Red

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?

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Also published on Medium.