I am reclusive. I am gregarious. I am in solitude but with a window open. When I dance the audience becomes one single point of light. When I speak, my words dance. I watch birds flying in to nest and rest for the night. That tree of silk-cotton now totally bald was green with shiny leaves. Now not one leaf to swear by. That summer when I moved here I saw huge orange-red flowers and not a single leaf. Then flowers left puffs of silk-cotton balls floating in air, giving asthmatic spasms to many. In this seventh year of my stay in this flat I see my life, years gone by as alternating as flowers and leaves and bare branches on which hundreds of birds rest, perch, play. I am that tree.
‘Think Sonal, how would you recount your journey of 75 years in 2 hours?’ a friend asked. They were making a video presentation. The process of selection of photos and video-clips was as daunting as enriching. Awesome, fantastic, unbelievable, inspiring, inimitable were some of the initial reactions from the selection committee. But they fell silent on the fifth day as frame after frame, photo after photo emerged from dark corners of cupboards and shelves. I stopped them after a week. They protested, we haven’t even touched one-tenth of it. Tough task to weed out, gloating over those images from early days of dancing through mid-life and later. I zeroed in on DD’s black & white video clips of Bharatanatyam and Odissi. Short 2-minute clips from my own creations and choreographies and the rest was me on stage, alone with myself, talking, singing, dancing, laughing. I have just begun.
My paternal grandfather Mangaldas Pakvasa, dadaji, was from Surat in Gujarat but had come to Bombay when his teacher-father relocated. The young man studied law to become a successful solicitor practicing with Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Bhulabhai Desai. Dadaji was a rich respected lawyer until his meeting with M.K. Gandhi and visit to Dandi with him in 1930. He picked up fistful of salt on that fateful day which changed his life forever. Dadaji was jailed. He went to jail frequently while donating his real-estate bungalows and properties to the nation. Thereafter he never went back to practice law. He resigned from the general membership of Indian National Congress in 1944, the year of my birth. He had differences with Nehru, so when the time came to select names for governorship of the five presidencies, Nehru opposed dadaji’s name. It was Gandhiji who pushed saying he is my man! Thus dadaji had the honour of being appointed Governor of Central Provinces and Berar on August 15, 1947.
