Sukhdev, Goddess of Happiness, will-of-the-wisps across the threshold on her first Grand Entrance ever.
     She dances into evening elegance that replaces day’s wrinkles, where earth tones mix with azures and purples. Cast off now from day’s moorings, pale blue khameezes mix with white silk, shoulder to wrist, there to meet the iron bangles that distinguish Sikh from Punjabi inside the same bit of geography.
     A sea of brown skin, bays of blue sequins, sandbanks of saffron sleeve. Oval smiles cascade beneath flowerfalls of black orchid hair. Colors rich as sweets made of honey and ghee, noses delicious as sculpted chocolate.
     Chandsingh, Lion of the Moon, old enough now to have earned his quavering voice, eyeglasses propped up on his turban, takes the microphone, entreaties: “Pray together. But if you have not the time, have at least dinner together.”

Chandkaur, Princess of the Moon, laments an old Punjabi love song:

I will build a home and make it a heaven for our love.
Coming into your arms I am afraid for myself.
When my eyes meet yours, I become a fish out of water,
fluttering
fluttering.
With you I won’t sing
of who I was before,
I will sing that I am
the music of a flute
that bewitches
into butterflies.
River of my life,
ocean of my love,
listen to my prayer:
My earth is empty,
let your rains come.
We are apart,
bring us together.
Take the light of my eyes and give them your rain,
let my dry earth grow flowers in the dry season,
let my prayer seduce the gods so I may seduce you
and with my love change this earth
into a land of flowers
which turn my wilted leaves into fresh.

Women conceal their beauties with bodices falling Punjabi-style in sheer monochrome free-falls of benthic blue. Saffron and matte gold on hither-eyed beauties, flickering faces in the candlelit procession honouring the sacrament that is rice.
     Crimson silk, charcoal cotton, gold brocade, aladdin-toed shoes. A tot of a girl in a pale yellow khameez, silk skirt of marble and gold, carmel and gold, garnet and gold, cinnabar and gold , moonstone and gold, tourmaline and gold — she, mere sky child now, will one day emerge far-winged Sélène, goddess of the moon.
     Shawls drape chastely over throats, streaming backward over the shoulders: angels with folded wings. Flowing spangles and brocades iridesce into sari-fall osaris of pouring topaz. Dance music like an accordion on fast-forward, so riotous it justifies a garment of pink and tangerine tie-dye-edged with woven silver, worn by a little girl posing as Priceless Miss Precious for daddy’s camera.
     Formerly floral ladies who frumped before their time dress in grays, their version of gold with no glitter.
     Reds enough to envy a sunset, emerald greens and sapphire blues, black and silver laced with indigo.Vest and shalwar of gold-mine sequins cloaking a khameez’s unfathomable artistry of stripes, as if to say weft is loom’s most joy-giving gift.
     One woman wore a single solid hue, an impossible-to-conjure merge of rose with crimson. Neither too vermilion nor too carmine. Not quite carnelian with all of its browns. Yet neither quite cerise with its stage-whispers of black. She was red’s finest hour.

Again Chandkaur sang — or did the song sing her?

You gave me
the heartache of love
yet where are you now?
I walk the emptiness
of my desert,
every step I take
in search of you.
My night goes by
with unclosed lids;
my days are many hours
of unhappy song.
Oh love, come back,
come back to me.
Oh love, I will live
in your hut
I will come
into your arms
and yield my emptiness.
I will turn my finger
into a pen,
write these words
onto your heart.
Since you came
into my life
I’d rather be in your fate
than in the smiles of the gods.
Please, Oh my lover, my god,
come back to me
come back.

     The evening’s-end dance melted into a riot of paints no longer edged by shape, but by the half-awake/half-asleep point when dreamtime becomes real and realtime becomes dream, skeining themselves into silk of woven touch so blended with being that life, sex, self, love, the fire of love and chill of fate, with its chill, too, of time and departure, become one. No, no: not one. Not a thousand and one. Nor ten thousand and one. A hundred thousand and one.

Just . . . One.

It was the grandest dance an eye ever laid to.