I am standing before ‘Landmark’ inside Chennai’s citicenter. A lady in her early twenties flung her eyes upstairs as if to reassure herself of the innumerable lolloping men who dashed into dustbins, corner stones and into each others. She was wearing a pinkish white sari that rested on her haunches laxly; her plush midriff extended all the way up from where her sari lightly embraced her waist below up to the pert shoulder blades. With the sari end let loose, her expansive back furrowed into a long thin parting that grew up from the sari, flew meditatively through the valley between the shoulder blades that appeared like giant elephant’s ears, only firm, thick and frozen. Her hair, she parted in the front, looped into a thick braid in the back with plaits furled up over the bronze ears; the back of her neck so white that one wondered if it was a blood ridden bird’s underbelly.
The incipient freckles on her slender waist, gaunt arms and a taciturn bosom flanked against the posture that dropped a hanky on the floor and bent to pick it up. This prompted an elderly looking man to drive his Santro into the lawn adjoining the parking lot with the security guard blowing gallantly behind him. A twelve year old walking past by with his hands locked firmly in his mother’s froze his eyes and gait, but was promptly whisked away by his mother who snuck a peek herself, over her shoulder, before exiting the mall.
She had a beaming ease about her, she would pull the sari’s pallu from its locks on the shoulder traps, wipe her three year old daughter’s mouth clean, flap it in air once before putting it back on. The keenest of eyes could have observed the mole above her left eyebrow, but the mind of even the lamest observer would have registered frames and frames of her lush beauty.
She was the mannequins that chose to come into the open over staying behind the sealed glass doors.
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