NEW AND IMPROVED! Has anyone thought about how those two words should never go together? If something is 'new', then it can't be 'improved' from a previous item.
But whatever. This is the fixed-up version of Shiva's Daughter, thanks mainly in part to the wonderful review given to me by Sweet Darkling, pointing out some aspects of India culture I was unfamiliar with and checking my over-dramatic nature. Thank you so so much, Sweet Darkling!
Mainly mild changes, but there're still differences, so go ahead and read up. XD
DISCLAIMER: J.K. Rowling owns Harry Potter. I am not J.K. Rowling.
iStat:
Story title – Shiva's Daughter
Story word count – 2,303
Story rating – PG
And contrary to my previous assertion: this is not associated with Antipathy at all.
Shiva's Daughter
by Shu of the Wind
It is always early when Padma Patil gets up to dance.
She can remember a time, when she couldn't have been more than two or three, when her mother began to teach her and Parvati how. She was always the less talented of the pair of them - secretly, she always envies Parvati for her greater gifts and showy style - but she is proud of how much effort she continues to invest, even though it is dangerous, now, to do it, in plain sight of the Carrows.
When they are both twelve years old, Parvati declares that dancing isn't something she wants to continue - that it sucks up too much of her time, that she only continued for this long because her mother loved it. Padma says nothing, watching how Latika's eyes water at these words, and oblivious Parvati doesn't notice. Right then and there, Padma vows to continue on with dancing - though unlike Parvati, she has never thought about stopping. Never even considered it. She loves it too much.
Latika agrees to spend more time teaching her kathak, one of the eight forms of classical Indian dance, and Padma devotes herself to it.
It is one of those things that continues to push her and her twin apart.
When she turns thirteen, and Parvati begins spending her time playing with the ideas of boys and dating and snogging, Padma joins a dancing group in London. She grows more involved every moment of the summer she can spare. Summer is her clean time, warm days and cool studios, and sometimes she spends all day away from home, or in her mother's makeshift gym in the basement, working on flexibility and movement and using the Muggle music her Muggle teachers provide to continue practicing. She lives and breathes dance, and she loves it, embraces it, blazing past Parvati in a rush of color and sound and blisters and raw, aching exhaustion.
But when she is offered the lead role in a recital her troupe is planning, she turns it down. Because she isn't dancing for the attention, or to show Parvati up; she is dancing because she enjoys it. She loves the work. She loves the constrained energy. She loves the way that when she dances, she grows loose inside her own skin, and she is no longer shy, no longer bookish, no longer mistaken for Parvati. When she dances, she is not passed over in favor of her sister. She is no longer a witch, no longer a half-blood, and she is most certainly not the only Ravenclaw in a house full of Gryffindors. She is Padma, and no one can take that from her.
Her thatha is delighted that she is following in her mother's footsteps, and for the first time, she feels close to her formidable old grandfather. She feels closer to thatha than anyone, during those third and fourth years of school - those times when dancing means everything to her. He is her confidante, her teacher, her friend; he claps out beats for her, and finds Muggle songs he thinks she might like, takes her to recitals and teaches her about her inheritance as a traditional dancer - about Saraswati, goddess of creativity and the arts, of knowledge and music. She learns about the other gods, too, the gods that her parents never saw reason to teach her about – about Vishnu and Brahma, Ganesha and Lakshmi and Parvati, the goddess that her twin sister was named after.
She was named after a goddess. I was named after a flower.
Slowly, she expands out of kathak, into the modern dancing that Muggles do, in their Boll-Wood movies. She wonders if this has anything to do with balsa wood, unable to understand the concept of 'movies,' but when she asks Su Li about it, she forces the other girl into storms of giggles. She decides to not bring it up ever again.
But the style is something she embraces with so much enthusiasm that it scares her, and suddenly whole new worlds have opened up at her feet, and thatha is there to walk them with her. He is Muggle-born, and knows about Muggle dancing; he is glad to take her to every performance he can find at any time she is home. She learns about jazz, ballet, modern, flamenco; even more about the different types of dance from India itself: garba, in particular, is her favorite, and she races past everything her mother taught her, absorbing tricks from this style and that to create one completely unique to her. And it makes thatha so proud of her that she could burst.
When she works out her own dances, it is the first time she feels truly connected with herself - with this being that the world knows as 'Padma.' Parvati laughingly calls this new method of dancing 'the Padma style,' clearly trying to compliment her, but Padma isn't sure if she likes this name or not. She has never liked the attention that other people give her. Thatha tells her to be proud of it, and she is, a little; but she also just wants people to leave it be. She doesn't like people making too much of her, as they are prone to do.
This pride is part of the reason she's frustrated at fourteen, having to watch the other students dance at the Yule Ball, while her date - why did I ever accept Parvati's recommendations at face value? - groans and grumps about the fact that the girl he actually wanted to ask is twirling the floor with Victor Krum. Parvati, the one who quit dancing, the one who refused to continue, is dancing with one of Krum's yearmates. And Padma is stuck, sitting there, refusing to ask anyone because she knows she will blush brick red, and ends up going back to her dormitory early out of sheer boredom.
And then her world caves in. Her grandfather collapses, and she and Parvati are pulled out of school for a weekend to hear that he has suffered a sudden stroke. No one can fix it. The Healers at St. Mungo's can do nothing. And Padma loses her will to dance for a very long time.
The Padma style is lost. Parvati tries her best to pull her back, trying to say that simply because thatha is trapped in this limbo, unable to speak, or smile, or think, or move; simply because he is utterly lost doesn't mean that Padma should give everything up. Padma ignores her. She tears down the moving posters of dancers she bought in wizarding dance studios, boxes up her books and costumes, and shoves them in the back of her closet, tearless and screaming inside. She doesn't feel like the follower of Saraswati anymore. She feels like the dancing Shiva, the destroyer, the Auspicious One, has taken control of her world and shaken it until everything lands upside-down, until things she had never dreamed would happen have and the rest of her family doesn't even realize it.
Until thatha wakes up, she will not dance again.
But no matter how often she begs the upside-down world to spare him, everything ends when thatha dies, a year later, in the middle of her O.W.L.'s. And still Padma doesn't begin again. She feels sometimes that she should, that she has to - her feet begin to ache with the thought of not dancing, and she dreams of simply getting up off the couch where she sits reading and doing homework and disappearing back inside the Padma she was, and just whirling, her hands moving, everything floating away from her. But she rubs her sore feet and turns her page and says nothing, and no one notices. She wonders if she has ever been noticed for anything other than being a twin.
She is unable to dance again until she is dragged home by her parents, at the end of her sixth year, prevented from attending Dumbledore's funeral even though both she and Parvati try their hardest to remain behind. The moment they return to their house in Wembley, she runs to her room, dragging the powder blue dancing sari that she buried all those months ago, and changes clothes, her hands shaking so badly she can barely unlace her trainers. It is a gift from thatha, for her fourteenth birthday, and still fits perfectly.
And she runs downstairs with it on, all the way to the basement, locks the door, and dances. Dances out her frustration, her fury, her helplessness. Dances until she can barely stand from the intensity of it, and her knees tremble, and tears pour down her cheeks, and she falls to the ground, sobbing for the first time since thatha died.
Her mother helps bandage her feet from where she stepped on broken glass, and says nothing, though her eyes are red from suppressed tears, and when Padma asks her to help retrain her, Latika immediately agrees.
Early mornings are the cleanest times in Hogwarts now. When the Carrows sleep, the other professors are just finishing their rounds, and the air is crisp and fresh, like nothing in the world is wrong. Birds sing; the sun is barely up, and Padma wanders out onto the grounds every morning like clockwork, with her papers that prove her half-blood status, in case the Carrows decide that not only as a half-blood, but as a dark-skinned British Indian from Wembley, not one of their precious pureblood whites, that her rights are no longer hers. And she dances, her feet bare and cold in the wet grass. She wears the powder blue sari, and the thin silver bracelets that her mother has given her yearly since she turned ten, and leaves her long hair loose for once, and dances with her eyes shut to work through the fear she feels. There is no music, and for some reason, that lets her dance even better than before - this way, no one controls the way she spins and leaps and flicks her hands, like the wavering movements of a butterfly. No one controls her, and this way, she is no one and nothing but her.
But still, something is missing.
One morning in early October, she spots Anthony Goldstein out of the corner of her eye as she moves quickly through the castle, dressed in her sari, but she doesn't greet him. She trusts and likes Anthony, as a fellow prefect and fellow rebel, but this is her time - her clean morning time. And she doesn't know anyone well enough yet, doesn't trust anyone else but thatha, to intrude upon it.
She sees others around the grounds, too, after she spends enough time outside. Astoria Greengrass marches down to the Quidditch every Saturday morning at six on the dot, her broomstick over her shoulder. Neville Longbottom, wandering the greenhouses and gardens from any time between five and eight. Sometimes Luna Lovegood, before Christmas leads to her capture, who waves at her but never speaks, the only one that Padma lets watch her at first; she never comments, after all. All of them seeking solace, all of them looking for something that belongs utterly to them as the world around them goes mad.
And after that Christmas morning that Anthony gives her another outlet for her exhaustion, Padma begins to let him watch, too. She is grateful for the fact that he never speaks, never asks her about it. His quiet is soothing, fills a hole she wasn't aware had existed. Something she now desperately needs.
She begins to dance out of sight of the castle, further away from the Carrows. Sometimes, Anthony remains inside, and she passes him in the Ravenclaw common room, making no comment on her dress as she makes her way down the stairs so early in the morning, but nodding in acknowledgment, sometimes smiling behind his glasses, and returning to his books.
Padma says nothing. She knows that those books are his solace.
She dances outside every chance she gets until she and her sister are forced into the Room of Requirement, and her feet itch from the need to move again, but she says nothing. The room hears her anyway, supplying a sari, giving her room, and suddenly, her dancing is no longer just hers. The other members of the D.A. are silent that first time she uses the space the room offers her, but the next morning, Parvati steps up to join her, and though her movements are stiff and unpracticed, she eventually evens out and keeps up. Anthony leads the members in clapping out her time as she whirls through kathak and contemporary, ballet and ballroom and jazz and flamenco, rediscovering the style she left behind.
But this is not her old style. This is not the free, innocent, fourth-year Padma Patil style. This one gleams with a strange, tarnished beauty, an aged weariness and an endless, frustrated grief. It glitters with the scars on her hands and back, shines with the despair and hope of whoever sees it, and makes her want to cry.
It is the style she shares with her friends, the ones she trusts; the style that she had been inching towards while learning from her mother and spending time with her thatha; the style that keeps back a bit of herself, hidden from anyone but her sister and Anthony; the style which connects her so deeply with the world around her that everything seems brighter.
Because this style is her, in a way that she has never found before.
And it brings a little light to the darkness, and makes her feel happy for the first time in a very long while.
ALL DEFINITIONS ARE FROM WIKIPEDIA, unless stated otherwise.
thatha: I picked this up from reading Climbing the Stairs , by Padma Venkatraman. Thatha means grandfather in Hindi, so far as I can gather.
kathak (from Wikipedia): Kathak (Hindi: कथक, Urdu: کتھک) is one of the eight forms of Indian classical dances, originated from northern India. This dance form traces its origins to the nomadic bards of ancient northern India, known as Kathaks, or storytellers. These bards, performing in village squares and temple courtyards, mostly specialized in recounting mythological and moral tales from the scriptures, and embellished their recitals with hand gestures and facial expressions. It was quintessential theatre, using instrumental and vocal music along with stylized gestures, to enliven the stories. Its form today contains traces of temple and ritual dances, and the influence of the bhakti movement. From the 16th century onwards it absorbed certain features of Persian dance and Central Asian dance which were imported by the royal courts of the Mughal era.
Saraswati (from Wikipedia): In Hinduism Saraswati (Sanskrit: सरस्वती sarasvatī) is the goddess of knowledge, music and the arts. She is the consort of Brahma. Saraswati is considered to be the "mother of the Vedas". The name Saraswati came from "saras" (meaning "flow") and "wati" (meaning "a women"). So, Saraswati is symbol of knowledge; its flow (or growth) is like a river and knowledge is supremely alluring, like a beautiful women. Saraswati is known as a Guardian Deity in Buddhism who upholds the teachings of Gautam Buddha by offering protection and assistance to practitioners. In the folklore of Durga Puja in Bengal, Saraswati is considered to be a daughter of Shiva along with her sister Lakshmi and her brothers Ganesha and Karthikeya.
Shiva (from Wikipedia): Shiva (Sanskrit: शिव, Śiva; meaning "Auspicious one"), is a major Hindu deity, and one aspect of Trimurti. In the Shaiva tradition of Hinduism, Shiva is seen as the Supreme God. In the Smarta tradition, he is regarded as one of the five primary forms of God. In images, he is generally represented as immersed in deep meditation or dancing the Tandava upon Maya, the demon of ignorance, in his manifestation of Nataraja, the lord of the dance.
garba (from Wikipedia): Garba is an Indian form of dance that originated in the Gujarat region. The name garba comes from the Sanskrit term Garba ("womb") and Deep ("a small earthenware lamp"). Many traditional garbas are performed around a central lit lamp. The circular and spiral figures of Garba have similarities to other spiritual dances. Traditionally it is performed during the nine-day Hindu festival Navarātrī (Gujarātī નવરાત્રી Nava = 9, rātrī = nights). Either the lamp (the Garba Deep) or else an image of the Goddess Amba is placed in the middle of concentric rings as an object of veneration. People dance around the center, bending sideways at every step, their arms making sweeping gestures, each movement ending in a clap.