Skip to main content

Seeing colours

All it takes is a child to make you think, see, differently.
Dark colours, he told me, have 'dark' in them,
Light colours have summer in them.

How beautiful, I thought, to look at life that way.
To him, pink isn't fuchsia or orange, ochre.
His life is too full of joy and discoveries
He doesn't bother with the inanities, the little affectations I dwell on.

Take red.
Yes, paprika sounds so much more exotic.
Calling it that makes me feel so sophisticated, so suave
A woman of the world--one who reads her vogue and her elle too.
To him red is red, it means stop and danger. And of course, Lightning McQueen.
Paprika, what's that?


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wasteland

Something happened over the past two days. Our next door neighbours, or rather one particular family (like all metrizens in this cramped city, we live within literally, touching distance of the others in our neighbourhood), have decided to demolish their home. Fine, so what, you ask. They see how valuable land now is. Who can blame them? But along with their home, they have also decided to kill off the two trees -- a mango tree and a coconut tree -- in their compound. I used to look at those trees from my kitchen window. The mango tree, in particular, was a welcome sight. Bunches of ripe green fruit used to hang heavily from it. Looking at it, I'd think of my home in Kerala -- of the time when I was a little girl in a white petticoat helping my father pluck mangoes as they slowly changed from parrot green to a golden reddish-yellow-orange shade. That was our annual summer ritual, you see. My father plucked mangoes using a long stick with a hook or a 'kokka' (in my collo...

A confession

So you voted? Wow. Did you click a selfie with your inked finger prominent? Wonderful. Well, as for me, I have a secret that's been giving me heartburn. I didn't vote. I didn't get my voter ID on time, you see. So I have not been on Facebook with my voting selfie. And each time someone puts up a post saying "If you don't vote, you don't have the moral right to talk about corruption or lazy corporators or crib about how your city/state/the country is run", my heart sinks just a little more. Because truly, I don't think I am a bad person. I do not believe I no longer have any moral authority to call myself a 'citizen; of this country. At the most, I am guilty of being lazy--because I did not get my voter ID on time. On the contrary, I think I am an involved citizen. I religiously segregate my waste, separating dry from wet--and then I deliver the bags to the dry waste collection centre. When I see a creature in distress--street dog/animal/b...

Belly Tales

I always had a belly. In the beginning, it was rather shapely. Curvy, but not outwordly so. Then lil man came along. Suddenly, my belly became The living, growing symbol Of another tiny, living, breathing being. My body became nurturer and nurse. My belly became both nest and nuzzling point. Baby grew out of me, literally. And my belly became an afterthought. You see, my body didn't snap back into shape. My belly stayed on. So terms like 'baby belly' were thrown at me. But guess what, a baby did grow in this belly. And yes, my belly will never Go back to what it used to be. It is wobbly, it's scarred. It has stretchmarks. It symbolises my strength.