regarding the color REDACTED ; dil dhundhta hai

reflections done in the first week of 2026; journal pt 4745629

the colour, my favourite as a young girl. everything i owned gradually turned purple. shoes, an eraser, a notebook. the sweet spot at the triangulation of red, blue and pink. at the age of eight i walked the tree-lined streets of a city that is now a distant memory. the roads, granite and dull, darkened with jaamun that fell each evening, waiting for my innocent act of cruelty — crush the soft ones, pick up the rest to stain your teeth with. the colour, such a lull between swimming pool cold and chocolate warm. the intonations of the colour fit within the blankness of my life with ease. a little redder, and that was my hair. a bit more bluish, and you’d have a bruise on my thigh that i nursed — no, raised, to a patch the size of my hand. i wore it like a proof that things happened and i had no control over them.

sweetened tongues in summer, sweltering heat making the tshirts stick to our backs (circa waves - tshirt weather). my toenails painted, bright blooms in sand. ice cream sticks thrown after chewn to death. a haze took over all of us, we were all going crazy in our personal ways. but purple ran through it all — like box dye running down my scalp, like the fizz out of a cough syrup medley that we accidentally shook too hard, like the ink from a glitter pen that was stolen from a kid i tutored who had more than me at her smallyoung than i ever had. purple ran through the veins of an overdose, and then through the eyeballs when red just wasn’t worrisome enough. purple stained my eyelids too, whenever i’d have one of my cooler nightmares, the ones that would take place at nighttime, in terror that wanted to escape using my body as a medium.

more than a visual, it’s how the taste would make me surrender. it was how i imagined the velvety black shampoo in black bottles would taste like. the chilled lollies in plastic tubes, right after getting down the school bus. i tried the others — green, blue, pink, white (frank ocean - pink + white) and i could only taste betrayal. the cough syrups, in dark bottles, contained further in a brown paper bag. they would go down the throat as a prologue to all the liquids that were waiting for me in plastic cups, years later. and i would always sweeten the aftermath with something like a pill; a chewy skittle, a hard candy — my favourite. it was called heartbeat, and came in the shape of tiny hearts. i remember when i tasted my first, my father had been having a lucky few weeks, and they coincided with my birthday, so he got me the fancy confectionary to raise my swagstocks at school. i tasted all of the varieties of the artificial sugar rocks, to deduce which ones to give to my best friends; the memory betrays but the fuzziness of it all alludes to the fact that i must have had at least a couple best friends then, right? i wasn’t that bad as a person, i hope? surely, somebody would have picked me? the mango, the lychee, the strawberry, they all tasted fine, but the blackcurrant took me in. the heart sat on my tongue, purple and wounded, a preface to what would happen over and over, to me and to my others, in the coming years. it didn’t taste sickly sweet, like you’d expect candies to be. it was the first complex taste of my life, tucked away in a small plastic wrapper. there was something electric to it, a buzz that could only be credited to the colour. blackcurrant, an exotic word that had entered my vocabulary reading enid blyton, and left much to the imagination, was now packaged, somewhere in rajasthan, under technical assistance from thailand. such an important international relation, now mine to swallow, and throw the remains in the dustbin, probably made in china. the candy was everything — buzzing with a minty quality, like vicks made edible — and enjoyable. i saved five for myself, and gave everything else from the packet up in school to subject myself to 40 seconds of “happy birthday” by 27 unruly kids my age, some of whom would grow up but never grow out of the meanness that had become their own personal bruises that would keep on festering. they would always find something to feed it.

i was lucky in some ways. my brother preferred the lychee flavoured more, and my mother, the mango. my father did not enjoy anything hard entering his system, he’d rather send it all out shooting like bright red magic beams — like sparklers on diwali, like the sun setting right before the violet of the night settled all over us like a void, like a blanket.

so i had heartbeat blackcurrant all to myself, and then, so it goes, i forgot all about it. other things replaced it. mood indigo (nina simon - mood indigo), i moved through cities, replacing the sweetness of confectioneries with the loudness of concoctions that helped me be better at forgetting the concept of Best Friendship. i started liking green more. the heart within turned purple and harder, and my tongue lost color, for a bit. nothing tasted the way it was supposed to, so i went to bed hungry. nobody wanted to be my heartbeat blackcurrant love candy anymore, nobody wanted me all by myself. i would have made a big deal about it, but it didn’t hinder the usual routine, so i stayed put. until, i fell a couple times, the boots fraying. the knees bled, and then shut themselves in, a layer of blue and black all over. it reminded me of the party thrown to celebrate my baby brother. i hit my knees on the marble floors repeatedly, until i bled through my pink and yellow frock. there were still parties, but wasn’t much to celebrate. my only party trick left was leaving early, and that’s when i fell in a ditch made of purple leaves and red mud and it all tasted all too familiar. i laid there all night, not waiting for anybody. i saw the sky, and my heart splattered all over it. the birds made their way in and out of the stains, and i could feel each tug within. daybreak and i got up. i chucked my boots. i walked some more. it was the edge of summer. mulberry trees lined the concrete of a city i now begrudgingly call home. i squashed some, i picked the rest.

a photo clicked three days ago

my notebook decoration that i did on 10/01/2026