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With all that talk about apsaras I’m pining to see some good dance and can’t find any this week in this wretched heat except for a ’sushi platter’ of a two-day dancefest, each day featuring ten-ten dancers in a big medley. You can’t really register anything in the whirl and I’m not going. 

Instead, I thought I’d share this stored-in-sandalwood experience from August 2002 when I got to briefly enter the nuanced world of the Japanese geisha, courtesy the Government of Japan that gave me a fabulous two-week whirl all by myself in their country when I was Arts Editor, The Indian Express.

They asked me for my wish list of activities and in between the Noh, Kabuki, Shinto and Zen, a stay at a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn, futon on the floor), a great ride on the shinkansen (bullet train) between Tokyo and Hiroshima, lunch with fashion designer Hanae Mori, a visit to the Haiku Society and tea with a scholar on the Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji (that I’d borrowed to read in English translation from my friend Iqbal Malhotra), I was also taken to beautiful Kyoto to meet a geisha. My only unfulfilled wish was a meeting with modern Japanese writer, Banana Yoshimoto, whose books I liked very much, in English translation.

It was American writer Arthur Golden who began the geisha wave in 1997 with his fictional work, Memoirs of a Geisha (called Sayuri in its flop Japanese avatar). Lisa Dalby, really the first with ‘Geisha’ in 1983, came back to the theme with a new preface in Twenty-four Years Later, 1998. And yet another American, Lesley Downer, wrote Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World in 2000, also issued as Women of the Pleasure Quarters.

These Western scholars of Japanese classics were certainly not writing for the anglophone Indian. They wrote for their own audiences, essentially white Christians. They acknowledged their shock at the values of the “flower and willow world” as the hanamachi, or pleasure quarters, are known. The stereotypes we Indians inherited through the English language, then, were these: Geisha are prostitutes who sell themselves to the highest bidder; geisha perform tea ceremonies and sleep with customers after a fan dance or two.

These American researcher-writers wrote earnestly about the truth. Geisha are “not exactly” prostitutes. They are not wives meant to bear children, cook, clean and run the house. They are “counter culture”, providing a chill zone for rich, powerful men. Their aim is to find a rich patron and be his unwed wife, whose job is recreational, not reproductive.

In the old days, poor girls were sold to the hanamachi by their families. The Meiji Era rulers put a stop to the selling but did not abolish geisha like the devadasis of India were abolished. It became a voluntary profession, which some Japanese women preferred to sitting all day at a computer in some vast corporation.

But this case for respectability is spoilt by the geisha ritual of mizuage, her ‘deflowering’ by a rich man who pays for the ‘privilege’ of bedding a virgin. Only then can a maiko (trainee) become a geiko/ geisha (artiste)!

The Indian reader absorbs the Western judgments that lie under the skin of even these adepts. One, that monogamy within marriage is the only correct option. Two, that geisha charge for every moment of their time. Three, that they are rude to gaijin (foreigners). Four, that they are interested only in their own tight world, closed to most Japanese, except for an inner circle.

Reality for this Indian woman was rather different. I was taken to meet a Kyoto geisha called Koito-san, the only one to host a website. Downer had described her as “a Cockney sparrow” and “plain”. So nothing prepared me for her exquisite complexion or her gentle, womanly bearing.

“Indian dance came to Kyoto and I very much wanted to learn it,” said Koito-san, who’d holidayed in Hawaii and hoped to see India one day. “Let me tell you, a geiko is an artiste who must spend years learning traditional music and dance. She holds up her kimono with her left hand. The wife holds it with her right, which lifts the flap easily for a man’s hand to intrude. You tell me, who is more modest?”

Good heavens, I thought, startled. The patriarchy’s unblinking leer down the centuries made me so mad with fury that I almost gagged on the sake I was carefully sipping from a shot glass-sized porcelain cup. However, ironclad Indian adakkam (restraint) saved me from a rude display of my feelings and I nodded politely as if discussing matcha (green tea).

Koito-san and I showed each other dance mudras. Her elegance with a fan in conveying states of love instantly connected with an Indian taught to portray various states of that emotion in Bharata Natyam. She led me upstairs to watch her maiko, Ko-sen (Little Fan) being dressed for a party by a trendy young otokosu (kimono dresser). He looked like a young pirate in his striped tee, scarf, ear-ring and little beard, and I learned that he had gone to live in the US but came back because he missed the world of the hanamachi too much. When he tied the obi (sash) tight around Ko-sen, he put his bare foot against her spine, braced his back and tugged mightily at both ends of the long, heavy sash with his hands, so it would sit tight on her waist.

Ko-sen had a shamisen (stringed lute) lesson before she set out to a nearby teahouse. Her teacher was a bit annoyed because she wasn’t getting it right. “Plink-plink-PLINK!” he’d demonstrate and each time, Ko-sen went “Plink-plink-PLUNK!” instead. The tune they played had quite a pahari lilt to it, very noticeable to Indian ears. “Unreal!” whispered my Japanese interpreter, a smart Tokyo girl, who’d never have seen these sights normally.

Our allotted hour stretched to three-and-a-half. Koito-san refused her fees, even money for the customary drink and offered another round. “I’m a Buddhist,” she told my interpreter. “She has brought me a gift from the land of the Buddha. That is enough.”

It was a dainty bud vase with pure, sinuous lines, made of smooth white marble from the quarries of Makrana, carefully wrapped because someone had told me that the Japanese appreciated nicely wrapped gifts. I had spent quite one hour at my regular book shop in Delhi, where the boys had gotten most enthusiastic about helping me wrap all the little gifts, not their normal line of work. But,  India se Japan jaa raha hai, kuch achcha karke dikhayenge! they’d said and achieved tidy, pretty parcels just the way I wanted, with ‘mother-of-pearl’-look wrapping paper and elegant strips of silver gauze ribbon. Koito-san’s gracious reaction seemed like a blessing for all the good energy they had put into her gift.

I rather thought that Sakyamuni would have liked it and wished very much that Asians could talk to each other directly instead of always through the filter of English.

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