By Wednesday, Vikram had formed a preliminary assessment of Freddy D'Souza, and it was not the assessment he had been expecting.
Freddy D'Souza was, by any objective measure, an excellent teacher. He was patient without being condescending. He had the rare ability to demonstrate something complicated and then break it into its components without making the simplification feel patronising. He remembered that Mrs. Apte had a bad left knee and adjusted her modifications without making a production of it. He remembered, on Wednesday, that Nirmala was new and came over during the warm-up to check her stance and make a small correction that immediately made the movement feel less like organised falling.
He was also, observably, at least seventeen people's favourite person in the society. The WhatsApp group — Vikram had discovered it was called ZUMBA QUEENS 👑💃, which he had been unable to tell Sunita he knew without revealing that he had read her phone — had forty-three messages every morning before seven AM. Thirty of them were about Freddy.
The problem with this — for Vikram's original theory — was that Freddy appeared to be equally warm and enthusiastic about everyone in the class. Sunita got no more of his attention than Mrs. Apte or Rekha or Nirmala or the young mother from Block A. He was the human equivalent of a well-calibrated room heater: warming the whole room uniformly, not directing heat at any individual in particular.
By Friday, Vikram was beginning to feel slightly foolish.
He was also beginning to feel, to his considerable irritation, that he was enjoying the class in a way that he had not anticipated and could not entirely account for. Not the dancing specifically — the dancing was still largely a controlled catastrophe, though his footwork had improved enough that he was no longer bumping into his neighbours. It was something else. The music, possibly. The specific kind of concentration it required, which was different from the concentration of engineering — less about solving a known problem, more about trusting the body to figure something out while the brain got out of the way.
Or possibly it was the bench after class, under the gulmohar tree, which had become — without any formal arrangement — a regular occurrence.
Nirmala was there every time. She was always on the bench before him, with her water bottle and her slightly out-of-breath composure, and she always stayed until the conversation reached a natural end, which was never fewer than twenty minutes and had once been forty-five.
