Salon 1: At Radhika’s, “Walk with an Artist”

On April 2018, friend and artist, Dipti Mehta, performed an excerpt from her award-winning show, “Honour: The Confessions of a Mumbai Courtesan” in a friends’  living room (Thank you Radhika B!) in Short Hills, New Jersey. There were 20+ women in the audience. Dipti had performed on many a stage, but we at Salons for Life would like to think that ours was a first in many ways for everyone involved. 

For one, Dipti sat a few feet across and could have touched the person in the first row. Looking back, it was this closeness, this intimacy– that gave me chills! I had seen this style of performance in India as a young child, during summer vacations at my grandparents’ in a little south Indian town called Arni. I remember how I would sit wide-eyed in a maidanam (the local playground in the center of town) on the ground, shoulder-to-shoulder with adults and children alike, watching a local theater troupe do dance-drama. The performance would center around mythology, scripture and stories of gods and goddesses, often coinciding with a festival. The backseeds of this inspiration had come to fore almost 35+ years later in America. It gives me chills writing this. Salon number 1 was called, “Walk with an Artist” – it was the first salon for SFL.