Step by step,
as if the spirit of all dancing had its home in her, she told a
wordless tale, using her feet and every sinuous muscle as no other
woman in all India ever did.
Men say that Yasmini is partly Russian, and that may be true, for
she speaks Russian fluently. Russian or not, the members of the
Russian ballet are the only others in the world who share her art.
Certainly, she keeps in touch with Russia, and knows more even than
the Indian government about what goes on beyond India's northern
frontier. She makes and magnifies the whole into a mystery; and her
dance that night expressed the fascination mystery has for her.
And then she sang. It is her added gift of song that makes Yasmini
unique, for she can sing in any of a dozen languages, and besides the
love-songs that come southward from the hills, she knows all the
interminable ballads of the South and the Central Provinces. But
when, as that evening, she is at her best, mixing magic under the
eyes of the inquisitive, she sings songs of her own making and only
very rarely the same song twice. She sang that night of the winds of
the world which, she claims, carry the news to her; although others
say her sources of information speak more distinctly.
It seemed that the thread of an idea ran through song and dance
alike, and that the hillmen and beyond-the-hills-men, who sat back-to-
the-wall and watched, could follow the meaning of it.
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