NCERT Book Class 11 English (Woven Words) Essay 6 The Story

188 Woven Words

7 Bridges
Kumudini Lakhia

F Look for these words and expressions in the text and guess their
meaning from the context

infraction demeanour
dubious assertion synergy

If my younger self could see me now she would be
incredulous. That I would work in the field of dance or
decipher and translate dance for my own comprehension,
call it choreography if you wish, would have been
unbelievable. In this respect, I am particularly envious of
dancers who claim that they were ‘born to dance’, implying
that it was clearly laid out for them from the beginning. I
must say, I find this assertion dubious; it is rarely that
easy. To dance means to struggle—I believe it is the same
in any discipline because discipline itself is a struggle. I
believe I was not simply born to dance; I was born to live.
And now, as the patchwork of my life comes into clearer
focus, I can see clear bridges between my life experiences
and my work in dance.
In all truth, as a child, I never did want to dance; it
was forced upon me by a doting mother and a silent father.
My father probably kept his peace to avoid argument. From
the beginning my lessons took place under trying
conditions, though I believe that the conditions were more
trying for my mother than for me. She travelled in local,
over-crowded trains to dance class with an unwilling child,
tired from a whole day at school. She waited a whole hour
in the not-so-clean ante-room of my guru’s house and then
endured the same journey back. This was in Bombay, and
my first dance lessons were with Guru Sunder Prasad who