eFiction India eFiction India Vol.02 Issue.09 | Page 26

25

STORIES

RED WALKED BY
    SHEENGINEE B                                   

A

S HE LOOKS closely, her onionlike skin appears more red in
the morning light. The redness
spreads over her back unevenly, like that
of an angry painting where the artist dealt
with the paintbrush like an old unkind love
who always had his coffee black, did no
laundry and barked at waiters who dared
to give him anything lesser than a mediumrare steak.
But when she poses for him, while he is
groggy but ambitious, usually at 3 AM,
and when her hair falls in large tufts down
the same steely back, it is beautiful. The tip
of his pencil becomes another man in the
room. He joins with this other man and
tries to pour something out on the naive,
speechless canvas – quite like disgorging.
But his pastels are never redder than her
hair. He also refuses to understand the limitations of art over reality and devours more
3 AMs with the other man.

Sheenginee B is mix of productive
eccentricity and poetic imagination. Her undergraduate degree in
Philosophy has contributed much to
her understanding of literature and
writing. She has also studied business
management which has given her a
diverse outlook. She has the eye for
nuances, something that is often essential an attribute for a writer; to be
able to observe, see and find poetry in
daily motion, life and banality. Her
first novella Itch has been recently
published.

eFiction India | June 2014

And, when he tries to touch her, she
murmurs, “I want to know how Lazarus
died later. If he was really happy with his
second coming.”
And every time he removes his hand and
ponders on the question. Questions like
these never come to him; all his life, he only
had to deal with his troubling itchy fingers.
“It does matter,” she goes on. “It does. It
does matter how badly a man wants to live
or not. If he was glad to taste broth again,
to be able to squint his eyes at the sun.”
***

She always arrives on winter mornings with
her gray cowl pulled up to her nose. And
says, “I walked on a lot of snow and they
did nothing. There is absolutely nothing
more defenceless than trampled snow.”
When she strips, she says every time, “You
will never get that ‘red’ on your paper. But
I will always let you try.”
He struggles hard with the other man.
Forcing, pushing to get there where they
cannot. The other man fails to spurt blood.
And when the charcoal gray on paper starts
to hurt his eyes, she sa