There was commotion upstairs. Women calling out in panic. A great-aunt, almost hundred, lived on the second floor with her attendant, Brihaspati.

I rushed upstairs and found the second-floor veranda flooded with the morning sun. TV melodrama poured out of the surrounding houses. Faces peered out of windows, quickly moving away on seeing me. On the floor, stretched out flat on her back, lay Brihaspati.

A willowy woman in her late thirties, she had a pale, long face with half-closed eyes. Her hair, always left loose, came down to her waist. When I saw her for the first time, I thought of Kadambini in Tagore’s short story — the woman who had to die to prove she wasn’t dead. Brihaspati’s village was an hour’s train-ride from Calcutta. Her husband left her after the birth of their son, who set out for school one day and never returned. Her mother was a madwoman living under a tree near a temple in the next village. Brihaspati lived with her brother and his wife before she came to work for us. She was vegetarian, and ate nothing that was not cooked by herself. Moving around the house noiselessly, she exuded an air of cat-footed mistrust. It isolated her from her colleagues in the house — our middle-aged, no-nonsense, non-resident cook of many years, and a spirited young girl with her own history of marital trauma. But Brihaspati looked after my bed-ridden great-aunt with absolute dedication. She never took a break. “Where will I go if I take the day off?” she would say.

That morning, we found her lying flat on the veranda floor, moving her head sharply from side to side. Her left arm was stretched out, palm upturned. She beat the floor with her tightly fisted right hand, knuckles stretched white. The head and hand moved precisely together. But she was fully conscious, and looked at each of us as we gathered around her. We asked her if she had eaten anything since morning. She shook her head to say no. We fed her some sugar-water. As it began to work, her head and hand grew still, the fist unclenched. Then, as we watched, the tips of the index finger and thumb of her right hand came slowly together, the other fingers straightened, and the hand formed, in a seamless movement, a gesture that most of us have seen on temple walls, frescoed in a cave, or in classical dance.

She lifted her arm slowly, holding the mudra, and, with a sudden change of pace, did a quick series of variations on it, swiftly changing the angle and tension of her arm with each. Soon, the thumb and middle fingers came together, with the index and little finger sticking out like animal ears. The left hand touched the right, each a mirror image of the other, as she raised both to her lips. She was playing the flute. Then, as quickly and seamlessly, she switched to wielding a spear. Her eyes opened wider, and she stuck out her tongue at regular intervals. She was still on her back on the floor, but her body and face had come brilliantly alive.

Something lit up inside my head too. “Who are you, Brihaspati?” I found myself asking her, kneeling close to her on the floor, unbothered by the theatricality of my question. It did not matter that my sex and class were all wrong. And this nonchalance, this falling away of correctness, came, not from me, but from her. The lucidity and directness of her gaze, as she looked at me, gave me courage, and an odd thrill. She was not having a fit. She was letting me into her madness; I couldn’t chicken out. Nothing in the non-mad world would have allowed the exchange between us, begun in that curiously freeing moment. Both of us stood to gain from it — but only if I could let go of something, some reflex of caution, and step into the circle of her body’s extreme, yet strangely déjà vu, language, at once intensely private and shamelessly open.

She stood up with great effort, raised her hands up in the air, lifted a leg, stuck her tongue out, and held the pose for a few seconds. Throughout this transition from horizontal to vertical, she kept her eyes locked in mine. “You are Kali now, aren’t you?” I asked again, and she flashed me a dazzling smile. We went into the drawing room. Her body relaxed as she sat down next to me on the sofa and started to speak in a deadpan monotone. Every morning on the terrace, when she made her obeisance to the sun, a hot light filled her body and mind, she said, and made her do things. Sometimes she became Durga, sometimes Kali. Sometimes her body broke out all over into little eyes — “like the eyes in the tail-feathers of a peacock” — and she became Krishna. When she went to the market, and people bullied and mocked her, her body would be wracked suddenly with the Kali language, and by the time Kali turned into Durga, her mockers would flee and the way back home was safe again. The Krishna bhaab or feeling came only when she was alone — bathing, cooking or nursing my great-aunt. The work of care, she said, brought her back to somebody else’s flesh and blood, less unstable but more helpless than her own. So, nursing was the one purely human thing she did without needing to be possessed by the divine. Without someone to nurse, she was nobody: ami keu na.

Her eyes became heavy with weariness as she spoke. But her entire monologue was punctuated with those gestures of the hands and abrupt changes in facial expression — sudden widening of the eyes, baring of the teeth or tongue. The rest of her body remained perfectly still, and the pitch of her voice was steady. It was as if her body and her voice were speaking two distinct languages. One was a coded, shared and precisely reproducible lexicon of gestures, expressions and postures, the other a more fluid and troubled meta-language unfolding alongside the first like a parallel text, without glossing or translating the former into words. Each grappled with the unspeakable. But one was readymade, historical, collective and indomitable; the other inward, improvised and broken, riddled with the ungraspable effort of communication.

Unable to talk any more, she made her way slowly to her room, leaning out for a second from the veranda railing, on the way, to look down on the street. And in the vertigo of that moment, we knew that we could not deal with her on our own. We sent word to her brother, and called a psychiatrist. She asked her if she had ever wanted to kill herself, wrote out a prescription of anti-depressants and sedatives, and left. The sedatives knocked her out at once. The diagnosis in the prescription was just one word: “chorea”. Wikipedia told me that chorea and choreography shared the same Greek root; chorea used to be called the “dancing sickness”.

The literature on the internet kept going back to the 19th century. “Essentially a disease of the nervous system… it is by no means a dangerous or serious affection, however distressing it may be to the one suffering from it,” assured George Huntington, MD, in an 1872 article archived online as a “classic” by The Journal of Neuropsychiatry. Huntington’s language then moved deftly into another terrain — the terrain that his great European mentors of the fin de siècle feared, but could never quite resist — as he described how the dance-like spasms in chorea do not lead to a loss of sense or volition: “the will is there, but its power to perform is deficient, the desired movements are after a manner performed, but there seems to exist some hidden power, something that is playing tricks, as it were, upon the will, and in a measure thwarting and perverting its designs; and after the will has ceased to exert its power in any given direction, taking things into its own hands, and keeping the poor victim in a continual jigger as long as he remains awake, generally, though not always, granting a respite during sleep.”

We are back, in this doctor’s words, through Stevenson and Poe, to something much older — to the good angels and bad angels of the Faustbuch, to the Brothers Grimm, to religion and the decline of magic. But Early Modern “choreomania”, I found out, was a mysteriously collective phenomenon — a “psychic epidemic” linked to both religious ecstasy and severe deprivation. It swept through villages and towns, from time to time, as swelling masses of starving peasants, labourers, artisans and wayfarers of either sex danced themselves to collapse or even death. It seemed to me that chorea, as a modern “neuropsychiatric” disorder, carried within it the living memory of such traditions of desperate hardship and intensity of feeling. Yet, an individual gripped by it now is irreversibly cut off from this sense of a community of ecstatic suffering. She is left essentially alone, stranded with (and in) its historically charged language, unable to take others along with her. It is still a psychomachia, a battle for the soul — but fought out between the bad angel of religion and the good angel of psychiatry.

As I read up all this on my laptop, I noticed that late into the night before Brihaspati’s attack, I had been watching on YouTube a complete recording of Pina Bausch and her company dancing — if that is the word — Café Müller. And suddenly, I understood that feeling of déjà vu, the sense of something lighting up inside my head, as I stood on the veranda in the morning glare, riveted to Brihaspati’s movements on the floor. Staring into my screen now, one window open on choreomania, another on Pina, and yet another on a site that told me pina meant pain or torment in Swedish, I felt the hair on the back of my neck prickling up with that appalling mix of thrill and shame and recognition and compulsion that we let ourselves feel when we cannot stop a piece of sublime art from flaring up into a bit of difficult life after being brought together by what appears to be chance.

Pina and those ecstatically abject women among a wilderness of chairs, playing out their incurable routine of collapse and rescue to Dido’s pristine lament, blind to the world yet commanding its gaze, had made me forget, for a while, the necessary difference between the madness of performance and the performance of madness.

The next day, Brihaspati’s brother’s wife and another woman came over from her village to take her back with them. I saw her sister-in-law carefully counting the money Brihaspati had saved, she had once told our cook, to build her own house. The two women also told us that before he disappeared altogether, Brihaspati’s child had turned into a bohurupi. He wandered around in their village, painted and dressed up as various gods and goddesses, making the same gestures and expressions as his mother had made the previous morning. Meanwhile, the drugs were doing their work. The women brought her down the stairs and helped her into the rickshaw that would take them to the station not too far away. Weeping and barely able to walk, her speech slurred beyond comprehension, she managed to tell us that she felt she was abandoning her charge. She left us no number. For a while, we would hear of her from the other women who came to work in our neighbourhood from her village. She is still with her brother’s family. But we haven’t had news of her for a long time.