Purple

Purple. Not the kind of purple that you get by mixing red and blue on your colour palette. The kind of purple that catches your eyes, the light shades of it which we see on the flowering trees along highways, blooming, falling, yet blooming again.

And sometimes I see this tint of purple in my dream, just like a dry leaf hovering in the wind from one place to another;unnoticed; unattached.

That purple was reminding me of something, something that I already knew. Something which is too familiar that I must have ignored.

Yet it feels like a memory that I never had.

Brown pinafore, white hair-bow, confused tireless face- the first day of school-the day I mark with the image of me sitting next to a girl with black round bindi, big ears and a pleasant smile. My first friend. I remember us popping our heads out of the brown brick wall of our school block with round holes on it,looking at birds flapping their wings to fly in the big blue sky. I remember us having grapes during our snacks break, with a heart that badly wanted to grow up fast, so that we can live together in a hostel room with a double decker bed. Maybe it is this shade of purple; the deep purpleness of the grapes who once laughed at us for our naive yet beautiful dreams, that came to my dream. The childish shade of purple, perhaps.

A blue diary, not so big, not so small, but filled with the scent of love and friendship, which was enough to make a twelve year old truly happy- a dairy that I gifted to my best friend. A dairy that had dry leaves and random drawings, a dairy that I wrote with all my heart-too cheesy, too mismatched, too me.

Maybe it was my way of telling someone that a part of me wants to become a writer someday, even though the other part is crawling under self doubt. But the purple I saw in my dream was neither that of the dairy nor that of my immature writing, but of hers; the one whom I gifted it to. The purpleness belong to no one but her, as it’s the colour of her joy and her tears, for she is everything and everywhere.

Twelfth standard, the night before school trip, a room filled with eight thrilled hearts.Few watching movie, few pretending to sleep, few playing guitar and the rest singing and screaming their lungs out- it was hard to identify one from another, as all of us were looking the same- happy.

With cheeks turning red and eyes getting wet, the purpleness of the moment rose. The tint of purple I saw in my dream must be this. This feeling.

This constant beauty of familiarity, of friendship; filled with chaos, laughter and silences, a feeling of home, a feeling that nobody ever talks about, for it is not something to be talked about, but to be felt, felt in a way that it lightens our heart with the mere thought of their smile.

Dusty air and a crowded park,Dilli. Eighteen year old me teaching my kids- the kids in my NGO, english alphabets for the hundredth time. Their tiny bodies with huge hearts waiting for the time to reach 5:30, so that the study hour is over, and the play time begins. Somedays we play kabaddi, somedays I watch them dance, and somedays, very rarely, we just sit there in silence, enjoying each others company and watch the dusk slowly turning into night. After saying goodbye, just before I leave, sometimes some kids come and wraps their tiny fingers around my waist and hugs me in a way that-

The black shade of nothingness which was emptying everything out of me, the redness of my eyes after crying myself to sleep, the blues of loneliness that I was trying hard to hide and all the other colours that I could ever imagine mixes up with one another and turns purple.

It turns purple for a second. The purple that I saw in my dream.

Maybe, just maybe, the purple all this while, was just the peace I need in my life, the peace that keeps coming back to me, the kind of peace I need to hold on to.

Because, everything in life returns to where they belong,or at least I like to believe so. Everything find its way back like the rhythmic unmatched flow of waves, usually accompanied by musical breeze who kisses our eyes.

Slowly,

yet constantly,

everything comes back to you.