At the End of a Long Queue

I found myself standing in a long queue at KoolSkool in Gurugram.

Sudha Murty was there to sign copies of her children's book How the Chilli Became Hot, and the store was packed. Children stood around holding newly bought books. Parents waited with them. I had picked up a few of her other books too, hoping she might sign those if there was time.

By the time I reached the front, she had already been there for hours.

What I remember most, though, is that you wouldn't have known it from the way she met people.

She asked children what they were reading. She listened to their answers. When adults came up, the conversation changed, but the attention didn't. There was no visible attempt to hurry one person along so that the next could be dealt with.

When my turn came, she looked up, listened, and signed the additional books I had brought along.

It was a very small interaction, especially after the hundreds that had come before it. But perhaps that was precisely what made it memorable.

I spent the first two years of my working life at Infosys, so Sudha Murty has existed somewhere in the background of my professional memory for a long time. I had expected meeting her to make me nostalgic about that period.

Strangely, it didn't.

What stayed with me instead was the sight of someone meeting a person near the end of a very long queue as though they might have been the first person she had met that day.

Book signings are curious things. We carry a writer's words around for years without ever knowing them, and then, occasionally, the distance between reader and writer collapses into a minute or two across a table.

Sometimes that minute is enough.