I gaze at the sandstone dancer, impaled for all time. She is nameless, and in this vacant gallery, I might as well be too. I’m alone with myself and thousands of strangers in The Met. Right now, it doesn’t matter that I’ve never felt fully safe in the United States of America. Right now, I’m gazing at the impossible dancer with no name and a thick metal post pushing through her sandstone haunch, holding her life-size frame upright. Her contortion is anatomically impossible. It’s also one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. When did I begin to contemplate a woman’s beauty? It started with the story of a mystic poet.  

In the early 1990s, tucked into the book-lined four corners of my Las Lomas bedroom in rural Trinidad, I devoured a small, fiercely guarded trove of Amar Chitra Katha comics: detailed, colourful drawings and exuberant text that animated the lives of Hindu saints, gods and martyrs. More exciting to me than any superheroes from the Western world, my favourite of these thin-papered, prized books was Mirabai, written by Kamala Chandrakanta, illustrated by Yusuf Lien. More times than I can count, I pored over the tragedy-romance of aristocratic Mira, ensorcelled by an image of Lord Krishna that she followed to the brink of devoted madness before ultimately being united with her God in a spiritual convocation as erotic as it was transcendental.  

Obsessed, I returned to the comic so frequently that the print started coming away in my hands. It has been nearly thirty years since I read Mirabai’s story for the first time, but she has never waned in either my memory or my imagination. I couldn’t know this would become one of the greatest fascinations of my life: divine love, human to Creator, reciprocal and woefully unrequited (how, after all, do you get a God to confirm he’s mad about you, too?). I couldn’t possibly comprehend, at not yet thirteen, that I’d chase this unchaste motif in leatherbound books, lavish oil paintings, films with foreign subtitles and other secret places. 

Mirabai, depicted by Lien in Amar Chitra Katha, is fair, with a thin-fluted nose and long tendrilling tresses. Her waist is as finely sculpted as if she too were an 11th-century temple dancer, dragged by the sandstone roots of her hair from Madhya Pradesh to Fifth Avenue. To capture the attention of the gods, it seems you must ofttimes have a waist snatched to high heaven. The subtitle of the comic book I used to sleep with under my pillow reads, ‘She gave her heart to Lord Krishna’. Decades after my nighttime reading of Mirabai’s love story, I’m chasing devatas in New York City when I could be shopping for souvenirs or visiting the Statue of Liberty – another woman not unfamiliar with sea voyages. 

It’s hard not to think of beauty in the Southeast Asian wing of this renowned museum. The image of the mystic poet I’ve long venerated collides with the sandstone dancer before me as I circle these statues as much as security permissions allow. Surely, I think, Krishna loved Mirabai not because she was fair of face but because she burned for him with an adoration so consuming it consumed him too. Surely, the sandstone dancer whose name is lost to history would be as admired had she additional rolls of fat lining her waist, as I do. 

Where is the boundary line between beauty and desire? What makes these bodies splendoured and mine subject to dismissiveness – or worse, cruelty? I gaze and gaze at the unmoving artworks in their well-labelled rows, longing to be alone with them long after the museum closes. I want to hear the secrets they might tell if their parted lips could speak. I want to know if they think I am beautiful, too. 

Improbably, or perhaps perfectly, the words of a popular Jamaican dancehall standard come to me as I stand in front of ‘Celestial Dancer (Devata)’. The 2014 Vybz Kartel song, ‘Credit Alone Done’ (commonly subtitled ‘A Yo Back Fi a Bend’) speaks of physical super-machinations of the waistline-to-hip-to-spine ratio, a performance of the batty-rider-clad female form under strobing lights that make a mockery of polite physics. In her own way, this devata is doing the same. Without the support of the balancing rod, she would topple and shatter: this is the price to be paid for the deep indent in her proportions, the eroticism of her arch, the persistence of her invisible vertebrae pushed to support a site of worship. 

Around and around the gallery I go, my camera phone shyly clicking away without flash. I want to divine a way to keep these women closer to me, to pore over their figures and pupil-vacant faces long after I leave. Thinking about them will help me soldier through a turbulent flight back to Piarco International. Thinking about their beauty will somehow make it easier for me to breathe. 

I carry the devata’s posture in my mind’s eye as I stand in a wearying Immigration line, watching an exhausted teenager sit on her pink carry-on. Her long dark plait brushes her luggage tags as her spine bows, better suited to sleep than god-pose. When I was her age, my own hair was as thick, as black, as plaited down my back by my grandmother in an unbreakable line. Finally, at home in the deep country night of Las Lomas, standing in front of my bedroom mirror, I twist my body this way and that. Rolls of my travel-tired fat ripple and solidly rotate instead of self-correcting into a svelte, temple-ready cinch: here, there is undulation, not steely poise. These are contours unlikely to appear in Amar Chitra Katha, after all. I exist in a body more apt to be called grotesque in its contortions than gracious. I do not believe my corporeality attracts the eye of any in the pantheon of our male gods. Not as Mirabai hoped to capture Lord Krishna. Not as the nameless devatas and apsaras, arching, leaping and cavorting in frozen relief in the Met, are made to meet the approval of their admirers, powerful and pious alike. 

When I dream, I often return to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this recurring dream, I am sometimes Mirabai, with features I do not, myself, possess in reality. The Dream Shivanee has had Mira’s alabaster skin, her thin and elegant nose, her long-stemmed fingers dripping with golden rings and shaking with desire. There, in a fugue state of fitful rest, Dream Shivanee embodies the Mira I met in comic books, a perfect vessel for romantic religious ecstasy. As I dream, Mirabai-me beholds herself soaked and shivering on the banks of a great river, saved from drowning by her Lord. As he did in the comic, Krishna tilts Mira-me’s supplicant face upwards with the command of a man who knows he is loved more than life or sanity. He murmurs to her (to me) that her life with her husband is over. Now, she is his. Now, she must go seek him in Brindavan – a real-life, now-historic place in Uttar Pradesh, cited as one of Lord Krishna’s most favoured childhood haunts. I do as she did, in myth and legend and in the pages of my comic books. I follow him, trailing reams of bhajans and a single-string ektara in tow, eyes dark and wild with need. 

When I wake, my cheeks are wet, and I do not look in the mirror for many hours. The me reflected there waits to ask why it is easier to adopt the countenance of a woman I will never resemble. I have no good answer for her, but flickers of shame and an unsatisfied curiosity send me to write poems about vengeful goddesses who drink blood instead. 

The Met is proud, I imagine, of all its acquisitions, including the ones that have no heads. In Gallery 247, I stand before ‘The Goddess Durga Victorious over the Buffalo Demon, Mahisha (Mahishasuramardini)’, dated 9th century. Both Durga and the demon she’s slain are missing their heads – not because she’s chopped his off in an artistic choice, hewn in volcanic stone, but owing to damages wrought by time or theft. The extensive curatorial notes don’t tell me the exact reason. When I am back home, because I miss these rooms of Indian women, I pull up Durga (and her dead demon)’s dedicated museum page and click on the helpful audio footnotes. ‘What a woman!’ the eager docent-historian-researcher tells me, kicking off a minute and a half of spirited commentary that covers Durga’s diaphanous dress, jewellery, how this specific idol would have been worshipped and garlanded, draped in cloths many centuries ago. 

Yes, I think, clicking through my galleries of goddesses, bodhisattvas and temple dancers. What a woman. What a headless marvel! What a great and terrible god. 

If a visit to a museum can end in a prayer, let it be this: in my next dream, may I walk up to the Devata as myself. May I kiss her sandstone hands, wearing my own skin.  

Island Writings