The Search

She gave herself a rule, the next morning, mostly to keep Rachel's eyebrow at bay: if she was going to actually do this, she was going to do it properly, not just YouTube tutorials in her living room at midnight forever. She wanted a real class. A real teacher. Someone who could tell her, out loud, whether her shoulders were doing the thing they were supposed to be doing or just approximately near it.

The first search actually turned something up. A listing, local, twenty minutes from her own front door: Jarnail's Bhangra Crew — all welcome, all ages, no experience needed. Twenty-five-odd participants in the photos, a community hall she half-recognised from a school fete years earlier, a man front and centre in every shot, arms thrown wide, grinning at the camera like he already knew how the photo was going to turn out.

She emailed him that same evening, careful and a little more honest than she'd meant to be. Hi Jarnail — I saw your class online and I'd love to come along. Total beginner, but genuinely keen. Long term, I think I'd love to learn enough to maybe teach this myself one day. Is it okay to just join in as a newcomer?

He replied within the hour, warm on the page, more welcoming than she'd let herself hope for. Of course! Everyone starts somewhere. Come Thursday, wear something you can move in.

She told Maya. She told Rachel, who managed something almost like approval. She spent the two days before Thursday in the same low hum of nerves that would, she'd later understand, become entirely familiar to her — though nothing about this particular Thursday would end up going the way any of that nervous anticipation had prepared her for.

The hall was exactly as full as the photos had promised — twenty-five people, easily, warming up in loose rows, chatting, genuinely friendly in the two minutes before class started. Jarnail found her almost immediately, the way a room's most confident person always seems to know exactly where the newest, least confident person is standing.

"You're the one who emailed," he said, delighted, already turning to address the room rather than her. "Everyone — new face tonight. Says she wants to teach one day." A small, warm laugh from the group, nothing unkind in it yet. "Let's see what we're working with. Come up front. Show us a solo. Whatever you've got."

Sam's stomach dropped somewhere around her shoes. "Oh — I've genuinely never done this before. I only just emailed you two days ago."

"Perfect. Even better. Everyone loves an honest beginning." He was already gesturing her forward, and the room, twenty-five faces now turned toward her, seemed to be waiting with the specific, expectant patience of people who had no idea yet that this wasn't going to be a kind moment. "Go on. Whatever your body wants to do. We're not judging."

They were, of course, judging — everyone in a room watching a solo is judging, that's what a solo is — and Sam's body, given no more guidance than that, produced roughly eleven seconds of the same clumsy shoulder-and-hip approximation she'd been practising alone in her living room, entirely out of rhythm with the track Jarnail cued up behind her, before she stopped, mortified, unable to make herself continue.

"Okay!" Jarnail clapped, once, and turned back to the room with the easy confidence of a man about to make a point he'd clearly made before. "This is exactly what I want you all to see. Real bhangra — the actual thing, not the version people think they can just pick up from a video — takes years. I've had this music running through my veins since I could walk. My father had me on a dhol before I could read. That's not something you learn in a weekend, and it's definitely not something you learn by walking in and deciding you'll be teaching it yourself one day." He said it warmly, almost kindly, which somehow made it land harder than cruelty would have. "No shame in starting. Plenty of shame in starting with that kind of confidence."

A few people laughed, not unkindly exactly, but not kindly either — the specific, awful laughter of a room that has decided, collectively and without much thought, that laughing along is safer than not.

Sam got through the rest of the class on autopilot, humiliation sitting in her chest like a stone the whole hour, and drove home with the radio off, replaying the eleven seconds on a loop she couldn't make stop.

She didn't go back. She didn't watch a single bhangra video for four straight days, which was, for her, by that point, a genuinely significant act of willpower. She caught herself, more than once, drafting the thought in full: maybe this was never actually for me. Maybe wanting it that badly, that fast, was exactly as embarrassing as it felt. She got close enough to actually believing it that she nearly deleted the folder of research she'd built over the previous weeks, cursor hovering over it for a full ten seconds one night before she closed the laptop instead.

It was Maya, oddly, who pulled her back — not on purpose, just scrolling on the family tablet one evening and turning it toward her mum with the mild, unbothered curiosity of a fifteen-year-old. "This lady's class looks kind of different from the one you went to. Look — it actually says what her qualification is."

Sam looked, mostly to be polite. And then looked properly.

The page was for a woman named Amrit Deol, and underneath her name, plainly, without any fanfare at all, it said: Pungra-certified fitness instructor. Not professional dancer. Not bhangra since birth. A qualification. A specific, checkable thing, sitting where Jarnail's page had only ever had a photo of him grinning with his arms thrown wide.

Something in Sam's chest, still bruised from Thursday, shifted very slightly toward curious instead of purely defensive. She hadn't known, until she saw the difference laid out side by side, that there even was a difference to look for.

She widened her own search that night, this time typing something closer to what she actually wanted rather than what she'd assumed existed: certified Punjabi fitness instructor England.

Buried on the third page of results, past the same chain-gym Zumba listing and a defunct Bath studio, she found a link to something called an instructor directory, hosted on a site she'd never heard of — professional-looking, spare, clearly built by someone who cared more about being taken seriously than about looking flashy. The same name came up again, closer to home than she'd expected.

Amrit Deol. Pungra-certified. Birmingham.

There was a small paragraph underneath — Sam read it three times — describing classes built around "actual exercise principles," a warm-up and cool-down, something called cueing that Sam didn't fully understand yet but that sounded, reassuringly, like the opposite of just show up and hope you can keep up. A phone number. A studio address in a part of Birmingham Sam had never had reason to visit.

She didn't call. Not that day.

She spent the next four days doing the thing Maya had correctly diagnosed as researching doing it instead of doing it — reading the two-sentence bio on the directory page probably a dozen times, googling the studio's address on a map to see how long the drive actually was (fifty-eight minutes, door to door, longer with the M5 traffic), even, one night, drafting a text to the number listed and deleting it twice before actually sending it, more cautious this time than she'd been with Jarnail, wording it like she half-expected to be humiliated again for even asking.

Hi — I saw your listing on the instructor directory. I'm a total beginner, is it okay if I just watch a class first before joining in?

The reply came the next morning, brief and warmer than Sam had expected: Everyone's a beginner the first Saturday. Come move, don't just watch — you'll learn more with your body in it. 10am, studio address below. No experience needed, just water and shoes with grip.

No mention of solos. No mention of proving anything. Sam read it four times, the relief almost as strong as the original nervousness had been, then put it in her calendar, out loud, while Maya was in the room, specifically so that saying it to another human being would make backing out require an actual conversation rather than a quiet, private failure to show up.

"Saturday," she told Maya. "I'm going. Birmingham. The class."

"Called it," Maya said, not looking up from her phone, and then, a beat later, looking up after all: "Wait, actually? Good. You should. Not like the other one."

"Not like the other one," Sam agreed.

She told Rachel too, mostly to see the eyebrow do something other than skepticism for once, and was rewarded with something close to it — not quite belief, but a kind of cautious, affectionate hope. "An hour there and back," Rachel said. "That's commitment. Okay. I retract twenty percent of my doubt."

"I'll take it."

She spent the four days before Saturday in a low, constant hum of nerves she hadn't expected — not dread, exactly, but the particular anticipatory static of a person about to try again after being burned once, and hoping, this time, for a room that actually meant it when it said everyone starts somewhere.