Kamala wanted to dance the way fire wants to rise.

She was eleven, with feet that moved before her mind gave permission, and she had been learning Bharatanatyam from Revathi Amma in a small hall behind the Brihadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur, where the gopuram rose so high it seemed to lean against the sky. The hall's stone floor had been worn smooth by centuries of dancing feet. Kamala's were just the latest.

But Kamala had a problem with discipline.

She came late to practice — not always, but often enough that Revathi Amma's eyebrows would rise when the door opened. She forgot to practice the adavus at home. She started her aramandi — the deep half-sitting position that is the foundation of Bharatanatyam — with energy, but within minutes her knees would straighten and her mind would drift to the samosa stall across the street.

One evening, after a practice so scattered that even the nattuvangam beats of the mridangam player could not hold Kamala's feet in place, Revathi Amma asked her to stay.

The other students filed out. The hall emptied. The evening light came through the high windows in long gold bars, illuminating the dust that the dancing had stirred up.

Revathi Amma did not scold her. She sat on the stone floor — cross-legged, straight-backed, with the stillness of the Shiva Nataraja statue behind her — and drew four circles in the dust with her finger.

"Discipline," she said, pointing to the first circle. "Without it, your body does not obey. Your aramandi collapses. Your feet arrive late. You cannot hold the form."

She pointed to the second circle. "Wisdom. This is what grows when the body becomes still enough to learn. The meaning behind the mudra, the story inside the abhinaya. Without discipline, you never reach it."

The third circle. "Meditation. Not sitting with your eyes closed — that is only one kind. The meditation of dance is when the mudra and the meaning and the music become one thing, and you disappear into them. Without wisdom, you cannot enter it."

The fourth circle. "Peace. The stillness that lives inside the movement. The centre of the spinning wheel that does not spin. Without meditation, you will never find it."

Revathi Amma looked at Kamala. "And without peace — tell me, child — where will happiness live? In the samosa stall? In the lateness? In the mind that cannot hold still for the length of one taal cycle?"

Kamala looked at the four circles in the dust. Each one needed the one before it. Remove the first and the whole chain went dark, like pulling a plug from a string of festival lights.

"Tomorrow," Revathi Amma said, rising, "come on time. Not for me. For the first circle."

Kamala walked home through the temple streets of Thanjavur, past the bronze shops and the sweet stalls and the Cauvery glinting in the last light, and her feet — which had been restless all evening — were, for once, still.