Do you like me?
“Who are you? And why on earth should I like you?” – You may
ask.
Well, I am red.
“Red?! That too with
a small ‘r’? Didn’t they teach you grammar at school? Are you prone to typo-s?
Is this the new trend of writing one’s name? Are you a redhead? No? You must be
red in anger then; or in shame or embarrassment; or…”
Come on, I’m the color red. Is it that hard to guess? I’m also the color she despises the most. And before you can
drown me in another deluge of questions, let me tell you who ‘she’ is; I’m
referring to the idiot who is writing this piece.
She has just let her heart triumph over her ever-cautious brain
and quit from her stable job of seven years. To put it mildly, it wasn’t an
easy victory. Her heart now wants to raise a toast to her new freedom and
write; her brain, still seething, has chosen me as her write-up topic out of sheer
spite. Do you now see why I call her the idiot?
At first, she thought of writing about child rapes. She contemplated
imagining the unimaginable agony of the countless victims she reads about in
the daily newspaper; the helpless, senseless, universe-drowning pain of those
little girls whose tender body they rip apart; the inescapable thrusts, each of
which push them closer to a death they don’t deserve. I shuddered and closed my
eyes.
“It’s relevant.” – She said. “And it’s a matter that has
been haunting me for some time now.”
She kept rambling about the topic in her attempt to win me
over. Apparently, she wanted sociologists, psychologists, economists,
criminologists, political scientists and every other ‘ist’ she could recall to
come forward and examine the society with their magnifying glasses and find out
where it’s going all wrong. “It’s brutally urgent!” - She claimed. “We need to stop
all the brouhaha about outrageously small and fast gadgets, driver-less cars, fancy
space tourism and what not, and focus on the critical aspects of human advancement.”
All that’s fine, I thought, but how could I let her write a
piece that would have the blood of the purest souls dripping from it and call
it ‘Red’? I cannot let my name be maligned so! Why, am I not the color of the Gulmohar’s elegance? Am I not the tint
of the sunrise and the sunset? Am I not the hue of the throbbing life force
that flows to and from every cell of your body all your life? Think, red is
your core color, the truest of your many shades. I was there with you in the
earliest days of your existence, when you were a tiny ball curled up in your
mother’s womb, much before you acquired that amber, green or hazel of your enchanting
iris or the black of your hair!
The idiot was visibly dejected at my noisy, and as per her,
nosy intervention. She started thinking about a large, large sky colored in the
rich red hues of sunset, and tried to set it as a backdrop for a pair of parting
lovers saying their final adieu to each other. In an hour, she found the
story-line juvenile and raised a melodramatic ruckus to which I was the sole hapless
audience. When I tried to cheer her up, she pretended not to know me and went
on with some banking and investment tasks with a look of stoic resignation.
On the next day, of course, she was back with her mouse
hovering on the haggard looking MS Word draft. This time, she was shaping her
fantasies around a not-so-young artist who had taken up his paintbrush after a cursed
slumber of years. The artist had reasons to be angry with the world, but anger
is an emotion he had not mastered well. So he wanted to unleash his aggression
on his paper; he wanted to paint a picture in red, only red, and the most
assaulting version of it – the scarlet red! But deep inside, our artist was
essentially a soul who loved peace, rain, croaking frogs and the smell of
sodden grass. Every picture he tried to create in his mind-canvas took the
shape of a woman with uncombed hair and eyes of moist lily, or a landscape with
soothing breeze and serene huts and trees and ponds with ducks in them, while
his hand created ugly blotches of discordant red on his sheet of fine handmade
paper. He wanted to die, at least for a moment.
There I intervened again. You see, your friend can’t see any
good in me. Green reminds her not of jealousy but of playful squirrels chasing each
other along the branches of large trees in the park where she goes for her
morning jog. Melancholy is the literal synonym for blue, and yet the color
reminds her of deep, somber depths of the ocean in a strangely respectful way.
And red brings to her mind loud, attention-craving, garish, pompous folks who
can’t but be at the center of the world. She would rather have them wiped out
from the face of the earth.
“What can you do, being a mere color?” – You’re probably
trying to reason with me by now. “Colors are helpless beings… without free
will. Colors don’t chime, clink or jingle either in pain or protest. All you can
do is beautify the world as per others’ whims. To take control of your fate is not a power the Almighty has bestowed on
your lot, you see.”
Says who? For one, colors can hypnotize idiots and take control
of keyboards and mice. Who do you think
wrote this piece, that morbid, miserable friend of yours?
And what do you think of the social media post she made the
other day, with photos showing the entire family dressed in red? Why do you
think she scanned two supermarkets looking for a tiny red bucket all through
the last weekend? Clueless you are? Now listen me out; I’ve found my way into
that twenty month old mushy brain of her son, you see, to the point that the
kid keeps blabbering about objects being red, or ‘not red’! Catch ‘em young,
they say!
Finally, did you see that half-read book laid by her side right
now? Come on, look closer… see its name… “Orhan Pamuk?”… Na, that’s not the novel’s
name…. look again… “My Name is Red”!!! Tadaaaa…!
Puny human, remember, hell hath no fury like a color
scorned! And a color ALWAYS has its way!
Do you like me now?
...
Also published on Medium.
