Colour Code
Yellow.
The colour of that small bulb in my room. The small bulb, emanating dull light luminous just about enough for me to make out my nose from my mouth as I stare into the mirror.
The colour of enigma, which was how I first came across the colour when I started registering them and attributing them to a certain elements in my life. I had to settle for this monotony to compromise darkness, it was no choice. My room was your typical Potter’s hole in the wall. The cardboard partition that made my room a ‘room’ was the farthest my parents could go to cater my whims. It doesn’t help a lot when your uneducated migrant mother lives with your understandably cranky businessman father whose profit graph has taken a fancy in skiing.
Those dull yellow light rays lent my room the best they had. It wasn’t much, but hell, I didn’t want brighter watts either. I used to stare at that bulb for hours at times, just watching that filament- tungsten, I surprisingly remember- erode away slowly for my cause.
Yellow. I never fancied that colour much. And as on today, I hate it.
Yellow is what is everything that’s wrong with the world. The colour of fire- yellow. The fire of missiles, the nuclear weapons that cause destruction, which shred lives and mince no regret while doing so. It is the colour of disgust. Look at your pee, your shit, your vomit. It is a synonymous motherfucker if I use it on you.
The sunrays are yellow. The rays those are ever ready to scorch and toast you alive if you leave yourself to be awed by its charisma. It is ruthlessly overwhelming when it comes and shows you its wrath. As if, in the test of human nature, nature wants to defeat humans only because it is so desperate to underline ‘survival of the fittest’.
Yellow- the colour of envy, the colour of a meek surrender. The colour of the palatial bungalow that was her house. That beautiful colossal structure in the heart of town. The one with a giant balcony of the size of my room. The balcony of her room where I wanted to chide her over her meeting other men. The place, staring at which, I realized that if I wanted to be with her, I had to accept even the most loathsome of her habits.
The tint under which she yanked at my heart and tore it to smithereens. The diffused yellow club lights which made her face radiant with each tequila shot, and their same tone when she refused to recognize me and got bouncers to throw me out. I am no stalker, I am a lover, but she refused to give me a single chance.
My agony is yellow when it ends. The turmeric my best friend used to bandage me with when I cut myself was yellow. Yes, yellow can be good. It is the colour of the candle-light under the grace of which, I fantasized our numerous dinners. It was the colour of her joy when she was adorned in that glittering metal. It was what she looked most beautiful in, when she gingerly placed that yellow rose in the silky bun of her hair.
Yes, yellow can be good indeed. But smolder me white if I still don’t hate yellow.
You see, it is red that I like.
Red is the colour of an audacious hope. The colour that my mother wore each single day of her miserably impoverished life on her forehead. The colour of chastity and benevolence, of inexplicable faith and trust. The colour that mutely cajoled that we might be living in a ghetto, but it is ‘we’ that matter, not the ‘ghetto’.
It is the colour of celebration. The colour of the shirt which my mother loved to buy for me when Diwali was near. The colour of crackers’ covers before they degenerated into that despicable yellow. It was what I loved even the meat of.
Red is the colour of comfort, the colour of emotional support. The colour of a few patches on the face of my best friend after he suffered acid burns in his factory accident. That never deterred or wavered with my affection towards him though I knew it would repulse her. I hated her yellow bred hypocrite guts. And I stayed by my friend throughout.
It seduces, that red does. I remember my hard-on’s whenever I saw her in her red one-piece. It is what her lips were made of, the same lips that she laid on one turdface in the backseat of a car barely minutes after they spat those orders of throwing me out of the club.
Red is the colour of glee, of satisfaction. It is the colour you can extract out of a person and feel no regrets about. It is the colour I bathed in after I cracked her skull open. That whore always was a wild child. Loved to play and loved to be played with. So I did. I tied her up and proceeded to slowly toy with death’s infatuation.
It is patience, and it is elegance. It is what trickles out when you cut the veins. Peeping out at first, doing a quick check of the new panorama and then oozing out in a friendly way, just the way you want it, sweetly, softly and slowly, causing you a little harm but doing the damage all the same. It is quirky but boy, is it smart!
Sadly, red can disappoint. It is the colour of healing, of danger. The colour of the siren of an ambulance as well as the police van. The zooming vehicles- one that scrambles to save your life, other that pines on stripping you of yours.
Brown. Alas, it is what my life has progressed to now.
You know brown? It is the colour of pain and anguish. Of the lathis I get the feel of for the funsies of those animals in uniform. It is the decider colour, that of the gavel- the ridiculously overrated motif in the law abode.
Brown is the colour of the food I get in prison, solid or liquid. The gooey mess that we create a brawl for to shove down our throats. Yes, brown can have a sense of humour. It gives me life till it gives me death.
It is the colour of the rope I am going to face. It is the colour of the planks of the platform I shall stand on. And interestingly, as I lay here in the cell, brushing off the lethargic overlapping legs of my cell-mates from time to time, I think about the red blood that will drip from my throat if the noose is not lubricated, in the dull yellow light of the corridor.
Brown, the colours you get when you mix yellow and red with a little help of the blue. The only thing I now wonder is if I should hate it or let it pass.
Toughie.
