Ashok Srinivasan is 70. His collection of short stories, The Book of Common Signs, has been longlisted for the Rs 20-lakh (€25,000) Frank OConnor Short Story Award. An excerpt from Winter Solstice He met her for the first time when she was twenty-three years of age and he was an ageing rake. It was during one of those long waits for a connecting flight in the airport on a crisp December night. It was that peculiar time of dusk which lasts longer than a lifetime or, indeed, several lifetimes. He was sitting in one of those plastic chairs alongside the glass wall of the airport, bored. He was waiting, with the stems of his reading glasses laced between the fingers of his hands that rested on the unread newspaper spread out on his lap, when he became aware of this girl who stood next to the drinking water fountain trying to set her lovely face to rights. Her sensitive face seemed to suggest she had just that minute stopped sobbing in secret. She was wearing jeans and a grassgreen kurta with an earth-coloured, open waistcoat, her jacket and scarf half sticking out of the tote bag at her side. Her straight, black hair, piled upon her head, seemed to be held in place with what looked like a lacquered chopstick. As he took in the scene, he had difficulty breathing as though he had suddenly reached an altitude wanting in oxygen. He had more time than he knew what to do with and as he sat gawking at her, she dropped her handbag. Her eyeliner rolled very, very slowly down the floor towards his shoe; she followed its progress towards him without picking up her purse or its scattered contents; their eyes met when the eyeliner came to a stop and they both broke into smiles. Just then, bright lights came on in the airport as he picked up her eyeliner. She did not come right away to claim it though. She went down on her knees and took her time examining in detail each of the items that had fallen out of her bag as though that would restore something of their former sheen to them. As she bent down, her hair came undone and the whole silken mass cascaded and bounced down her slender shoulders. She came to him when she was done with picking up her things and sat down in the chair next to him and said, ‘Thanks a ton,’ before extending her hand towards him for her eyeliner while at the same time looking past him at something that was happening there beyond the glass wall behind him. Over tea, in the upstairs restaurant, he tried to draw her out while suppressing his own awkward eagerness; there was the constant roar of planes landing and taking off. She kept putting up her hair so lackadaisically that it kept tumbling down repeatedly; and each time she put her arms up, her kurta sleeves slid back and he could see the green veins beneath her translucent skin. The aspect of her girlish beauty he was most attracted to was the contradictory sadness in her sparkling eyes: inky pools of promise and sorrow from which there seemed to be no possible way out. She did not respond to his question as to whether she was a frequent traveller but, like one who spurned small talk in departure lounges, she asked, ‘Are you a married man?’ ...
Posted on: Thu, 12 Jun 2014 08:00:00 +0000
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