VIRIDESCENT-AL

“Honey you are a rock
Upon which I stand
And I come here to talk
I hope you understand

That green eyes
Yeah, the spotlight shines upon you
And how could
Anybody deny you?

I came here with a load
And it feels so much lighter now I met you
And honey you should know
That I could never go on without you

Green eyes

Honey you are the sea
Upon which I float
And I came here to talk
I think you should know

That green eyes
You’re the one that I wanted to find
And anyone who
Tried to deny you must be out of their mind”

-Green Eyes, Coldplay

Coldplay taught me when I was a teenager that green, mixed with honey, the colours in the eye in the music video of the song, was the colour of desire. Not lust, not all consuming obsession. Desire born out of a sense of comfort felt in the presence of someone. The desire to be desired. The kind of desire that is meant to “save” you. Comfortable desire. A slow churning blend of cool translucent emerald, and warm olive tones. The colours chasing each other steadily, in a mixing cup, swirling into eternity.

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“mann ranat gela ga paan paanat gela ga

mann cheenchechya jhadat ambyacha padaat gela ga”

-Mann Ranat Gela Ga, Jogva

‘Mann Ranat Gela Ga’, is song from the Marathi movie Jogva An internationally acclaimed and celebrated film that I wasn’t allowed to watch, because my grandmother thought I couldn’t take it. I still haven’t watched it. The song instantly pulls me into an environment infused with green smoke, and the sounds and smell of the first rain. The above words from the song, see the naïve girl in the beginning of the movie celebrating the infinite sense of possibilities in the universe which comes with childish innocence. She says “My heart fled into the forest, it fled into every leaf in the forest. My heart effervescent and excited, ran into the tamarind tree, and the unripe mango bud.”

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Green is in the smell of earth after the first rain. Which back home, unlike New York actually smells amazing. My favourite smell in the universe, announcing the dawn of the monsoons. When whole world, every leaf, every brick wall, ever flower looks brighter, as though the rain has washed off the dusty film of dirt that summer brought, and gifted you with new and improved high definition vision.

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I once heard someone say Indians are passionate about three things-religion, politics, and cricket. There is a special kind of green. A shade, somewhere between coriander green and “popti” (parrot) green, that I was once told, by someone inconsequential enough to escape my memory, I wasn’t allowed to like simply because it appeared on the uniform of the Pakistani Cricket Team. I associated that colour with a lack of interest in the game, which is universally unacceptable, to the point of being considered alien, even demonic, by what I know as the Indian populace at large.

If you exclaim to your family, that you would rather do anything else, than join the “khandaan” in the boisterous viewing of an India versus Pakistan match, you are affectionately branded anti-national. It is the colour of my family’s collective embarrassment at my lack of knowledge of cricket lingo. And sometimes, when Dhoni gets out a few moments or hours, around the time, I comment on how I don’t understand why people like him so much, I find myself on the receiving end of several stink eyes. And sometimes, I get a smaller serving of cucumber salad at dinner time, in comparison to my more cricket-friendly cousins. My Dadi’s refreshing cucumber salad bears promises of cleansing your soul. Surely, I don’t deserve it, because there is no hope for redemption, when your worst sin is not cheering for Yuvraj Singh, and wishing he got out already, so that the match would end faster, and you could have your turn, watching TV.

Of course, if you have the tendency to dryly comment on how darkly hilarious it is, that we continue to invest so much, and fight so obstinately over the outcome of a sport, invented by the same people who turned our brothers and sisters against us, and tore apart families for their personal entertainment. Entertainment provided by the special show titled colonialism, in its two hundred year long, variety episode set in the exotic, foreign, and sublime Indian landscape, the country of elephants, snake charmers and fakirs. A variety episode, whose repercussions continue to haunt us today.

*popti- parrot green

Khandaan- An extremely large joint family spanning several generations

Dadi- paternal grandmother

Dhoni- M.S. Dhoni( star player and captain of the Indian cricket team, last time I checked. A really long time ago.)

Yuvraj Singh- Another cricketer

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Green is my cousin, Kshitij’s favourite colour. We grew up together. We haven’t spoken in a year. I don’t think he has noticed. “You can’t like green”, I remember my seven year old self telling him, “It is the colour of cow dung”. Little me was an uptight rule-loving idiot, who never anticipated that she would grow into a purple haired hippie, who inserted poop references into ninety percent of her conversations. “It is the colour of Mehendi “, I would tell him. “Mehendi may be pretty, but it stinks! I read somewhere that they make it out of sparrow shit!”

My little brother was never dissuaded from his love for the colour. He still loves that foul shade of green. Or he did, the last time I checked.

Mehendi-Henna

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More than anything else it could represent in the universe, Green is for Pudina.

Mint leaves if you prefer.

Oh Pudina, Pudina, Pudina…Loyal, dependable, steadfast, loving Pudina, in every single one of its avatars. Pudina in coconut and Pudina chutney, to pleasure your taste buds, eaten with ‘dosas’, ‘idlis’, sambar, and every kind of ‘vada’ to have ever existed, on a cool clean marble floor set for a nine am breakfast.

Pudina, the graceful breath of fresh air, infusing magic into every ‘dish’ it walks into. Pudina leaves that your ‘Bhaajiwali’ will give away to you for free, because she heard that you got a good score in your board examination in school. Pudina in the five rupee tiny silver packet, free with the purchase of the twenty rupee packet of ‘Dhaniya’.

Dear, faithful Pudina, whose very pronunciation makes you feel like a tuning fork has been struck against your aura, to produce a single true and perfect note, now reverberating all around you, and breathing a little bit of it warm golden light into your lungs.

Idli, dosa, vada- kinds of breakfast food, local to states in south India

Dhaniya- A kind of spice

Bhaajiwali- A woman who sells vegetables on a handcart or pavement

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Irish Green is the colour of dreams. An innocent childhood interpretation of an Irish legend. Irish green is a little brown girl, nearly getting lost in her city, in her attempts to find the pot of gold, at the end of the rainbow. Because in her mind, if she can prove that the pot of gold exists, she will have proved that proved that magical creatures exist, and will have evidenced the potential existence of mermaids. And in her four year old brain, there could be nothing better that real mermaids.

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Green is the colour of the clover leaves and leprechauns that I would tell my grandfather about. And in return, he would tell me green tinged tales of envy the green eyed monster, and his insatiable urge to covet virtues that he does not possess.

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Santa Claus used to be the big man in green and white, before coca cola rebranded him in 1950s to encourage their sales in the aftermath of the Second World War. Since, it was difficult to introduce an unknown product during a time of post war depression, the company researched and commercialized an old European myth, which has today become associated with themes of childhood, innocence, and coming of age.

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The colour green has grown so accustomed to embodying both ends of a situation, that it has come to identify with thresholds. It is the colour of fertility, hope, safety progress, and also that of disgust, sickness, acidity. Spinach provides Popeye, the sailor man, the power to overcome all obstacles. It is also the colour his face turns into when he is going to puke. In America, green is used to denote a rise in stocks while in East Asian countries, it is used to denote a fall in stocks. In cartoon shows, the colour is used to show both fields of healthy abundance, and also acidic, toxic industrial waste, and nasty bubbling concoctions in cauldrons. The colour green is a precipice, as potent as either side of it.

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Chris Wood explains why the images created by night vision glasses appear green. The phosphors on the screens of night vision glasses are deliberately chosen to make green pictures because our eyes are more sensitive to green light. It’s also easier to look at green screens for long periods than to look at black and white ones (that’s why early computer screens tended to be green). Hence, night vision goggles have their characteristic, eerie green glow.

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Green is the colour of Urdu letters neatly printed in the graceful script on white walls of the ‘chawl’ houses in an alley near my house. The alley runs through a Muslim ‘chawl’ community, and his also home to horses who live in a stable owned by the families of the former ‘tongawallahs’ who inhabited the old city, and were slowly pushed out of business, and traffic, and the construction of a skywalk in the middle of the road, made it impossible to sustain their living from entertaining ‘tonga’ rides. Along with the horses are roosters, and paired up goat kids tied to each other by a leash, and decorated with bells and sparkly light paper ornaments. As you walk through the alley, you walk under a canopy of small green and silver square flags and ‘patakas’ hanging in neat rows between the roofs of houses. During, tiny squares of thin paper float happily in the breeze against the sunny skies. I wonder what happens to them in the monsoons. Do they all grow soggy and fall off? Are the very many of them created ad hung up all over again when the rains finally stop? Or are they not made of paper and just really thin resilient cloth after all. Cloth whose resilience mirrors that of the Muslim community in an area that is so obnoxiously and suffocatingly right wing Hindu.

Chawls- A group of a certain kind of buildings that are four to five floors tall, at the most, and have approximately 20 rooms in them, so that each individual house is a room, known as a “kholi”.

Patakas- little flag

Tonga- A horse drawn carriage of sorts

Tongawallah –The person who owns the Tonga

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Green is the colour of the tears that rolled down Javed uncle’s eyes, when he told his friend, my mother, the story of the riots in his childhood when, he and his family were forced to flee from their homes, “carrying only their lives, in tightly clenched fists”, from the anti-Muslim Hindu rioters who were setting fire to ”Muslim homes”. And how he is alive today because of the old Hindu widow and her daughters, who hid his family in their home, and convinced the rioters who arrived at their doorstep, to leave their house unchecked for refugees.

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Sea green is the colour of unexpected inexplicable epiphanies.

Flashes of emerald and sea green is experiencing deeply felt introspections about personal freedoms, and long due realizations of societal constructs. In the midst of a loud noisy music concert in a tiny jam packed underground studio bar, dominated by the colours black and pink, happy writhing bodies in the audience, are left faceless, in the dark. Meanwhile, on the stage a magical youthful angel with a voice dripping with ambrosia, stardust and tar, sings of sexual frustration and her mental demons.

Flashes of emerald green slicing the scenes and colours of reality, amidst fishnets on creamy skin, and the overhanging smell of verbally fired shots and burnt hearts.

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Sea green is the colour of the flecks in someone’s eyes, when you share a monumental moment of comfortable silence, and really observe the eyes of the person in front of you. Flecks of sea green you find in there, placed there, not by the coincidence of genetics, but the physics of reflection, of objects around you that you know longer care about. Objects that are rendered so worthless and insignificant by the presence of your companion, that their existence is considered only through their reflection in her eyes. Through her eyes. Sea green is colour of complete surrender of the self to the notion of trust.

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16.

As a quintessential young brown girl fed on a healthy diet of Bollywood, when I think ‘epic romance’ I think of marigold fields, a swaying pointillist scenery of yellow and green, fusing into one colour, as the vision fades out slowly.

I also think of turquoise, green and white thin Kerala towels hanging from clothing lines in a verandah of either an ancestral home, or a ‘chawl’. Towels, held in place by “chimtas”, billowing in the wind, to construct an impossible ephemeral vision of a playground for adults, and games of affectionate tag, teasing, and hide and seek. A vision constructed by advertisements for detergent powders for clothes.

I don’t know about all of that, but I would love to run alone through an endless ‘verandah’ corridor amidst moist, drying Kerala towels, hair dripping wet from a long and satisfying hair washing session and bath, reveling in the warmth of the sun on my skin.

Chimtas-peg

Verandah- A platform outside the house on the same level as the ground.

Kerala- a state in India

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I associate pubs and bars, with the end of exhibitions, and the taste of chocolate milkshake. Last year, every time my friends and I were done putting up a major exhibition, we would go to our favourite pub in Bangalore, to just destress and breathe, and treat ourselves a little bit, at the success of our work. It was the sweetest feeling in the world. The exhibitions would usually be on a Friday, and we would return from them, wash away the grime on our skin, the dirt under our nails, the filth in our hair, wear clothes that made us feel pretty, cover up the dark circles and bags under our eyes, and wear lots of kohl and ethnic jewelery, and go to the pub to breathe.

I don’t drink alcohol. And I loved the fact that the pub sold my favourite brand of chocolate milkshake. We would listen to live music and chomp on chicken drumsticks. I would slurp on my milkshake and watch the harsh tacky lights in the pub, dance sea green on the surfaces of the liquids in my friends’ tequila shot glasses. I would watch the green lights dancing on the filmy surfaces of their drinks, and on the glass rims of the shot glasses, making their way into their eyes, as they knocked back swallows of oblivion and momentary mirth. The sea green would move from their drink to their mouth, and settle in their eyes, and they grew into a diffused versions of themselves.

It is the feeling of looking at these people you love, watching them transform, and thinking of a drop of deep green ink, falling noiselessly into a pitcher of water, its skin breaking against the surface of the water, and causing its contents to bleed over the surface of the water.

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Green the most dominant colour in nature, available in a panaroma of hues, shades and tints, is also the most difficult colour to be exracted from nature as organic pigment or dye.

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“It’s not that easy being green

Having to spend each day the color of the leaves
When I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow or gold

Or something much more colorful like that

It’s not easy being green

It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things

And people tend to pass you over ’cause you’re

Not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water

Or stars in the sky”

Green is the colour of Kermit the frog, and my tiny embarrassed, independent heart, wishing they was noticed.

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Sea green is in the transient and effervescent, sublime pleasure of doing something forbidden.

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Green is the colour of self hate built up over the years
Self hate so intense that it has grown from a stinky invisible floating smidgen of algae suspended forever in air in front of your heart
To a parasite, enveloping you so completely that you mistake it for armour.
If you hate yourself this much no one can hate you more.
It can never hurt more than this.
You make sure of that.

When you swing your arms around,
The dense algae shield swings around with you
When you raise your hand it rises with you .
shifts clicks in place
Allowing a forgettable flash of skin before it is covered again.
You don’t fight it.
If you hate yourself this much. Nobody can hate you more. Hurt you more.
You are in control of your pain
you know what to expect
You know
Nobody can hurt you.

Until someone slips up.
No you slip up.

Green is the colour of unwanted realizations
Green is the colour of your best friend triggering your self-hate.
Of course he didn’t mean it.
No you slipped up.
You let your armour thin in places.
You let in idea
That someone wanted you, thought you were amazing, no matter how inconsequential and in the past it may have been.
Even if it was a lifetime ago and you couldn’t possibly move on more.

YOU let yourself entertain the idea that you could be desired.
You let it stick to your armor like a microbe eating away at your algae.
You enjoyed the sliver of sunlight hitting you through a crack in the slimy canopy you had come to know and be content with.

So when he tells you,
that he never really felt that way.
And he was conscious of it
When he said he wanted to be more than friends.
You read between the lines
he was in it for the experience
He always knew your friendship could survive it.
Because you cared too much.
It doesn’t matter you tell yourself.
It was a long time ago.
You don’t care anymore

the next day you realize
that you can’t get it out of your head.
The sky is mint green and you cry on a pavement
No you don’t feel anything for him anymore.
But he was your algae eating burr and you got addicted to the slivers of sunlight you stole from the chink in your armour

A murky sewer green is the colour that stinks up a place
It is the colour of you roommate who is lovable in a creepy psychoanalyst way,
saying
“Hey I figured you out!
You are always in a hurry to let people know that they are beautiful, and that you love what they are wearing, before they can walk out the elevator and you miss the opportunity to do so.
because you have always felt otherwise
Everyday when I walk out the door, you tell me I look pretty because you feel the opposite.”
Sewer green is the colour of denial.
It’s the colour of trying to laugh it off.
It is the colour of failing.
Lime green is the colour of optimism feigned for many years, till it becomes a part of you.
A part you love more than any other
How can you not?
It sets you apart.
It makes you lovable and fun
So easy to hang out with.
” I love how you don’t need much to be happy”
You are so glad you have never known “much”

He was your validation.
Of the fact, that you can be desired.
You are strong and independent
You have dealt with your past,
You embraced your scars,
You made them your armour
How can you let something like this
Affect you so much?
Do you have no shame?
Stop acting like Taylor Swift
Stop acting so soft
So pathetic
You are better than this.
You knew he was toxic
Every time he took you for granted
You did this to yourself

Acid green is the colour of crippling anxiety
Spurting Flashes of harsh acid green in a black hole of a room.
Invisible pillows pushing down on you, from every direction, on every surface imaginable.
Turns out your armour had thorns on the inside

You bite your lip.
You breathe out quietly
Shakily.
Your housemates are home.

You focus on what your were doing when you let yourself get pulled down.
You are looking at a frying pan.
You breathe out again.
Why is your face wet?
You are holding a frying pan
When did you start crying?
You were making omelettes.
Yes omelettes.

How can you do this to yourself
You said it was over
You dealt with this
You should talk to someone
You should call someone now.

So you text an online pen friend

Hey are you up ?
I think I just had a tiny panic attack.
But I am okay. I think.
So how was your yesterday?

I look up
Out of my window
And the sky is colour of shattered emerald glass
The shards still holding on tentatively to their places
Trembling against the force of gravity
A moment of monumental potential energy
Before they realize the pointlessness of it all,
Yield to the inevitable
And soundlessly come crashing down.

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Bibliography

“Facts About the Colour Green | The Fact Site.” The Fact Site. 2010. Accessed March 06, 2016. http://www.thefactsite.com/2010/03/facts-about-colour-green.html.
“Was Santa’s Suit Originally Green and Why Did It Turn Red?” Yahoo! Answers. Accessed March 07, 2016. https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061202031716AAt7TMY.
“Kermit The Frog – It’s Not Easy Being Green Lyrics.” Www.lyricsmania.com. Accessed March 07, 2016. http://www.lyricsmania.com/its_not_easy_being_green_lyrics_kermit_the_frog.html.
“Night Vision Goggles.” How Does Night Vision Work? A Simple Introduction. Accessed March 07, 2016. http://www.explainthatstuff.com/hownightvisionworks.html.
“The Color of Art Pigment Database: Pigment Green – PG.” Art Is Creation. Accessed March 07, 2016. http://www.artiscreation.com/green.html#.VtyHz_krLnA.
“Mann Ranat Gela Ga Marathi Lyrics | Marathi.” Mann Ranat Gela Ga Marathi Lyrics | Marathi. Accessed March 08, 2016. http://www.hindilyrics.net/marathi-lyrics/for-Mann ranat gela ga.html.
“Coldplay.” – Green Eyes Lyrics. Accessed March 08, 2016. http://www.metrolyrics.com/green-eyes-lyrics-coldplay.html.

The Out of Tune Flute

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