“Have dinner at home. I’ll fetch you at 10pm.”

“Yay!”

For the past year, for every weekend that I was in my city of Mumbai, this was the one-sentence text between R and I.

R, a 20-year-old student of media, who amazed me the way she taught herself video editing, and walked confidently in her red stilettos.

I, a 33-year-old journalist, who travels far and wide through the year, but longs to dance in a way as though nobody was watching.

But this is Mumbai, this is India, and everyone is watching everyone.

But we didn’t care. We had found each other. Every Friday or Saturday. For two hours, bellies filled with home-cooked food, and a pint of beer to share — as a donation to the DJ.

At about 10pm, the DJ would be churning the latest international hip-hop. By 11:30pm, he would take us through Bollywood hits. By 00:55 — five minutes before mic drop — the lights would slowly go bright, the sweat on our bodies would glisten, and we’d be doing funny and yet familiar steps to classic Bollywood numbers. The steps would be specific to those songs, and suddenly, everyone in the club would seem like background dancers in a Bollywood movie.

Except, each of us were the heroes. R and I were the perfect partners on the dance floor, with our eyes only on synchronizing our moves. Nobody could come between our impromptu steps: the scissors with four steps being our favorite.

Almost every night dancing, there would be one person who’d come up to us and compliment our wild moves. We weren’t being sexy; we were simply moving our bodies to the rhythm of the night.

I’d often need more space while dancing, and R would take my place to save me from the elbow digs of others behind me. I’d often see boys ask to dance with her and she would oblige, but only for about two minutes. We’d dance together the best. This was our evening, our music, our groove, our space. Not to be tread upon.

One Friday evening, R was tired after a long day at college. Unlike other Fridays, when I’d insist that she take a shower, eat some food, and step out with me for just an hour, I did not insist that Friday. I had a date.

He was someone I had known from college. I remembered him as a dancer. He said that he still loved to dance but did not know where to dance now. His words reminded me of how I had felt before I had met R.

After dinner, we walked to the club where R and I could burn the floor with our moves.

The bouncer nodded a hello, and looked at my date. He and I danced; we got excited when the DJ played some songs that were chart-toppers from the time we were in college, nearly 16 years ago. He and I were the only 30-somethings in a space that was dominated by 20-somethings. But we didn’t mind. He had his eyes on me all night, and he later said he would cherish this date for being so refreshingly different.

I smiled. But I missed R. I missed this special “us” just for a few hours on Fridays/Saturdays whenever I would be in Mumbai.

I made a vow to myself: to never let anyone trample upon my sacred space of weekend dancing. The anonymity at the club, and only R as my connect, was where my body came alive and my mind calmed.

All through 2018, I caught up on what I had missed when I was 18.

At 33, dancing with R on Friday nights did to me much more than what it could have done to me at 18.