Time has taught me that time is the greatest guru of all. It is something that you cannot catch. It is so ephemeral. It is like quicksilver. You cannot catch it.
When one is young, one thinks of time as something which is ahead. There is always a tomorrow. There is always another performance, another possibility.
But then you suddenly understand that what you thought was permanent suddenly changes. You take your parents for granted, but suddenly one of them might just leave you.
It happened to me. I was going on with life as usual, and suddenly, on the 22nd or 23rd of November, I heard that my father was no more. He had lost his life in a train accident.
I felt that the ground under my feet had vanished. I went and located his body, identified it, got the postmortem done, brought him to Delhi and gave him the mukhagni the next day. This was in 1977.
And two days later, I was in Mathura, dancing at the Mathura Festival.
So what did it teach me? Two things. What you think is permanent is actually impermanent. And second, life goes on.
There was pain within me. For a long time I lived with that pain. I hallucinated for months that my father was driving the car in front of me. But the reality was different.
And yet I went and performed. My mother said, “Dukh toh jayega nahin. Go ahead. Karam karna hai, do it.” And while I was dancing, there was pain within me.
You also see institutions changing. You see something arriving with great noise, and then it disappears just as quickly. You see young dancers suddenly becoming established artists, and then another generation takes over, while the older generation begins fading into oblivion.
Somewhere you realise that we are just moments in that whole canvas of time and space. Yet, however small we are, that small particle, that small anu, is very precious.
It reminds me of a favourite nazm of mine by Ali Sardar Jafri:
“Main ek gureza lamha hoon…”
We are just that moment in time. And we have to understand how precious it is, and give our best to live it honestly. There is no tomorrow.
A hundred years from now, whether somebody remembers my name or not is immaterial. So you dance your way.
Time has also taught me that tradition is not constant. It survives because it keeps changing. Every moment brings in something new, and what remains, what lives, becomes a tradition over time. But that too is subject to change, because every generation enters into it with a new conversation, a new atmosphere and a new era around it.
That is what beautiful time does. It asks you to grow with it, to live, to understand, and to enrich oneself with every passing wind and what it brings.
Over time, the body may become less capable of doing certain things, but the inner landscape becomes larger.
As a young dancer, you need many movements. I did the same. But as you mature, every little gesture starts taking on newer meaning, newer dimension. The meaning becomes greater. Silence becomes as important as sound. Stillness can be as powerful as movement.
With time, one learns to dance through memory, experience and consciousness.
So what has time taught me?
Time teaches that everything passes. Main ek gureza lamha.
But if one has lived well, attentively, truthfully, honestly, with sensitivity, compassion and depth, nothing is wasted.
