They looked at the front of the room, where Freddy D'Souza had just arrived. He was thirty-four, as advertised. He was wearing red tracks and a white t-shirt and had the specific energetic quality of someone whose resting heart rate was probably fifty-two and who had never in his life needed two alarms to get out of bed. He had a wide, genuinely warm smile and the comfort in his body of a person who had been at home in it since birth.
"Good morning, everyone!" Freddy said, in a voice that was cheerful without being aggressively cheerful, which Nirmala appreciated. "New faces today — welcome! Don't worry about getting it right. There is no right. Just move."
The music started. And the problem became immediately apparent.
Freddy was doing something with his hips. It was a rolling, fluid, entirely natural motion that seemed to require no muscular effort on his part and that his body produced the way a river produces waves — automatically, as an expression of its basic nature. The experienced women — Mrs. Apte, Rekha, Sunita, who Nirmala now spotted three rows ahead — followed with varying degrees of success. Sunita, she noticed, was actually quite good.
Nirmala attempted to do the thing with her hips. Her hips did not do it. Her hips produced, instead, a kind of rigid sideways lurch that she could feel was wrong in the way that you can feel when you have mispronounced a word in a language you are just learning — aware of the error but unable to identify its exact nature.
She looked to her left. The man in the formal shirt and the new sports shoes was doing something she could only describe as a controlled march. His arms were at approximately the right position. His feet were moving in approximately the right direction. But the overall effect was of a man completing a brisk walking inspection of a construction site rather than dancing.
He noticed her looking. "Is it supposed to feel like this?" he said.
"I think it's supposed to feel different from this," she said.
"Hm," he said, and returned to his controlled march.
Twenty minutes in, Freddy changed the song to something with a faster tempo and introduced a step involving a cha-cha movement to the right, three steps left, and something he called a "hip flick" that the experienced group did with great enthusiasm. The toddler in the corner woke up from a small nap and began to cry. The man next to Nirmala executed the cha-cha movement in entirely the wrong direction and bumped into her firmly enough that she took a step sideways.
"Sorry," he said, looking genuinely mortified.
"It's fine," she said. "I was going the wrong way too."
At the forty-minute mark, Freddy called a water break. Nirmala and the man were both slightly out of breath — not from exertion but from concentration, which was somehow more tiring. They stood side by side at the water table with the slightly shell-shocked expressions of people who have just been through something together.
"Vikram Mehta," he said, holding out his hand. "Seven-C."
"Nirmala Iyer. Four-F."
They shook hands with the formality of two adults who were behaving like adults about something that was inherently undignified.
"Have you done this before?" he said.
"Never. You?"
"No. I was under the impression it would be more — structured. Like aerobics."
"Did you do aerobics?"
"No. But I imagined it was more structured."
The music started again. They both looked at the dance floor with the mutual expression of people who have a decision to make.
"Once more," she said.
"Once more," he agreed.
They went back in. He bumped into her twice more. She stepped on his foot once. By the time Freddy called the cool-down, they were both perspiring in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room and everything to do with the effort of attempting to translate instructions from one's brain into one's body via joints and muscles that had been doing something completely different for sixty-odd years.
But they stayed to the end. That, Nirmala would later think, was the thing that mattered about the first day.
