Marriages everywhere around her. She had grown up with them, played with them, fought with them and today they were all going away, some to homes where they had never lived, others with people they had never known to places they had never been to. And they were all happy.
She looked at the girl in front of her, decked up in red and gold, looking like she had just walked out of a movie set. She was standing next to a tall guy, also dressed in red. The color red dominated everything around her, the stage, the carpets, the chairs, the lights, the canopy under which they all sat now; even all the people around her seemed to have chosen red to wear. It seemed as if a giant red cloud had burst and left everyone drenched in its color.
Everything had changed. There was a time all of them would be dressed in the same khaki colored uniforms, no demarcations, no boundaries, part of an endless sea of students tramping back and forth from school. They would all be the same shade of khakhi when they set foot into the school in the morning and the same dirty brown by the time they emerged from the school gates. By the time they reached home, the grease from the school bus would add streaks of black to this brown.
‘Hey! Do you want something to drink?’ The voice brought her back to the present. Shaking her head she looked back around her.
It was strange how the same color could signify two diametrically opposite things – one so auspicious and the other so gory. Two weeks ago, returning to Mumbai after a wonderful weekend at Daman she could have never imagined the scene that was to confront her as she reached Borivili station. Everything around her was splattered in the same color, everyone around her soaked in the same red. She could imagine the scene at six other places that were ripped in a series of blasts that rocked Mumbai.
She wondered who chose red to represent happiness and prosperity when it was the same color that represented death and devastation. But here it was, all around her, representing Gods being invoked, bonds created, lives being intertwined and responsibilities shared. A color that dominated everything it touched.
