PROMPT: A STORY BASED ON EXPLAINING COLOURS TO A BLIND PERSON.
I
"Are you gawking at a guy?" Dhruva asked.
Sudha frowned. "I wish."
He folded his walking stick with a sharp click and said, "What else do you wish for?"
"For you to be silent."
"Seriously, what are you looking at?"
Sudha pondered briefly before she answered, "People."
"People?" He scowled and added, "Yes, they're the worst."
She believed him, even though she knew he'd forgiven people who had insulted him and laughed at him. She'd seen him apologize to a man who made a big deal to pick up the earphones that fell out of his hands on the metro. A lot of people didn't deserve this world, not as much as Dhruva.
She rested her elbows on the railing and glanced around. The grey three-story-long poster of a brand-new Benz car hung lazily in the mall's centre. The brown, overflowing chocolate fountain on the second floor, and the bright, orange jacket of a man posing for a picture on the other side of her floor. It was a slow day at the shopping mall. Minimal crowd. She liked it that way.
Dhruva stood in silence beside her. He wasn't looking down; he could have, but it wouldn't have done any good. He adjusted his glasses and leaned back at the railing. Leaning! Sudha wondered how easy it came for her. The word. The verb. For him, it was a process. He took a step back and touched the metal railing with one hand to confirm that it was still there, that he could lean on it, and that it would not disappear, melt, or dissolve. Then he rested his back against it. Why didn't he ask her if he could lean on the railing? She knew better. He was as proud as he was blind.
"How can you lie with such a straight face?"
Dhruva shrugged. "It's easy to hide the lie when you don't have your eyes to reveal everything."
"Oh," Sudha giggled. "Now, now, ladies and gentlemen, here comes the prophet. Blindest, the third."
The mall went quiet. The guy in the orange jacket was gone. Was it the jacket or the shirt? She struggled to remember. The ground floor looked at her blankly, the mall staff dragging themselves around. They must be closing the place soon.
"Hey, do you want to take a walk?" Sudha asked.
"To Bangalore?"
Sudha shook her head and straightened. She felt her jeans tight around her legs. Javed never got her size right. What a generous and attentive boyfriend he always had been.
"I'm not going to Bangalore. Would you drop the topic already?"
"I won't." He opened his stick and tapped it on the floor. "I deserve the answers. You don't bring a blind guy out in public and not give him gossip. That's absolute treachery."
"Call my life gossip again and I'll paint your specs white."
"Why would I care?"
The tremor in his voice said otherwise. He adjusted his glasses, his hand lingering on them a little longer than usual. Sudha bit the inside of her cheek and tried not to smile, knowing he cared. He had ordered those glasses specifically to deceive people into thinking he wasn't blind. They gave him a cool gen-z expression.
"Imagine a brown guy with white specs walking around in traffic."
"Shut up."
She held his hand and walked down the corridor together. She'd always assumed that she led the way, taking him to where they wanted to go. But slowly she came to understand he walked just as clumsily when she was holding his hand as when he was walking alone. It was little, but she noticed it after years of knowing him. Maybe it was his muscle memory that kept him from walking like everyone else. A lifetime of walking with the assumption that there was always something in the way would have had its consequences.
"Alright, I've an admittedly insane idea," Dhruva said, shifting his stick to the other hand while locking his elbow with hers. "All this talk about brown, white, and people, it made me wanna ask. So, promise me you won't laugh."
"I swear I'll not laugh out loud."
"I want you to describe colours to me."
"What?"
"You know. Colours. I've never seen one."
"I know. You told me once when we first met. We even filed a police complaint that they were missing."
"I hate it when you go through breakups. You just—the sarcasm is unbearable. Even illogical."
Sudha kept her mouth shut, her heart pounding in her ears. Javed had not broken up with her. She liked to assume he did so she could have some closure. She woke up last Thursday morning and he just wasn't there. He slipped out. Ran away. Abandoned her like she was a pet he couldn't be bothered caring for. He was an idiot. Well, she let him be. Honestly, it was her fault. She should have hidden her headphones. The jackass even took the warranty card. It was a thorough and meaningful theft.
"I'm sorry," Dhruva said after she hadn't said anything for a while.
"Same to you."
"Now, about the colours—"
"Sure." Sudha cut him off and sighed. "Orange is like eating apples."
"Eating apples. How does that—"
"You know that moment you've eaten half of an apple and you're chewing. That lingering sweetness, the residue of a memory enough to remember it forever. Orange is like that. A residue. A half of two other colours."
As they reached the end of the IMAX floor, Sudha could smell popcorn in the air. She took them down the escalator, wondering how silly her explanation sounded, how ridiculous. She noticed the shops for clothes on the floor below them. Neon signs hung on the glass doors and walls, and the well-dressed mannequins judged the tired workers.
Dhruva must've heard her thoughts because he too said, "That's stupid. Orange can be better, I assume."
"Next, yellow." Sudha continued, confusing herself about why she was doing it. Perhaps she was pissed off at his weird request. "It's like my mother's voice."
"I love your mother's voice," Dhruva said.
"The way she asked us to tie our shoelaces in the railway station before we boarded that train to college. The way she yelled at me when I broke up with Madhav last year. The way she asks us to eat before nine every night."
Dhruva nodded and said, "The way she cries when you fall asleep and asks me not to tell you, fully knowing I'd do it anyway. The husky manner of her tone when she makes me promise."
"Yep, that's yellow. You're catching the drift, my boy."
Sudha spun on her heels, hiding her untimely tears. Part of her reminded her that Dhruva couldn't see them. But the rational side of her knew better. A chill ran over her skin, and she rubbed her hands along her elbow. She wanted to spend the night without breaking down in front of her best friend. She had to.
"What's green like?"
"What's green like? Let me think. Yes, the mud pot."
"Ah, mud pot. I got it." Dhruva shrugged, handing over his stick to her. "I'm not blind anymore. I can picture green now."
"And my sarcasm is illogical? You Dimwit."
"Fuckface."
"Arseclown."
"Fuck nugget."
Sudha kicked his left leg and fled from his side.
"Stupid Green fuck."
"Fuck is your go-to word for everything. Forget colours, let me teach you curse words."
Dhruva pointed his stick towards a wall, presuming Sudha was there, and said, "You're not teaching me colours, fuckbrush. You're describing them. At least, you're trying to."
"What the hell is a fuckbrush?" Sudha burst out laughing.
"I don't know." Dhruva still talked to the wall. "How the hell is a mud pot green?"
"You remember, we had a mud pot at our school in the summer. They fill it up in the morning and by the afternoon, everyone is running to the nearest water cooler to get their bottles filled. You wait on the stairs for me, saying, 'I'd love to have some water from the mud pot.' I fill both our bottles, bring them back, and say, 'The water tastes different.' You say, 'Better different?' And I loudly reply, 'Of course.'"
"Really?" A glow took over Dhruva's face. "That's how green is?"
"No doubt. Often, I sit in a park, staring at the looming trees and that's all I remember. The mud pot water."
"I love green."
"Me too, boy. Me too."
Sudha caught a change of expression on his face, perhaps a hint of a frown to come, and asked, "What's it now?"
"But you only go to parks to make out with your boyfriends, so..."
"I blame myself."
"What?"
"I shouldn't have met you today."
She left him behind. She got on the escalators. She got off the escalators. A few minutes later, she was at the exit. She didn't feel guilty. She felt a little guilty. Her blood group was guilt-positive.
II
When one of the mall staff left Dhruva next to her, she cringed at the way Dhruva clung to the stranger's arm. He had a habit of pretending to be helpless beyond his capabilities with others. It makes them feel good, he'd always say.
Sudha knew that he could come down all the escalators in the mall without a hitch. He knew the mall better than she did. The mall staff who had dropped him off was a middle-aged woman who gave Sudha worried looks since she sat there unresponsive to the arrival of her friend. The woman must have expected Sudha to get up and welcome him or at the very least, act as if she had a reason to leave her poor, blind friend behind. Sudha wanted to tell the woman that he was a certified arsehole. But the way the woman patted him on the palms while thanking him for being so brave, was enough to realize that he had charmed her. Conniving idiot.
"You abandoned me," Dhruva said after the staff woman left.
"That's ironic coming from you."
He walked forward, found the cement bench she'd been sitting on with his knee, and settled beside her.
"And you left the conversation in the middle."
"I've a few questions of my own." She figured if she was doing something crazy for him, he might as well repay her likewise.
"Everybody has questions."
"Well, mine are important to me."
"Fire away," Dhruva said. He looked exhausted, gasping for breath at regular intervals. He was no longer the energetic kid who had no care for his disability. He used to run into walls and bang his knees on the edge of the bench and still had the energy to laugh at himself.
"Do you like my cooking?"
"God, no."
She sighed. "When are you getting married?"
He wavered for a moment, but answered, "Next June."
"Why didn't you invite me?"
No answer.
"Why did you leave me out?"
Silence.
"Why do you hate me?"
He snorted at her question. "That's one way to see it."
Sudha exhaled, hiding her face in her hands.
"What does grey look like?"
"Do you remember the old cassettes?" Sudha asked. "The feel of them, the way we could wound them with a pencil. The size of them."
"I once broke one of your cassettes, and you stole my Harry Potter pad."
"That's how grey feels like," Sudha said, tired of her own words. "Like something old, something stolen."
"What about red?"
She wanted to tell him that red was a betrayal. The betrayal of knowing that your best friend, the one friend you had ever truly trusted, had left you out of one of the most important moments of his life. The arrogance, the disloyalty, the forgetfulness. Her moving across the country didn't make it okay for him to forget to invite her. Hearing it from her mother, of all people, hurt her physically. The woman never called if not to berate her for her life choices or to mock her for the invitations she never received.
"Sudha?"
She snapped out of her fever dream. "For me, red is like reading braille. I keep forgetting I've to read with my fingers."
"I know you're pissed off at me but stop lashing out."
She smiled weakly. "No, no, you know I am still working on my braille reading. The worst part is I can't help but look at it while I'm reading. I just can't help it. No matter how pointless it is."
"You remember all the 64 characters of braille?"
"You bet."
"I'm beaming with pride."
Sudha leaned onto him and said, "I can see that. I'm not blind."
She heard him laugh and rested her head on his shoulder.
"Did you know that my fiancé's brother took two days to read the braille side of our wedding card? He called me at 5:00 a.m. one day to tell me he finished reading it. You people with eyes are very possessive about your wins and losses."
"Sure," Sudha sang. "The card I never got and the people I never met. Tell me all about it."
"You know I think you haven't asked the right questions," Dhruva spoke in a defensive tone. There was a bleakness in his voice, a regularity, like he had been hurt, like he had rehearsed his responses. "This should not be about whether I like your cooking or not. It's: Do I want you in my kitchen, my house? Yes, always. This should not be about why I did not invite you. It's: Why am I running from you? If I must spend more time wondering whether you'll call me this week or not, I think I'll fall apart like an old machine without a spare part to repair me. Sudha, I want to move on. Especially from the idea of waiting for you forever."
Sudha glanced at him. Sweat brimmed his forehead. One of his collars was folded in reverse. She wrapped her arms around his neck and laid her head against his shoulder. It was an uncomfortable embrace, but she didn't care. She breathed on his neck, and he smelled of popcorn and regret. The summer wind blew her hair over his unresponsive face, and she heard the distant cry of a child. She was like a wave trying to hold onto the rock on the beach.
"White is like hugging you."
"Blank?"
"No. It's peaceful. And honest. Our kind of minimalism."
"Like a painting?"
"Like a survival."
They were both twelve when she hugged him for the first time. He stood next to a two-tiered cake, wearing a blue suit with a tie whose design almost matched the cake's icing. She vividly remembered him fiddling with his suit's pocket square until she had to smack his hand down. It was his first birthday party, and he was nervous. He was bribing the other kids with food and music in an attempt to fit in. She thought a hug would soothe him, so she reached out and pulled him into her arms. She didn't think much of it at the time. It was a reflex. He didn't speak to her the rest of the night. Now she knew why.
"Have you ever thought that time is the most disabled thing out there?" Dhruva asked.
Sudha said nothing.
"It can't hear, smell, or feel. And it can't see us. It'll just move on. But damn, it heals. You must let it."
She rubbed her runny nose on his shirt and said, "Please tell me someone famous said this."
He shrugged and her head rose with his shoulder. "No, it's just me. Your Blindest, the third."
She laughed quietly, hugging him tighter, perhaps in the hope of dissolving into him. Be that rare phenomenon that poetry raves about in the century to come. The girl who merged with her favourite person. The girl who didn't let go of her favourite person. What a hollow dream it was!