LURU Editor’s Pick: Jayant Kaikini’s “Evergreen” Translated by Carol Blaizy D’Souza

An unscripted scene plays out on a film set. Through the eyes of Viloma, the protagonist, we bear witness to a delicate act: his father’s maintenance of stardom. Neither innate nor borrowed, the glamour of the evergreen hero Sharatchandra is an edifice that must be erected daily through the rehearsal of precise facial expressions and the careful concealment of weariness. Even the environment seems to hint at artifice, a mis-en-scène of manufactured rituals and missed connections.  

As a sentence suddenly stops, walking with one leg on the paper, Viloma stopped abruptly at the gates of Kanteerava Studio, noticing the security guard’s signal. “On which floor is the ‘evergreen hero’ Sharatchandra’s shoot?” he asked. When the security guard responded, “And you are…?” he quickly said, “I am his relative, he has invited me. He said it’s urgent,” transferred the helmet to his left hand, and signed the register with his right. After scrutinising him, the guard allowed him to pass. Parked outside were scattered rows of generator lorries, water tankers, and foolishly haughty “caravans” stationed there for actors to rest, along with people who looked as though they were alone, even when standing together.

In Kannada, “Evergreen” is “only three large paragraphs,” writes its translator, Carol Blaizy D’Souza, in her translator’s note. In English, she breaks this structure to “capture its shifting rhythm better.” Almost nothing seems to happen in the story, but Viloma’s unobtrusive presence at his father’s workplace is an invitation to the reader to look beyond reputation, image, and even plot.

Only the senior lead actor, Sharatchandra, sat holding a small mirror in his hand, looking somewhere into the blank distance. He seemed dazed and disconnected from his surroundings. All his energy seemed drained—expended on guarding his youth, on trying to look young. All the light boys, assistant directors, dancers, technicians, tea boys, and touch-up boys were in their natural youth—only Sharatchandra was collapsing in fatigue under the weight of an imposed one.

As Viloma begins to see more clearly, his emotions shift. While the film industry maintains one image of Sharatchandra, his family sees quite another; the man torn between the two seems beyond reach. “How the daily travel between these two worlds must have strained him. Which of his roles had stuck to his soul?”

At once stark and tender, this is a short story about the movement of our inner worlds. It leaves room for subtle change but does not guarantee an outcome. This indeterminacy, woven through stillness, observation, and silence—Sharatchandra barely utters a word—creates intimacy in the text. Rather than deliver a linear film reel with a beginning, middle, and end, Kaikini offers a single frame that runs deep—“as if panning inward in slow motion,” writes D’Souza. Viloma’s gaze becomes ours; we are nudged to see through not just our eyes, but with the whole body of our emotions.

Read “Evergreen” and more short fiction in Issue #3 of LURU, themed “The Games We Play.” Each issue of LURU takes a single theme and examines it through the kaleidoscope of plural storytelling. Issue #3 includes long-form non-fiction by Bhanutej N and Sharda Ugra; an illustrated playbook co-authored by Sudeshna Saxena and relationship expert Simran Mangharam; and personal essays from Bhairavi Shibulal and Paul Dharamraj.

Anishaa Tavag is a Bengaluru-based writer, editor, dancer, and certified teacher of yoga and the Alexander Technique.

This is an excerpt of a fiction feature from Issue #3 of LURU.