I remember the night well. I was at the Elbo Room, a bar in San Francisco’s Mission District. Downstairs, it’s a dive bar extraordinaire. Upstairs, it’s a dance floor / rock room / dj temple where the cool kids pay extra and do their thing. I had never gone upstairs before, so I took a peek.
The salsa band was in full force, the Latina ladies were quite pretty … and I didn’t know how to dance. Not salsa, at least.
So I figured I’d try the mildly flirtatious “teach me to dance” approach. No dice. The pretty one wanted to dance, not teach someone how to dance. And like power point presentations, salsa wasn’t a part of my skill set.
So now that I’m in New Delhi, I’ve decided that it is time to close that critical gap in my cultural knowledge. I’ve signed up for salsa lessons.
In the basement of a large south Delhi housing property, a shiny dance studio awaits. Large mirrors and pictures of salsa celebrities greet me. I put down 2500 rupees (roughly $70) for 8 lessons. That’s a little under a month’s rent for the autorickshaw driver who drove me home. It is about a third of the rent for my bedroom in a shared local apartment. On the Delhi scale, I’m guessing salsa lessons are something for people of Delhi’s wealthier set.
As I stepped my way through the first group lesson, I couldn’t help but notice in the studio mirrors that my traveller’s jeans just weren’t cutting it anymore. If I’m going to be learning snazzy salsa moves, does that mean I have to have snazzy clothes too? Now that I’m making New Delhi my home for a while, I guess I have to live beyond the suitcase.
But I have to say that it was fun learning to dance with the mixed crowd of twenty- and thirty-something Indians. And before I make any condescending comments about Delhi-ites becoming “Westernized,” I have to remember to use the right adjective: Latinized.
Tomorrow’s mission? Find me a good kickboxing or judo academy. And then back to the studio on Wednesday for salsa lesson two.
