Being Besharam with Rangs
🪶 The Sensitivity Series #2
Welcome to the second piece of 🪶 The Sensitivity Series. This evolving series will gently touch upon the pains and pleasures of being a sensitive creature in the 21st century. The idea is to sit with our sensitivity, play with it, and work with it. Slowly. Creatively.
Being Besharam with Rangs
(Trans: Being Shameless with Colours)
“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.”
This is how Maggie Nelson began her iconic book Bluets.
My first deep love in colours was the colour mauve.
I was already into many colours in the Camel Poster Colours box at school. Vermillion, Cobalt Blue, Bottle Green. But when I saw a bottle of Mauve — being sold independently at the shop, literally out of the box, like purple’s first cousin — I was smitten.
I didn’t buy it to paint. Just to see the thick colour make the brush plump with fluid, splash it on the paper, and spread it thin with my index finger. It was both dark and bright, soothing and energising, a friend and a lover. Uff..how many hours I spent that summer in the company of a single colour.
This crush fizzled out. I was happy to shed the dull grey uniform of school and wore pink and purple to college. A college senior wore green kajal and I was thoroughly mesmerised. I kept studying her green-underlined eyes as she spoke to my classmates. It emboldened me to try colours where they were not meant to be. That was also the time our generation went against our mothers, and bought coloured bras and chaddis.
Soon, I turned on my Govinda mode, wearing three-four bhadkile colours all at once.
A visiting faculty at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Chaks, who unfortunately passed away last year, used to wear green kurtas almost exclusively. That inspired me to find my one true colour, and commit to it, wear shades of it and be known as that girl who wears only ______. Still waiting to fill in that blank.
I feel polyamorous about colours. Today, my wardrobe and home are filled with a vast variety of colours, and even a stint at an only-formal-clothes-allowed corporate didn’t wear down my love for deep bright hues.
The only problem when you love all colours at once is you can’t focus on one. I no longer stop to look at the pearly pink of onion skin or the translucent brown of the Pears soap. All colours blend and blur into a generic colourful background.
Colour is yet another privilege I take for granted.
When having sight itself is a privilege, being able to see or enjoy colours is an additional privilege many don’t have.
Consider The Case of the Colourblind Painter — an artist who could no longer enjoy food, dreams, and the sight of the human skin because all of it looked grey and ghastly to him. Think about the widows of 19th or 20th century India, who were stripped of all colour, once their husbands passed. Historically, working-class people could not afford colours like purple, which only the royals used as a symbol of class. Mauve, it turns out, was not just my first colour, it was also the first colour to start the democratization of colours.
Nature, however, offers free entry to the museum of colours.
The spectacles of sunrise and sunset bookend a vibrant day, and rainbows are the best surprise parties ever. Ordinary daylight hits objects in such a way, they vibrate with colours, which the human eyes can see with the help of the brain. Then we, especially writers, give words to these sensations and try to paint pictures in the minds of others with our descriptions. (Imagine a novel without colour words!)
I love knowing words for different shades and tints of the same colour.
There are some colours I know in Marathi and Hindi, but not in English — Jamuni, Aboli, Firozi, Chanderi, Gulabi, Narangi. Telugu and Italian seem to have a richer vocabulary for colours.
Many times, we don’t need language to describe colours. Our index finger is enough. I used to love going to blouse piece centres with my mother and spotting the exact shade of fabric that will go with a sari. Once, I found an Asian Paints catalogue in the trash and I literally read it, line by line, box by box, colour by colour.
I miss being present with colours, without language, only wonder.
Is colour a topic worthy of a long essay?
When it can be a topic of endless news debates, innocent colours being owned, violently protected, divided into “us” and “them”, when advertisers use every bit of colour psychology to trick us into buying more, when YouTube Kids is filled with gaudy colours of glitter and slime, to hook kids into watching more — why not tune into colours for our own joy and sanity? Why not find out which colours ground us and soothe us? Which of them makes us feel a tad more alive when we wear it?
Being a sensitive person has meant that little things bother me, tiny stimuli can trigger big emotions, and anxiety can crawl up my chest at any time. If I get burdened by the painful side of sensitivity, why not use the same wiring to lean deeper into the pleasure that tiny specks of colour bring? I might not have synaesthesia, but I get regularly awestruck by a purple sky and a sexy orange highlighter. It’s the colour of chocolate that I taste before I take a bite.
A few times I’ve been told to tone down my excitement. But I want to be besharam with colours, in my journals and on my skin and admire others who dabble in their own risky colour love.
Out of all the lovely things my partner has ever said about me, it is “she brought colour into my life” that strikes the most to me. I aim to be a bringer of colours all my life.
Some Colour Gifts
Colouring - a tiny playlist of colour-related songs in Hindi/Urdu. It’s a collaborative one so feel free to add similar songs.
A photo gallery - My friend Sneha generously shares these photographs buzzing with natural colours from her walks around Iowa.
Such a delightful essay, gesturing beautifully towards so many associations, giving body to nebulous joys; while reading it I thought of many things... How colour is my favourite thing about the sense of sight; how Bhakti poetry and falling in any kind of love is so much about taking on the lover's colours; how the nine rasas have a colour ascribed to each. I thought of how while painting again with my kid I relearnt that mauve and maroon have the same parent colours, just more of one and less of the other (I often think of red as a woman and blue as male, so maybe we're all in the spectrum between mauve and maroon?) I thought of my wardrobe, and how I often spot during a particular phase of life that it's turning into one particular colour; I force myself to break the inertia by making it look more like a rainbow. I've recently realised that rainbow is my favourite colour, because it's also my idea of dynamic balance, like a ragamala made of just seven notes 🌈
You are a bringer of colours in my life too, Raju Tai :) I'm so happy to find this piece doing the rounds on Substack again 🌈