Pink Is Not the Only Color
The beautiful woman has been painting the Bara Gumbad tomb in Lodhi Gardens since eleven o'clock this morning. She arrived at ten thirty sharp and unpacked her leather satchel, taking out a water-color set, five paint-brushes of varying lengths and thicknesses, pencils, rag-cloths, pens, a clean jam-jar, and a sketch-book, which already looked very fat from the other art she must have previously fed to it. She appeared to have been a painter for a very long time, perhaps having begun to paint when she was just a small child.
It was a mellow Delhi winter morning, the sunlight beginning to generously soak the tombs and grass and the unruly, sprawling bougainvillea bushes. Perhaps, this was the artist’s favorite time to paint in the outdoors. Actually, if one were to be absolutely accurate, she did not begin painting the tomb at exactly eleven o'clock. She first sat cross-legged and stared at it for almost twenty minutes before beginning to commit it to paper with a pencil. The tomb gradually started to appear on the paper, as if her hand was lemon juice unmasking letters written in invisible ink. A bit like sculptors coaxing muscle and expression from stone, Anamika thought, producing a story where there seemed the impossibility of none.
The beautiful woman was unaware that Anamika sat nearby, half hidden in the shadow of an Asoka tree and had been watching her all this time. It was only when she put the sketch-pad down, luxuriously yawned, and rummaged in her satchel for her lunch, presumably, for she looked like the sort of woman who brought a packed lunch, that Anamika stood up and walked away. It was one thing to watch a woman paint, another thing to watch her eat.
Anamika had promised herself that she would spend the entire day in the garden but she was now at a loss as to what to do. Unlike others congregating in the park, mostly in couples or families or boisterous groups, she was a deliberately solitary presence. Oh, the beautiful woman painter was by herself too, but then, she had her art for company: Anamika had none and no one. She began walking aimlessly, threading her path through a forest of blooming champak trees before espying a rose garden. There were very few roses blooming there, and she found herself gazing instead toward a group of twenty-odd college students. Upon approaching them more closely, she observed that they appeared to be rehearsing for two separate plays. A young man in a mustard kurta, sleeveless black Nehru jacket and jeans, was carefully observing both groups, nodding, suddenly loudly expostulating when he was clearly dissatisfied with the actors' performances. Students who were not performing stood either as a mute, intently observing audience or gossiped with each other in the shadow of a peeling white arched gatehouse smothered with torn political posters.
A boy and a girl each held a script in their hands but were more interested in talking to each other than looking at it.
“You forgot the lines again! Nikhil looked like he was going to kill you,” the boy remarked.
“He always looks like he's going to kill me – or someone someday. But seriously, I have no memory these days, I forget everything. Do you know how long it took me to memorize my new mobile number?”
“How long?”
“I still haven't memorized it!”
“I knew someone who had the same problem. She wrote her number down on a piece of paper and taped it to the back of her phone until she memorized it.”
“Think how the strip of paper would look on my phone case, yaar!”
Anamika walked past them but she may as well have been a ghost so engrossed were they in their conversation. Not to mention, she thought, too blinkered in their youth to notice anyone significantly older than them. She did not mind, rather, she empathized with them: she too had been blinkered as they were at one point in time. She heard Nikhil, the director, apparently, call out to them, and they perfectly enacted a murder scene few minutes later, the boy and girl stabbing each other before lying prone on the jaundiced grass, the sunlight dribbling down their faces.
She thought of surveying this garden-theatre from the gate-house's terrace but when she tried to climb the steep stair-case, a grim-faced uniformed man appeared at the top and silently shook his finger. She retreated from the gate-house, watching him resume his position at the terrace, looking across the garden, as she had intended to do. What churned beneath the grim facade? Boredom, idleness, melancholy, what? Was he thinking of his predecessors who too had warded off intruders who had dared to foray into this space where the forefathers of their rulers slept, this dormitory of death? They still slumbered on – and he, the successor of those guards, now shooed away lovers urgently seeking privacy in a public garden or teenagers craving the perfect background for their selfies or wandering loners such as herself. She and the guard were united in their aloneness, she thought, although his was from compulsion and hers was not. She realized it was the second time in a short span of time that the thought of her aloneness had come to her. She was not sure what to make of that realization.
When Anamika returned to her now sun-soaked spot beneath the tree, she noticed that the beautiful woman painter had finished her lunch and was beginning to ink her pencil sketch; her fingers worked nimbly, quickly, making very few errors. Was she painting for pleasure or money? What would she do afterward with the painted sketch? Anamika imagined encountering it in a gallery many months later, inked, painted, framed, and embalmed in glass: a tomb of art. The beautiful woman painter meanwhile inked on blissfully, unaware of both Anamika's meandering thoughts and her presence. When she finally paused to take a sip of water, there were shadow-blue blotches dotting her palm, her fingers, and even her left cheekbone.
A birthday party meanwhile had taken birth in a space near the tomb that the beautiful woman painter was sketching. It was evidently a little girl's party judging from its copious amounts of pink party paraphernalia, including the large cake being unearthed from a square white box. Anamika noticed a woman – the mother, presumably – writing on small thin white paper strips, inserting them into limp balloons, and blowing them up. Surprisingly, none of the balloons were pink: they were mostly white and red except for one errant, cheeky bright orange one.
The mother arranged and lit six candles atop the cake before inviting the little girl and her friends to congregate around it. The little girl blew out the flickering candles – and suddenly, to Anamika and even the little girls' and her friends' surprise, all the balloons were rising in the air. The little girl's perplexed friends were clearly undecided whether to finish tunelessly sing 'Happy Birthday' or watch thirty balloons polka dot the surprisingly blue Delhi afternoon sky. The birthday girl in question eventually helped them out when she herself stopped cutting her cake to gaze upwards; it was only when the balloons finally vanished that the gathered company agreed to sing the rest of the song, the birthday girl cut the cake, and the birthday party erupted into activity again.
Anamika wondered what the mother had written upon the paper-strips and if anyone would read those bottled-balloon messages whenever and wherever the balloons landed. She thought of suddenly encountering a balloon landing upon her roof or at her feet, seeing a message bob inside its confines, like a fish in a bowl. She saw herself puncturing the balloon, hearing it pop and reaching down for the message, eager to learn what it said.
One balloon had not made it all the way up to the sky; for some reason, Anamika was unsurprised to see that it was the bright orange one. She began following the balloon's parabola path as it bobbed and dipped and rose before finally becoming enmeshed in the messy, convoluted hanging roots of an elderly banyan tree. It looked both beautifully weightless and yet, simultaneously heavy, an alien mutant fruit which had sprouted from the branches. Young boys were playing cricket beneath the tree and she was debating to ask them to fetch the balloon for her when someone hit a six – and the ball arced into the tree and towards the balloon. She did not see the moment it ceased to exist – only the wet orange fragments scattering upon the ground, like remnants of a remarkable sunset. She hunkered down next to the fragments, hunting for the message but it was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, it still lingered in the branches, where a bird would eventually make it a part of its nest or it might simply disintegrate over time, falling into the dust below and becoming tree-food.
The afternoon itself was now disappearing into the air. She wandered away from the dead balloon, the cricket-playing boys who were innocently and patently unaware of their crime, the mother now feeding her birthday daughter cake and uncaring of the fate of the balloons whom she had cast off into the sky sea. The beautiful woman painter was now rapidly filling in the inked tomb with her water-colors, clearly eager to make use of the light before it started to die and become apricot and unbearably beautiful but ultimately of little use to anyone. Anamika returned to her tree, leaning back against its sun-warmed rough bark to once more watch the beautiful woman dip and swirl her brush in the now berry-hued water-filled jam-jar. That impounded water in the jam jar looked like a mysterious, inviting concoction, promising whoever drank it immortality and fame and beauty and whatever attributes one desired to possess. The brushes in turn greedily consumed the water before transmuting whatever they absorbed into beauty on paper.
Anamika shifted her gaze to the tomb, observing that the dying light made the tomb look more alive, somehow. It radiated an inner glow, its flaking caramel brown textures becoming loquacious, the cobalt blue ceramic titles decorating the arches becoming as vividly hued as the sky had been two hours ago. Even though it was over five centuries old, the tomb presently looked as fresh as it must have been when it was first completed, basking in its exterior beauty, unmindful of the dead bodies and fugitive souls it housed within it. And when Anamika once more glanced over at the beautiful woman painter, she was sure that the woman too was aware and appreciative of the tomb's dusk vanity and feverishly sought to capture it.
By now, Anamika was not the only watching the beautiful woman paint; there were several more curious onlookers who had gathered around her, assuaging Anamika's voyeur guilt. It also appeared that the woman did not mind the audience, rather, welcoming them to contemplate both the tomb that she was painting as well as her interpretation of it. When she finally put her brush down, she was even fielding questions and answering them. But Anamika did not go up to her, not even to say hello; she remained sitting where she was.
Like a bloom, the park was closing it on itself. The mother was supervising the wrapping up of the birthday party picnic, leaving behind the air smelling of burnt candles and cream (the best kind of smell, really), and some intact balloons. The young boys too had ended their cricket match and headed towards the garden exit, carrying cricket gear. Anamika wondered if they had even noticed the balloon float towards them and into the tree and whether they were aware that they had murdered it. The theatre group had fragmented into clots of twos and threes; the girl and boy whom she had seen earlier asprawl on the ground after having killed each other were now also sitting beneath a tree, snacking on dal pakoras in grease-splattered newspaper cones. Like her, the pakora man too had been wandering through the garden all day, his entire world contained within and balanced upon a large, wide tin and glass cylinder atop his head. When he spotted a customer, he would set the cylinder upon a metal tripod and begin to dish out the pakoras; once they finished eating and paid him, he would re-set the cylinder on his head and off he would go on his wanderings again. His life on his head, she thought.
The beautiful woman was now finally packing up too; she packed as meticulously as she had unpacked, dumping the contents of the jam-jar into a bush (lucky bush, she thought, being fed with that beauty), wiping her brushes and placing them in her satchel along with her pens and pencils, and finally, the most precious of her cargo, the sketchbook. When she finished packing, she stood up and jammed a floppy black hat upon her head.
Anamika also stood up, unsure once again whether to stay longer or leave too; the mother and the birthday girl walked past her then, her friends in an uneven queue marching behind them, clutching bright pink goody bags.
“Happy birthday,” she impulsively called out to the girl.
The girl looked up at her mother, who nodded, as if to say that the girl was permitted to reply. “Thank you, Aunty,” the girl told her, fingering her ruffled pink dress, which coordinated with her identically hued rhinestone-embellished shoes, socks, jewelry, and a furry bag.
Aunty, Anamika though, I have become an Aunty.
They were going to resume walking when Anamika held them up. “Could I please tell you something?” she said, leaning closer towards the girl. “Just remember that pink is not the only color in the world.”
The mother now looked extremely perplexed now, clearly unable to reply.
“And she's absolutely right,” spoke a voice behind her, and Anamika was startled to see the beautiful woman painter's amused face. “A rainbow exists for a reason.”
The mother, her daughter, and the little girls examined the pair, unsure what to make of the two woman strangers advocating the significance of rainbows to them.
“Pink is good too,” the beautiful woman painter said reassuringly, jabbing at her own nails. “But the other colors might get upset if you don't give them a chance too.”
Everyone, including the mother and Anamika, considered this fact in relative silence, relative as in excepting the shrieking of the birds which had come home for the night to roost within the trees' rooms. But before Anamika or the woman painter could open their mouths again, the mother swiftly shepherded her charges away and towards the security of the waiting cars outside the garden.
Even though it was still not exactly dusk, the park had now virtually emptied of people.
“It must be even more beautiful by night,” the beautiful woman painter remarked, adjusting a dandelion flower patterned scarf beneath her neck. “Just imagine. All these tombs submerged in darkness, that thick luxurious blackness.” The thought seemed to please her because her face burst into a smile.
“Black is the absence of color,” Anamika said.
“So it is,” she said, thoughtfully contemplating Anamika. Anamika was about to ask her name but the beautiful woman painter then jauntily walked away, her satchel purposefully bumping against her body, heavily laden as it was with memories of the day. She held her hand up as in farewell although she did not look back.
And even though she was alone once again, as she had been throughout the day, Anamika still felt the comforting weight of the beautiful woman’s farewell in the air. The sun was still taking its time to set, the darkness still a distant thought but Anamika knew it was time to finally leave the park. And so she did.
It was a mellow Delhi winter morning, the sunlight beginning to generously soak the tombs and grass and the unruly, sprawling bougainvillea bushes. Perhaps, this was the artist’s favorite time to paint in the outdoors. Actually, if one were to be absolutely accurate, she did not begin painting the tomb at exactly eleven o'clock. She first sat cross-legged and stared at it for almost twenty minutes before beginning to commit it to paper with a pencil. The tomb gradually started to appear on the paper, as if her hand was lemon juice unmasking letters written in invisible ink. A bit like sculptors coaxing muscle and expression from stone, Anamika thought, producing a story where there seemed the impossibility of none.
The beautiful woman was unaware that Anamika sat nearby, half hidden in the shadow of an Asoka tree and had been watching her all this time. It was only when she put the sketch-pad down, luxuriously yawned, and rummaged in her satchel for her lunch, presumably, for she looked like the sort of woman who brought a packed lunch, that Anamika stood up and walked away. It was one thing to watch a woman paint, another thing to watch her eat.
Anamika had promised herself that she would spend the entire day in the garden but she was now at a loss as to what to do. Unlike others congregating in the park, mostly in couples or families or boisterous groups, she was a deliberately solitary presence. Oh, the beautiful woman painter was by herself too, but then, she had her art for company: Anamika had none and no one. She began walking aimlessly, threading her path through a forest of blooming champak trees before espying a rose garden. There were very few roses blooming there, and she found herself gazing instead toward a group of twenty-odd college students. Upon approaching them more closely, she observed that they appeared to be rehearsing for two separate plays. A young man in a mustard kurta, sleeveless black Nehru jacket and jeans, was carefully observing both groups, nodding, suddenly loudly expostulating when he was clearly dissatisfied with the actors' performances. Students who were not performing stood either as a mute, intently observing audience or gossiped with each other in the shadow of a peeling white arched gatehouse smothered with torn political posters.
A boy and a girl each held a script in their hands but were more interested in talking to each other than looking at it.
“You forgot the lines again! Nikhil looked like he was going to kill you,” the boy remarked.
“He always looks like he's going to kill me – or someone someday. But seriously, I have no memory these days, I forget everything. Do you know how long it took me to memorize my new mobile number?”
“How long?”
“I still haven't memorized it!”
“I knew someone who had the same problem. She wrote her number down on a piece of paper and taped it to the back of her phone until she memorized it.”
“Think how the strip of paper would look on my phone case, yaar!”
Anamika walked past them but she may as well have been a ghost so engrossed were they in their conversation. Not to mention, she thought, too blinkered in their youth to notice anyone significantly older than them. She did not mind, rather, she empathized with them: she too had been blinkered as they were at one point in time. She heard Nikhil, the director, apparently, call out to them, and they perfectly enacted a murder scene few minutes later, the boy and girl stabbing each other before lying prone on the jaundiced grass, the sunlight dribbling down their faces.
She thought of surveying this garden-theatre from the gate-house's terrace but when she tried to climb the steep stair-case, a grim-faced uniformed man appeared at the top and silently shook his finger. She retreated from the gate-house, watching him resume his position at the terrace, looking across the garden, as she had intended to do. What churned beneath the grim facade? Boredom, idleness, melancholy, what? Was he thinking of his predecessors who too had warded off intruders who had dared to foray into this space where the forefathers of their rulers slept, this dormitory of death? They still slumbered on – and he, the successor of those guards, now shooed away lovers urgently seeking privacy in a public garden or teenagers craving the perfect background for their selfies or wandering loners such as herself. She and the guard were united in their aloneness, she thought, although his was from compulsion and hers was not. She realized it was the second time in a short span of time that the thought of her aloneness had come to her. She was not sure what to make of that realization.
When Anamika returned to her now sun-soaked spot beneath the tree, she noticed that the beautiful woman painter had finished her lunch and was beginning to ink her pencil sketch; her fingers worked nimbly, quickly, making very few errors. Was she painting for pleasure or money? What would she do afterward with the painted sketch? Anamika imagined encountering it in a gallery many months later, inked, painted, framed, and embalmed in glass: a tomb of art. The beautiful woman painter meanwhile inked on blissfully, unaware of both Anamika's meandering thoughts and her presence. When she finally paused to take a sip of water, there were shadow-blue blotches dotting her palm, her fingers, and even her left cheekbone.
A birthday party meanwhile had taken birth in a space near the tomb that the beautiful woman painter was sketching. It was evidently a little girl's party judging from its copious amounts of pink party paraphernalia, including the large cake being unearthed from a square white box. Anamika noticed a woman – the mother, presumably – writing on small thin white paper strips, inserting them into limp balloons, and blowing them up. Surprisingly, none of the balloons were pink: they were mostly white and red except for one errant, cheeky bright orange one.
The mother arranged and lit six candles atop the cake before inviting the little girl and her friends to congregate around it. The little girl blew out the flickering candles – and suddenly, to Anamika and even the little girls' and her friends' surprise, all the balloons were rising in the air. The little girl's perplexed friends were clearly undecided whether to finish tunelessly sing 'Happy Birthday' or watch thirty balloons polka dot the surprisingly blue Delhi afternoon sky. The birthday girl in question eventually helped them out when she herself stopped cutting her cake to gaze upwards; it was only when the balloons finally vanished that the gathered company agreed to sing the rest of the song, the birthday girl cut the cake, and the birthday party erupted into activity again.
Anamika wondered what the mother had written upon the paper-strips and if anyone would read those bottled-balloon messages whenever and wherever the balloons landed. She thought of suddenly encountering a balloon landing upon her roof or at her feet, seeing a message bob inside its confines, like a fish in a bowl. She saw herself puncturing the balloon, hearing it pop and reaching down for the message, eager to learn what it said.
One balloon had not made it all the way up to the sky; for some reason, Anamika was unsurprised to see that it was the bright orange one. She began following the balloon's parabola path as it bobbed and dipped and rose before finally becoming enmeshed in the messy, convoluted hanging roots of an elderly banyan tree. It looked both beautifully weightless and yet, simultaneously heavy, an alien mutant fruit which had sprouted from the branches. Young boys were playing cricket beneath the tree and she was debating to ask them to fetch the balloon for her when someone hit a six – and the ball arced into the tree and towards the balloon. She did not see the moment it ceased to exist – only the wet orange fragments scattering upon the ground, like remnants of a remarkable sunset. She hunkered down next to the fragments, hunting for the message but it was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, it still lingered in the branches, where a bird would eventually make it a part of its nest or it might simply disintegrate over time, falling into the dust below and becoming tree-food.
The afternoon itself was now disappearing into the air. She wandered away from the dead balloon, the cricket-playing boys who were innocently and patently unaware of their crime, the mother now feeding her birthday daughter cake and uncaring of the fate of the balloons whom she had cast off into the sky sea. The beautiful woman painter was now rapidly filling in the inked tomb with her water-colors, clearly eager to make use of the light before it started to die and become apricot and unbearably beautiful but ultimately of little use to anyone. Anamika returned to her tree, leaning back against its sun-warmed rough bark to once more watch the beautiful woman dip and swirl her brush in the now berry-hued water-filled jam-jar. That impounded water in the jam jar looked like a mysterious, inviting concoction, promising whoever drank it immortality and fame and beauty and whatever attributes one desired to possess. The brushes in turn greedily consumed the water before transmuting whatever they absorbed into beauty on paper.
Anamika shifted her gaze to the tomb, observing that the dying light made the tomb look more alive, somehow. It radiated an inner glow, its flaking caramel brown textures becoming loquacious, the cobalt blue ceramic titles decorating the arches becoming as vividly hued as the sky had been two hours ago. Even though it was over five centuries old, the tomb presently looked as fresh as it must have been when it was first completed, basking in its exterior beauty, unmindful of the dead bodies and fugitive souls it housed within it. And when Anamika once more glanced over at the beautiful woman painter, she was sure that the woman too was aware and appreciative of the tomb's dusk vanity and feverishly sought to capture it.
By now, Anamika was not the only watching the beautiful woman paint; there were several more curious onlookers who had gathered around her, assuaging Anamika's voyeur guilt. It also appeared that the woman did not mind the audience, rather, welcoming them to contemplate both the tomb that she was painting as well as her interpretation of it. When she finally put her brush down, she was even fielding questions and answering them. But Anamika did not go up to her, not even to say hello; she remained sitting where she was.
Like a bloom, the park was closing it on itself. The mother was supervising the wrapping up of the birthday party picnic, leaving behind the air smelling of burnt candles and cream (the best kind of smell, really), and some intact balloons. The young boys too had ended their cricket match and headed towards the garden exit, carrying cricket gear. Anamika wondered if they had even noticed the balloon float towards them and into the tree and whether they were aware that they had murdered it. The theatre group had fragmented into clots of twos and threes; the girl and boy whom she had seen earlier asprawl on the ground after having killed each other were now also sitting beneath a tree, snacking on dal pakoras in grease-splattered newspaper cones. Like her, the pakora man too had been wandering through the garden all day, his entire world contained within and balanced upon a large, wide tin and glass cylinder atop his head. When he spotted a customer, he would set the cylinder upon a metal tripod and begin to dish out the pakoras; once they finished eating and paid him, he would re-set the cylinder on his head and off he would go on his wanderings again. His life on his head, she thought.
The beautiful woman was now finally packing up too; she packed as meticulously as she had unpacked, dumping the contents of the jam-jar into a bush (lucky bush, she thought, being fed with that beauty), wiping her brushes and placing them in her satchel along with her pens and pencils, and finally, the most precious of her cargo, the sketchbook. When she finished packing, she stood up and jammed a floppy black hat upon her head.
Anamika also stood up, unsure once again whether to stay longer or leave too; the mother and the birthday girl walked past her then, her friends in an uneven queue marching behind them, clutching bright pink goody bags.
“Happy birthday,” she impulsively called out to the girl.
The girl looked up at her mother, who nodded, as if to say that the girl was permitted to reply. “Thank you, Aunty,” the girl told her, fingering her ruffled pink dress, which coordinated with her identically hued rhinestone-embellished shoes, socks, jewelry, and a furry bag.
Aunty, Anamika though, I have become an Aunty.
They were going to resume walking when Anamika held them up. “Could I please tell you something?” she said, leaning closer towards the girl. “Just remember that pink is not the only color in the world.”
The mother now looked extremely perplexed now, clearly unable to reply.
“And she's absolutely right,” spoke a voice behind her, and Anamika was startled to see the beautiful woman painter's amused face. “A rainbow exists for a reason.”
The mother, her daughter, and the little girls examined the pair, unsure what to make of the two woman strangers advocating the significance of rainbows to them.
“Pink is good too,” the beautiful woman painter said reassuringly, jabbing at her own nails. “But the other colors might get upset if you don't give them a chance too.”
Everyone, including the mother and Anamika, considered this fact in relative silence, relative as in excepting the shrieking of the birds which had come home for the night to roost within the trees' rooms. But before Anamika or the woman painter could open their mouths again, the mother swiftly shepherded her charges away and towards the security of the waiting cars outside the garden.
Even though it was still not exactly dusk, the park had now virtually emptied of people.
“It must be even more beautiful by night,” the beautiful woman painter remarked, adjusting a dandelion flower patterned scarf beneath her neck. “Just imagine. All these tombs submerged in darkness, that thick luxurious blackness.” The thought seemed to please her because her face burst into a smile.
“Black is the absence of color,” Anamika said.
“So it is,” she said, thoughtfully contemplating Anamika. Anamika was about to ask her name but the beautiful woman painter then jauntily walked away, her satchel purposefully bumping against her body, heavily laden as it was with memories of the day. She held her hand up as in farewell although she did not look back.
And even though she was alone once again, as she had been throughout the day, Anamika still felt the comforting weight of the beautiful woman’s farewell in the air. The sun was still taking its time to set, the darkness still a distant thought but Anamika knew it was time to finally leave the park. And so she did.
May / June 2023
Priyanka Sacheti is a writer and poet based in Bangalore, India. She grew up in the Sultanate of Oman and was educated in the United Kingdom. She's published widely about gender, art, culture, and the environment for various international digital and print publications. Her literary work and art has appeared in many journals such as Barren, The Common, Popshot, Dustmag Poetry, and Lunchticket as well as several past and forthcoming anthologies. She's currently working on a poetry and short story collection. She shares her journey of photography and art along with her writings at @priyankasacheti on Twitter.
Art: Jennifer Peart. Future Site of Perseverance Farms, acrylic on wood panel, 12” diameter