They had three weeks. Freddy designed a routine — three minutes, a medley of tracks they knew well, incorporating steps from the past two months. He made modifications for everyone's limitations with the practical creativity of someone who had learned to choreograph around reality rather than against it. Mrs. Apte's shimmy became the centrepiece of the second chorus. Vikram's excellent footwork anchored the beginning. Nirmala, who had been moved to the front row for her reliability, was given a turn at the start that required her to count everyone in — the teacher's role, which Freddy had clearly understood before she had.
They rehearsed. Things went wrong in the usual ways — the group lost the beat on the transition to the second song, Mrs. Apte's shimmy began migrating progressively earlier in the sequence until Freddy gently relocated it back, and Vikram went the wrong direction during the final turn three times before something shifted and he simply got it on the fourth, with the expression of a man who has solved a problem that had been bothering him for some time.
The night before the Annual Day, Nirmala could not sleep. Not from anxiety, exactly — something more like the feeling before an examination that you have actually prepared for, which is different from the feeling before one you haven't, because the stakes feel real rather than arbitrary.
She went to the balcony at midnight with a glass of water and stood looking at the society below — the lit windows in various blocks, the garden dark and quiet, the security guard doing his slow round of the compound. Somewhere in Block C, a dog was barking intermittently at something private. The gulmohar tree was a dark shape in the darkness.
