Dancing between Saris and Sorrows

Review of This is One Way to Dance by Sejal Shah (USA: The University of Georgia Press, 2020)
By Prasanthi Ram

Sejal Shah's debut This Is One Way to Dance is a collection of twenty-five linked essays that looks at growing up Indian in America and finding one's place within the larger diaspora as well as within the liminal space between Indian motherland and American nation. In the introduction, Shah, borrowing the words of academic Kakali Bhattacharya, explains that she wished to explore the feelings of both invisibility and hypervisibility from being "racialized as non-white and non-Black" in America.

Indisputably, the diasporic South Asian conundrum has been extensively explored in anglophone fiction and non-fiction works by writers of the scattered and sprawling community, including Jhumpa Lahiri and Arundhati Roy who are both mentioned in the essay "Skin." What makes Shah's entrance into this discourse particularly novel is the fact that she is a New Yorker who was born to Gujarati parents of Indian and East African heritages respectively; her father was born in India while her mother was born in Uganda and later grew up in Kenya. Indeed, East African Indianness, let alone East African Indian Americanness, is a severely underexplored subset of the diaspora. While the project of the collection is much larger than a simple articulation of this cultural subset, seeing that her true aim is to "dwell and revel in the spaces between" through writing essays about her life in "Massachusetts in the late 1990s and continuing through moves to New York City and Iowa," Shah’s collection of essays helps to bring the often invisible sub-community into a more mainstream consciousness—which is something I, as a diasporic Indian writer myself, deeply appreciate.

The title of Shah’s work, "This Is One Way to Dance," stems from her own fascination with weddings, which she perceives as a microcosm, even simulacrum of her own experiences. Weddings are undeniably a "part of the landscape" of growing up as Indian American. In “Matrimonials: A Triptych,” she writes:

Weddings join families and communities, spark joy, and suggest the possibility of cultures in balance with each other: a pure Indian Americanness I hadn't experienced in any other setting.

The essay recounts her brother's 1992 wedding where Shah witnessed the two "separate cultures" as well as "distinct selves" coexist and merge "in one semipublic place" through the act of dancing. Shah recalls how the mere sight of hundreds dancing together to a mix of Indian and American music as well as of participating in native Gujarati folk dances, namely dandiya raas and garba, all to celebrate the couple's marital union was "beautiful, multiple, mirrored, [and] carnivalesque." Wedding dances are in no way forced, transient performances of balance between two seemingly unrelated cultures, Rather, they are an active perpetuation of that delicate intertwining through movement. They make room for the mediation and reconciliation of cultural complexities. They are sites of joy capable of producing organic "[circles] of stories" that speak without contrivance to the inherent cultural hybridity of Indian Americanness.

Written mostly in prose but sometimes in lyrical poetry too, the memoir covers a wide range of sub-topics that contribute to this overarching discourse: the slow but upward trajectory of South Asian representation in American popular culture; the undeniable whiteness of anglophone storytelling as well as literary academia; the joy of finding a safe space to write oneself under the mentorship of a culturally aligned academic; the perceived unusualness of South Asian names and the politics behind naming (as demonstrated through her brother Samir who renames himself at an early age as "Mike" in order to avoid being made fun of by his peers); as well as the complexity of planning an intercultural South Asian wedding to satisfy both her Indian-Kenyan Gujarati family and her husband’s South Indian Tamil family. Each anecdote is expressed in such vivacious detail and with a poignance that attests to Shah's mastery of her craft.

Since the essays have been written across two decades, This Is One Way to Dance bestows on readers the privilege of witnessing Shah's evolving understanding of her own cultural mixedness and personhood. This is further underlined by the fact that Shah occasionally reworks or responds to her earlier text-pieces. For example, in the first and last text-pieces of the memoir, "Prelude" and "Voice Texting with My Mother," both 2002 and 2019 are indicated in their timestamps, making visible to readers Shah's investment in revisiting and reshaping her responses. Indeed, this dual timestamp appears in many parts of the collection. Another example would be "The World Is Full of Paper. Write to Me," an essay about her mentorship under the late poet Agha Shahid Ali. Within it, she expresses immense gratitude towards him for having shown her how to "allow the poem to unfold, to breathe, to surprise, to live, through the generation of lyric possibilities," wherein her writing itself is an exemplary ode to his teachings. However, in a postscript appended to the essay, an older Shah admits that her younger self’s appraisal of the late poet’s teaching style may have been too generous. She reveals, upon hindsight, that there in fact was "little room for [her] voice" in his workshops even if she remains appreciative and admiring of him. She also rejects his method of teaching, admitting that it “was not the way [she] wanted to help [her] students find their voices.” Such a remarkably self-reflexive practice behaves as a "kind of excavation," readily presenting to the reader the nuances of Shah's growth as a writer and human being.

The collection also allows readers to observe and examine for themselves how the diaspora and its relationship with the larger American society have evolved with time. Many essays expound on where and how spaces have been gradually carved out to acknowledge and accommodate the community. For instance, in "Matrimonials: A Triptych," Shah writes about watching the film Monsoon Wedding in 2002, a drama film by Mira Nair that drew on the dramatic storylines, singing and dancing characteristic of Bollywood movies. She elucidates how it was monumental in centering Indian representation in American popular culture for the first time but admits that it still left her wistful about "the lack of spaces in which to simply be Indian in Amherst." In another essay written just a year later titled "Kinship, Cousins, & Khichidi," Shah discusses how "the food [they] were teased about while growing up," meaning 'ethnic' food from Indian and Middle Eastern cultures for example, had "become chic" by the time she had moved to New York. These discussions bring up the necessary question of whether or not peoples are as celebrated as their cultures and cultural products within a white hegemony, and how instances of accommodation often come with a concurrent strand of alienation.

Beyond discussing issues of identity and culture, Shah also includes other tangential essays that launch into a semi-philosophical meditation on what it means to be human and alive. For example, in the poetically devastating "Street Scene," she delves into the loss of her close friend LeeAnne to suicide and expresses her inability to let her go: "I'm not ready yet. We are flowers alive by the side of the pool, bowing and bowing toward each other, heads bent, as girls always do." This piece, in part, also mirrors her later revelation about her husband's older brother Mahesh's unexpected death that had taken place years before she even had the chance to meet either of them. In another essay, "Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent" (which, by the way, is a fantastic title and is taken from a preacher whom Shah encountered), she recounts the alienating and disorienting experience of Burning Man in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, where she at one point wakes up in a random couple's SUV after dropping acid. To travel all the way to the desert for Burning Man only to fail to see the Man burn may be perceived as a failure by many but Shah, in a moment of introspection years after, says: "It was me: I was the spectacle I had traveled so far to see." The search for oneself is indeed the greatest, yet most overlooked journey to embark on. 

The collection eventually returns to the titular metaphor through the antepenultimate essay "Ring Theory." This particular piece is a patchwork of vignettes about different rings that function as totems, even amulets representing various junctures of Shah's life: from a hammered silver ring that she tossed into the East River after losing her tenure-track job (she'd bought the ring for the interview); to the South Indian mangalsutra, an ornate gold necklace with a pendant that married Hindu women traditionally receive on their wedding day; to the wedding ring that Shah chose for herself in a Chennai jewelry store six months after her wedding. These rings, no matter how unimportant to the untrained eye, are all integral to understanding Shah as she sees herself.

"Saris and Sorrows" then takes the reader into the complexities of a bicultural North and South Indian wedding and the compromises Shah and her husband make in order for a smooth ceremony that would appease both their families. For example, given the wide reach of their two sub-communities, she conceded that "a small wedding was impossible" and that it was indeed "not [her] wedding" at all but their families'. Part of Shah's willingness to relent is born out of her acknowledgement that her wedding was in fact about her late brother-in-law Mahesh and more importantly, his gaping absence: "my in-laws were doing everything [...] so as to set their remaining son off on a good foot and to keep him, to keep us, from harm." The two essays in juxtaposition serve as a reminder that our identity is in part about how we permit others to view and position us as well. This is particularly with respect to our families who are invariably enmeshed in our constant endeavors to define our personhood. Hence, while the entire experience could have been extremely stressful for Shah, we learn that her early fascination with weddings was only heightened further through intertwined feelings of frustration, love and grief during this period: "Life is not about weddings [...] but still, weddings astonish me: the threshold, the intention, the cusp, the crucible, the gathering, the hope."

This Is One Way to Dance comes to a graceful end with "Voice Texting with My Mother"—a poetic reflection on a humorous voice text exchange between Shah and her mother, where the former asks for old saris but instead mispronounces it as sorrows. In a culmination of her memoir, Shah writes that just as we wear saris on our bodies, bodies with which we dance ourselves merry at weddings, we wear our sorrows and our sorrows wear us too, winding themselves around us. Indeed, through the course of our lives, our culture(s) and our pain are engaged in a perpetual dance with each other. It is up to us to revel in that entwining and find space to become ourselves. If we are lucky enough, we will find more than one way to dance.


Prasanthi Ram is a PhD candidate for Creative Writing at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. Her interests lie in South Asian literature, feminism(s), and popular culture. She is working on her debut collection of short stories that explores the Tamil Brahmin community in Singapore. Most recently, she co-founded and is the fiction editor of Mahogany Journal, an online literary journal dedicated to South Asian writers born or based in Singapore.