COLOURS

I am a painter. I paint lives.

Hey! Did I see you raising your eyebrows that eloquent fraction of an inch? Is it your veiled incredulity that peeps out of your ever so faint a smile?

Come on now. It’s not as crazy as it seems. Life is an odd canvas, with unearthly surrealistic colours etching out myriad designs on it. Colours!

Cool, enervating colours that dip into life like melting icicles – tingling your nerves and untangling the mad jumble of knots in your mind. Colours that say – ‘ we’re alive!’

I played with lives.

I painted lives and wiped them off. I gave them depth, then with a single stroke swept off the foundations and left them weak…tottering….broken.

Broken lives.

Why is it that these are strewn in my path like tiny shards of broken glass? Who laid them there, to trap me? Who could have known that I was the one who had broken them? How was it that, while playing with their lives, I didn’t realize, I was slowly, inexorably, playing with my own?

The western horzon was awash with the deep, orange hue of the sinking sun, as I stepped down and felt the dry, dreary sand lacing my feet.

Dusk was descending like a shroud over the infinite expanse of bare rock and barren soils – and endless desert, where the eye, refusing to limit itself to the horizon, swept on and lost its direction in the swirling maelstrom of colours where day and night embraced at the twilight hour. Then, suddenly, the world lunged headlong into a brooding darkness. The sun had set on the horizon.

For me, the sun had set forever. For me, there would be no dawn, the next day, no welcome light to dissipate the gloom.

I have created darkness…

Darkness – just darkness and oblivion, all around a whirlpool, in which I was struggling, frantically to keep my head up, to stay afloat. Darkness – which at each of my desperate efforst to free myself, winds itself more tightly around me like an anaconda, engulfing me in its dark depths, leaving me gasping for breath.

My parched eyes search desperately for some vestige of colour around me, some light, some…brightness! A trillion souls cry – ‘Colour!’ Their voices, merging into a single mighty wave of sound echoing through the colourless plain, moving the ground beneath my feet – rising. Rising to a screaming, agonizing crescendo, and then…suddenly breaking off to give way to the silence of a grave.

I have deleted the indelible.

I have extinguished light.

I have imprisoned life in darkness.

I have wiped out colour.

I am god of course. Bad, bad god.