The Rabbit Hole

By the following Monday, Sam had a folder.

She hadn't set out to make a folder. It had accumulated the way these things do — a note in her phone titled bhangra stuff that had started as three links and, over one long weekend, become something closer to a syllabus. Documentaries on YouTube about the Punjabi diaspora in Birmingham and Toronto. A podcast episode on the history of the dhol drum that she listened to twice, once for the content and once, almost sheepishly, just to hear the drum patterns again, isolated, so she could hear what her ear had picked up without the rest of the song around it. A thread on a forum, written by someone who signed off as a second-generation Punjabi-Canadian, gently but firmly correcting a comment further up that had called bhangra "basically just Bollywood dancing" — a distinction Sam found herself, three weeks into an obsession she still hadn't told anyone about, oddly protective of. Bollywood was a film industry. Bhangra was older than the films, its own tradition, one of several regional dance forms of Punjab, and Bollywood had borrowed from it as much as the other way around. She'd have been in the basically just Bollywood dancing camp herself, a month ago. She wasn't anymore, and she felt a small, private satisfaction in that, the particular pleasure of no longer being wrong about something.

She almost shared one thing from that weekend of research before catching herself — a glossy infographic, reposted a few thousand times, claiming that "studies show bhangra burns more calories per hour than any other dance-based workout." She'd had her thumb over the share button before some old, work-trained reflex made her stop and actually look for the study. There wasn't one. No citation, no link, no named researcher, just the phrase studies show doing all the load-bearing work a real source should have been doing. She sat with that for a second, a little unsettled at how close she'd come to sharing it anyway, and recognized the shape of what had almost happened: she'd wanted it to be true, badly enough that she'd nearly stopped checking whether it was. She did this exact check professionally, most weeks, for pharmaceutical marketing claims that crossed her desk at MedGen — where's the citation, does the study actually say what the headline says it says, is this one small trial being generalized like it's settled science — and she'd nearly waived all of it for a good feeling and a pretty graphic. She didn't share it. She didn't stop wanting it to be true, either. She just filed the wanting and the checking as two separate things from then on, and made herself do both.

She had started, too, without quite admitting it to herself, doing it in her body. Not dancing, exactly — more like fidgeting with intent. Her shoulders would go, sitting at a red light, the little pop she'd watched a hundred times now, trying to feel out from the inside what it might feel like from the outside. Her wrists turned over on their own sometimes at her desk, an unconscious echo of a hand movement she'd seen in six different videos and still couldn't have named.

She hadn't told Rachel. She hadn't told Maya, not directly, though Maya had definitely noticed the noise coming from Sam's room some evenings and had once put her head around the door to find her mother watching, with what Maya later described as "unsettling focus," a video of a dhol player at what appeared to be a wedding in Jalandhar.

"What is happening in here," Maya had said. Not really a question.

"Research," Sam had said, which was, technically, true.

Maya had looked at her for a second too long, the way teenagers do when they're deciding whether something is worth the effort of investigating further, and then said, "Okay," and left, and Sam had felt a small flicker of relief and a smaller flicker of something like disappointment, because some part of her, it turned out, wanted to be asked more.

She didn't push it. Not yet. She wasn't sure yet what this was, and some old, cautious part of her — the same part that had quietly boxed up the oil paints without making a whole thing of it — wasn't ready to hand anyone else a reason to raise an eyebrow at this one too.

But alone, at night, with the volume low and the bedroom door shut, she kept going. She learned the difference between the dhol and the tabla. She learned that "bhangra," as a word, was sometimes used loosely to mean four or five genuinely different things — a devotional or folk movement tradition, a wedding-floor social dance anyone could join with no training at all, a competitive stage performance art with its own choreography and costuming, and, increasingly, in gyms in London and Toronto and, she was starting to suspect, somewhere not too far from her — a fitness class. That last one snagged on something in her the way the others hadn't.

A fitness class.

She sat with that for a full minute, laptop glow the only light in the room, feeling something click into place that she didn't yet have words for. She taught fitness classes. She'd taught fitness classes, in one form or another, for almost a decade — spin, a brief unsuccessful stint with kickboxing, Zumba on Sunday mornings for the last three years. She knew, with the kind of certainty that came from actually having done it, what made a class work and what didn't: the music, yes, but also the structure underneath the music, the invisible architecture of warm-up and peak and recovery that a good instructor built and a bad one skipped.

She opened the bhangra stuff note on her phone, scrolled past three weeks of half-formed links, and did something she hadn't done yet — wrote actual questions, numbered, the way she'd have opened a work project if anyone had ever paid her to solve this instead of it just quietly taking over her nights.

1. What actually is bhangra — is it even the right word for all of this, or is Punjabi music the bigger category and bhangra just one thing inside it? 2. Dance floor, stage, or gym — are these the same activity wearing different clothes, or are they genuinely different things that happen to share a name? 3. If they're different — different how? Different enough that you couldn't teach all four with the same techniques? 4. Is there an actual way to take Punjabi music and build a real, structured, safe exercise class out of it — the way spin took cycling and built a class around it — or is "bhangra fitness" always going to mean someone's cousin doing choreography in a gym?

She looked at the list a long moment, four questions with absolutely no answers under any of them, and felt something settle into place that was steadier than the midnight obsession had been so far — not a hobby anymore, not exactly, but a genuine question she wanted the real answer to, whatever it turned out to be. She didn't know yet that she'd spend the better part of two years answering it. She just knew, closing the note, that she wasn't going to stop until she had.

She didn't let herself finish the bigger thought that night, the one underneath all four questions that felt too large to look at directly yet — something like and could I be the one who actually builds it. It felt too far ahead of where she actually was, which was a woman with a folder of links, four numbered questions, some new shoulder movements, and absolutely zero actual dance training in this specific thing.

But she typed one more search before she closed the laptop.

Bhangra fitness classes near me.

She hit enter, and waited, half-expecting nothing, the way most late-night searches for things "near me" in a mid-sized English city tended to end.