Morni

She meant to forget about it.

She did not forget about it.

By Wednesday lunch, sitting alone at her desk with a sad desk salad and forty-one unread emails, she'd watched the clip four more times, this time with actual attention paid to the things around the edges of the performance rather than just the shot of adrenaline in her sternum. She noticed the way the horn line answered the drum, call and response, like two people finishing each other's sentences. She noticed that Diljit Dosanjh seemed to be having, visibly, the best time of anyone she had watched perform anything in years — not the practiced, teeth-forward joy of a pop star working an audience, but something that looked, unmistakably, like a person doing the thing he loved most in front of people who were finally getting to see it.

She typed Morni lyrics into her phone before she'd consciously decided to.

The English translation, when she found it — imperfect, she'd learn later, but good enough for a start — turned out to be a love song. Playful, a little cocky, comparing a woman to a peahen, "morni," roughly, "peahen," which struck Sam as a much better compliment than it had any right to sound like in translation. There was a lightness to it. A song that knew exactly how good it was and wasn't embarrassed about it.

She typed Diljit Dosanjh next, and lost twenty minutes of her lunch break to a Wikipedia page and three more music videos, each one pulling her further from sad desk salad and further into something that felt, for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, like curiosity. Actual, unforced curiosity — not the performative kind she brought to a work training on "emerging trends in patient engagement," but the kind she remembered having as a kid, the kind that used to make her stay up late reading the backs of cereal boxes because she'd run out of everything else in the house.

She typed bhangra next.

That was the word attached to half the videos that had started auto-playing in her sidebar — not just Diljit Dosanjh now, but dozens of other performers, other songs, some clearly decades old and shot on tape that had gone soft and warm with age, some clean and modern and shot for a phone screen. Circles of people in bright colours, shoulders popping, arms thrown up like they were trying to catch something falling from the sky. A word she'd heard before, distantly — she had a memory of a university flatmate's Bollywood dance-themed birthday party second year, the kind of thing nobody at the time had thought twice about calling that, and which Sam now, watching an actual bhangra performance for the first time with real attention, understood to have been almost entirely unrelated to whatever this was.

That embarrassed her a little. Not enough to stop watching. Just enough to make a mental note: you don't actually know anything about this.

By the time her 1 p.m. meeting started — a status update on the flu shot campaign, forty-five minutes she would later have zero memory of — she had eleven browser tabs open on her phone and a half-formed, slightly ridiculous thought sitting at the bottom of her chest like a stone dropped in a pond, still sending out rings.

I want to know more about this.

She didn't tell anyone. Not yet. It felt too small and too strange to say out loud — I saw a video and now I want to learn about Punjabi music — and she could already hear, with perfect clarity, exactly how that sentence would land if she said it to Rachel over post-workout coffee. Rachel, who had watched Sam attempt pottery, then a half-marathon training plan that made it to week three, then a brief and expensive foray into oil painting that had produced four canvases now facing the wall in the garage.

So she said nothing. She just kept watching.

That night, after Maya had gone to bed, Sam sat at the kitchen table with her laptop instead of her phone, which felt, obscurely, like upgrading from a hobby to a project. She searched bhangra dance history and read for an hour about Vaisakhi, the Punjabi harvest festival the dance form had grown out of — farmers, she read, celebrating a good harvest with movements that mimicked the physical labor of the fields itself, the swing of a scythe, the lift of a sack of grain, turned into something joyful and communal instead of just exhausting. She read about how the dance had traveled with Punjabi immigrants to the UK in the sixties and seventies, how it had fused there with reggae and hip-hop and eventually electronic music to become something new, how it had crossed back over into Bollywood soundtracks and, eventually, American pop culture, one algorithm-fed clip at a time, to women like her who had never once thought about the Punjab region of India and Pakistan in her entire adult life and were now, at 11:40 on a Wednesday, deeply moved by the fact that a folk dance about harvesting wheat had somehow ended up making her cry a little at her own kitchen table.

She wasn't even sure why the crying part had happened. It wasn't sad. It was the opposite of sad. It was more that she recognized something in it — the unfiltered, unembarrassed joy of it, a kind of joy she used to have access to and had somewhere, gradually, without ever deciding to, stopped reaching for.

She'd been a dancer once. Not this kind — jazz and hip-hop, four years on her university's competitive dance team, up at six for conditioning before her first class most mornings, a body that had known exactly what it was for. She hadn't danced, actually danced, in something like fifteen years. Spin class didn't count, not really; spin class was cardio wearing dance's clothes. This was different. Watching Diljit Dosanjh's shoulders pop on a stage in London was reminding some very old part of her body of something it used to know how to do and had simply been asked to stop doing, one unremarkable year at a time, until she'd forgotten to miss it.

She closed the laptop a little after midnight, with a full browser history and absolutely no plan, and went to bed thinking, not for the last time, I don't know what this is yet. But I don't want to stop.