Colour Blind

By Reedhima Tyagi

That’s her. Her? Her. She rests between the bright yellow walls where pigmy faces call out to the freshness of childhood and the newness of the world. The hues of orange and light stroke their heads into soft brown alike the colour of rain soil. Among them she sits palming a dulled crayon. Its blue bleeds into the white paper except at the smallest mote of white near the edge. She scrubs. She washes. The white dot doesn’t disappear. Her forests are violet, and hands are blue. Her river is red, and her feet are brown. She realises then, the speck, a dot of light in the sheet of colours will not vanish. Instead, it will grow a seed. Bigger and bigger. Before it blasts into a steaming light and blinds her. Maybe she had realised then- like this sheet of paper, her life will be tainted with the wrong set of colours. 

She guesses her nail paint to be grey in colour. She guesses her aunt’s porcelain tea set to be pink. She guesses her own self to be bronze. She guesses everything; everytime she is held in contempt for her mistakes. Her colours travel from one edge of her brain to the other. A free flowing river which demands no question but a painful verdict of its wronged nature as its last is mixed with the saltiness of the sea. 

No sea-saw rises towards the sky behind her eyes and no friend holds her hand. The colours have rendered her childhood dry and obsolete with uncharming loneliness. She stands to poke a shaking finger  towards her iris- a paler white disk in its pool of white matter. It doesn’t hurt when she reaches across her eyeball inside her head. Her finger moves mute in the crumple of nerves and vessels. She thinks to pull one of them free. The one that dims the colours. But courage is unreliable. She takes her finger out, dry and green, and feels the betrayal of her own body, her own mind. 

Her pony tail grows. Her nails grow. Her deceptive body and mind grows. More neural pathways are formed and created inside her and it is only then, she notices. Her mother’s rage has begun glistening a bright red. It bubbles and simmers in front of her. She notices the man beside her at the bus stop, whose regrets weigh the colour blue. Her father’s mistakes bear the brunt of the colour purple. Her classmate in front of her carries the colour yellow in his deceptive laugh and openness. She feels a bubble, light and airy, burst on herself and the colours around her, inside her, don't hurt. Their pinprick way of establishing their existence only feels like an itch presently. She stands at the footpath of every road- crosses and pauses when the stop sign flashes charcoal, brown and orange. She doesn’t question. Instead she blends right in and walks amongst the different colours that have never left her alone.  

By Reedhima Tyagi