With having said this I took the first step in my dance and embraced her with a kiss on the cheek and smile as we shook hands a second time.

      The smile was returned to me. "Oh I see," she said. "We are both already dancing. This blows all my expectations into the wind. They've been too small. Are you offering a whole New World?"

      "Would you expect anything less from us dancing for one-another as directed by our heart and soul, and our common humanity?" I asked. "Here begins a New World indeed, because there has never been such dancing before."

      "No, I don't expect anything less," she said quietly and closed the sentence with a kiss of her own. "I don't expect anything less anymore. Wow, oh what light we are going to have unfolding in India!" she said and began to grin.

      "What light indeed?" I added. "The greatest light we can bring to one another, the light of universal love. Can there be anything greater?"

      Indira didn't answer. She simply kept on grinning.



      I was hoping for some major insight, something that I could bring to India to be able to enrich the scene I would find, but nothing came to mind except what we had talked about at Ross' place. Before I stepped on the airplane coming to an India that I had always regarded as a mythical country, I spent a few days studying up on its history and on the status of the Dalits; the broken people; the untouchables. I had learned things that Fred hadn't revealed, that the very term, the untouchables, was really a lie. In real life the opposite happened. When it came to sexual exploitation, the mythical untouchability of the Dalits was routinely thrown out of the window. That started eons ago. I supposed that Indira might have grown out of this inhuman atmosphere where the low-caste women are often raped and the men are brutalized. I reasoned that this kind of tragedy might have been a part of her life from an early age on as this often happens in poor countries with a history of imperial oppression. I reasoned from this that the very notion of sexual affections would logically have to be repulsive to her.

      I couldn't even begin to imagine then, what it might mean for a young girl to grow up in a world filled with such deep disdain that a human person is given a lower status than a dog and is always in danger of being beaten, raped, even murdered at will, and this almost legally so. I could see how in this strange and twisted sense the Dalits had become untouchable, as nothing more could be taken from them that would make their life worse.

      I puzzled over these things again that I had learned in the history books as we walked away from the baggage counter to her car. I was puzzled, because the books seemed to be incomplete. I was puzzled by what I saw, because her appearance and gestures denied this background of endless pain, mixed with shame and the hidden anger that seems inevitable in such a life.



      With this puzzle in mind her introduction seemed even more contradictory. It totally overturned my expectation. She had introduced herself as Indira, the name Fred had suggested to her. She seemed proud of it. She didn't use the name reluctantly as she might have had if it were out of necessity in order to hide her real name. Maybe she had stepped away from the past, as Fred had suggested to her. She had introduced herself and spoken her new name with the same warm and shy smile that accompanied those first amazing words, "I greet you and I kiss you." Those words had opened the door to me to speak about dancing, and she had responded instantly with her own dance and had followed it up with a gentle kiss of her own, on the cheek. We were indeed already dancing for one-another. This wasn't the mythical India that I dreamed about, or the downtrodden India that I had read about. This was a revolutionary India with a wide-open human heart and mind, a place where miracles seemed possible.

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Stories about War from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche