The colour red

It was something about the colour red that appealed to Mrs B. She had realised this over the past month. It wasn't because red had several shades, each one coded to the myrad mood swings that charecterised her personality. Because so did blue, green, orange and all the other colours of the rainbow. Not also because red was flashy and prominent. Although in her younger days she had claimed to herself, as well as to her friends, that red was her favourite colour because it was bold and looked smashing on a Ferari! That was sometime back. For the last one month or so she had been thinking quite a lot about this colour..or more precisely, about incidents which for some reason had one form, or the other of this primary colour in them.

Why! the other day she was walking, almost aimlessly, through the sleet and the snow and for no particular reason she started to think about the train ride she had taken almost four years back....

She had woken up groggy from medication. She was going to a place by the Arabian Sea to meet her best friend, far far far far away from the heat and the chaos of the Navrangapura. She had been running a high fever but had decided at the last moment to take the trip. She was glad she did. She had fallen asleep, tired, in a crouched position by the window in the lowest birth of a 'sleeper class' compartment as the train snaked its way towards the small nook by the Sea. As she looked out of the window that morning she saw the rainsoaked Western Ghats....

Strangely, the only memory of that morning she recalled as she walked through the snow, was of the rain drenched red soil by the railway track along which whistled the lone train ...

The soil was a deep blood red colour which had turned to a wet crimson. The continuous showers of the long monsoon had caused the crimson soil to drip as mud pellets from the edges of the walls along the railway track. The red soil was in stark contrast to the lush green vegetation that covered the hillocks and the low hills, just a little further away from the railway tracks. She could only see the red mud where it was dripping and her eyes had followed the bloody trail till it got lost...higher up in the all encompassing greenery. It had seemed to her that the earth was bursting at the seams..dying to reveal something : a secret? a pain? a quiet pride that the green above was because of the red earth below..? Somehow she never remembered what had happened to the red trail after it dripped on the tracks. Her eyes had only followed it up and not down. She had been mesmerized by the scenary for it promised her of the rain, the wet and the moist ..all of which she had craved for in the heat and harshness of the Sun in Navrangapura.

She looked up and saw that the buildings along the snowed-over-road looked a heavy crimson..a wet crimson and she thought again...red. It was this colour in a movie that had brought her to these red, brick-house-lined streets in the snow, far from that grey house on that red dirt road in that small town.. through the railway tracks along the rain drenched, red soils of the Western Ghats. In a distance she heard the tolling bell and as she looked at her watch she couldn't help but notice that the handle of her bag was red too...

Photograph: From the BBC