woke up in a cold sweat. It was a bad dream. I dreamt 1 walking barefoot in a desert. The sun was over my head and the sand sizzled under my feet. And with each step, my blisters bled. How badly they hurt! But when I stopped walking, a hand with glass bangles hit me hard from behind, bruising my back.

The dream went on in tones of sepia, flooding my mind. As if a dam had broken somewhere! It took hold of my mind and refused to go away. It took its course relentlessly, mixing the real and the unreal, never altering a single detail. Taking me through the joy and the pain, mostly the pain, Rambha felt in her short life.

Why me? I asked myself, as I had done all these years. It was not as if I even knew Rambha. I had only been to Puri once, so many years ago, and just for a few days. All I had done was see her dance. On a makeshift stage. On the beach. As she danced unmindful of the pouring rain, no one left. Not even a tourist like me who had never before, or after, seen a devadasi dance. Enraptured by the dance I had tried to find out more about her and the stage on a wet beach. And there was no dearth of people willing to tell me. All the little details.

I remember being fascinated by the story. Until it came back in my dreams. Relentlessly.

Why me? Why not any of the thousand people who were there to watch her dance? It was not as if I even understood why she did what she did. Why did she go on being a devadasi? Why didn't she just non away? Like some of the others did. Why should someone like me, who didn't appreciate any of her decisions, be haunted by her so many years later?

Haunted, yes, haunted. The dream was not just an unfolding of Rambha's life. I was Rambha. I was the devadasi dancing for a god I knew little about in a city I would hardly recognise. But in the dream I was Rambha in every little detail. In her flair for dance, in her devotion to Jagannatha, in her joy, in her pain.

The bruising of Rambha's back, my back, was just the beginning. I knew that hand well. It was Rambha's mother's, my mother's. Her face is sharp in my mind: beautiful but sullen, with a scowl as big as her nosering - the pot-bellied one, suspended from her nose like a temple bell. She supplied flower garlands to the village temple. As she sat there in the veranda surrounded by flowers and weaving them into garlands, the scowl would move across her face like grouchy, rainless clouds in a summer sky. If her scowl was mobile, her hands were more so. When she started on those garlands in the morning, her hands were a shade hesitant - just a shade, mind you but, in a matter of seconds, they would move as fast as a weaver's hands on a loom, and her glass bangles would jostle each other with angry tinkles. Even at that speed, she didn't miss a flower stem.

It was the same when she beat Rambha, when she beat me. The first blows to land were soft, even diffident. But, very soon, her hands would move quickly and the blows would come in a shower. Like a brisk flurry of arrows. Unerring, unending. I would duck as much as I could, but she never missed my body. Not even once.