When I speak of dance affecting my writing, I am actually referring to my specific relationship with Chandralekha, which for me has been profound. I am not a dancer in the ordinary sense of the word. I have never harboured any secret aspirations to be one and have no formal training.

When I moved back to Chennai after several years abroad, it was entirely through a strange series of coincidences that I met Chandra and that she invited me to join her group.

At the time, I already had a manuscript of poems and the vague sketches of a novel, but I was well aware of the perils of writing. I knew I could spend five years writing and have nothing come of it. So, in a sense, it was important to be able to engage with the world in other ways. Chandra's house and the theatre offered these possibilities.

During the day, I would work my body in ways I had never imagined possible. In the evenings, the house would be full of painters, writers, architects, mango-growers, neurosurgeons -- all kinds of brilliant, dynamic people passing through. This 'feeding' of mind and body was undoubtedly siphoned into my own work.

For many years, I listened and worked -- tuned myself, as it were -- to this alternate world I previously had no access to.

I think by far the most important thing Chandra offered me, by way of dance, was a way to channel a particularly rare kind of beauty. It's not just the physicality of dance that whittles away excesses and flab and forces a kind of tautness in every aspect of your life, it is also the idea of performance -- going out alone on stage in front of hundreds, with only your body and breath, hours of sweat and concentration, only the energy of the musicians and the audience and my partner that allowed me to go onto the dark nothingness of the stage and make my limbs do what they had been trained to do.

And so, with dance, I learned about my own energy and power, and sharing this -- about being part of something whole and unified and sublime, about dispelling certain fears. From Chandra, as a teacher and a friend, I learned much more. I learned something about the kind of artist and human being I want to be. For her, there was no separation between art and life; she embodied both entirely and with a great sense of seriousness and joy. For where I was, at the beginning of my literary journey, it was a wonderful thing to be able to be a dancer as well -- to be open to anything else that might come along.

Image: Tishani in performance during Chandralekha's Sharira, in Delhi

Also see: Vikram Chandra on Sacred Games

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