mudras that are a language of their own. It’s almost as if the hand is the first frontier of dance – the sacred ground where the dancer and viewer meet.

In Odissi, I use my hands the way I usually use my voice: with all my expression and intention. Onstage I am a paradox: a dancer in the 21^st century expressing an old tradition, the music of which is ethereal but rarely heard, the language is inexhaustible but not spoken anymore. The dance requires the entire body to emote, but my lips are sealed. I have stories and stories to tell, and often I wonder whether I am behind a glass wall while I narrate, and my audience listens. My hands have taught me the greatest lesson in this scenario: if you put intention in something, its emotion travels through.

“Yatho hasta, tatho drishti, yatho drishti tatho mana, yatho mana tatho bhaava, yatho bhaava tatho rasa.”

Where the hand moves, the gaze follows

Where the gaze moves, the heart follows

Where the heart goes, the emotion follows

Where the emotion manifests, there is rasa.

This famous quote from the Natyashastra that classical dancers are tired of hearing, is annoying because it’s so goddamn accurate. ‘Holding energy’ in the fingers and palms, in the arm that animates the hands, in the heart that breathes life into the arm, and the entire person who embodies this heart, is a magical thing. This is what it means to be alive, to create connection with other living people. 

And so, when I see hands, I pay attention. Even while watching the skinship so peculiar to Kdrama, while watching handholding I forget that I am watching merely a romance (more specifically, and problematically, the traditional cis-hetero romance of beautiful, youthful people). I forget, and begin to think instead, that those hands I’m watching are a faithful depiction of a genre-less omnipresent case of human connection. Entwining, touching, feeling hands bolster in me a silly and uncomplicated hope - that human connection is possible, that it is vital, that it is all we really need. There’s an urgent, primal joy in this rediscovery, a far cry from the canonical Michelangelo finger-touching between God and Adam.

Sometimes, like the Natyashastra quote, I find my entire being following “where the hands go”. Hand hugs in Kdrama feel human and life-size, in the face of all things lofty, spiritual and transcendent. You really need these small things to help you find courage to face the big battles. They clear the rubble amidst the daily business of living, and shine a soft lantern glow on the small empty space created — showing a way and a reason, all at once. (Even if temporarily). Lovers’ hands, whether in life or in rabbithole screen series, allow me to steal images that soften my daily grind a tad bit. For some time, all the parts bleached by boredom, loneliness, despair, fear are coloured in like a colouring book. I see the point of it all. It is enough to make me want to roll my Sisyphean rock up the incline again, with the renewed, youthful, idiotic heart of a person illuminated from within.

(This is the third in a series I’m writing about my body, in continuation with the essay on breasts that I wrote for Immortal For a Moment by Natasha Badhwar. The essays from this series explore the crossroads between dance, culture and memory — which is my favourite place to rest, and which was the point of this substack after all.)