Colours Apart

We painted together. She chose her side of the sheet, I chose mine. We were always like that, respecting each other’s spaces. I drew a tree; she drew a Rajasthani woman, complete with red sari, silver earrings, and a waist that would set several roadside loafers’ hearts a-flutter; I pictured them too, those loafers, perched by a wall between my tree and her woman, popping peanuts, clad in designer jeans (jeans with designs), ogling, high-fiving, laughing, commenting. Instead, I drew a Sufi saint. Dancing perhaps, I don’t know. Subjectivity in art was my forte—even the question of the saint’s clothes were ambiguous, the top half seeming to suggest some type of a shawl, the bottom more like the Emperor’s New Clothes.

She looked at my Sufi and grimaced. I knew what was coming; she would first run her hands through her hair, bite the tip of her brush and let the words form in her head. And then they would pour—words poured for her, never flowed nor stumbled—she thought (and therefore spoke) faster than most people I knew and you had to listen to her in slow-motion for the first time if it had to make any sense to you.
What a waste of a pretty Rajasthani, she was saying, but I barely paid any attention.
Its good to be abstract and everything, but there is a time and a space for it all, she continued.
Time and place, time and space. Typical.
The woman is so precise and decked, with intricate details assuming precedence over long sweeping brush-strokes, she ploughed on.
Sweeping—her once-favourite adjective, only to be replaced by a string of better ones. Wonder if that’s how she is with her men too?
It is ok for the tree to be the way it is; it’s not a person and trees are meant to be flowing.
I’ll miss her flowing trees and singing chairs, oh yes I will, but it’s better now that later.
But the Sufi? He’s like this Bugs Bunny in a Nishant or .. WILL you please STOP giving me that DEMENTED smile?

“Huh?” I said and immediately wiped clean my smile and said uncertainly “Um … The Sufi is abstract because Sufis are abstract. Their whole existence—“
“The Sufis have figured things out” she snapped. “They think very clearly. I don’t see why they should be termed abstract”
“Abstractness and clarity are both subjective terms” I said, having had time to gather my thoughts, and continued “What is crystal-clear to the Sufi is still very abstract to us. And since we live by the rules of a democracy, definitely, by the simple fact that there are more normal people than Sufis , Sufis are abstract by majority vote” I said triumphantly, and added, without thinking,” Its like a solar eclipse or something ”
“You do realize that I have dated you for a couple of years now and will not fall for that old say-something-absolutely-random-in-order-to-appear-brilliant trick”

And that was why we were splitting ways: we knew each other too well. And yet, we rarely agreed on anything. And with time, we were less willing to compromise. And towards the end, we clung on to anything similar—like the fact that we both liked an almost universally acclaimed movie or that we both preferred rich sweet lassi to bad milk tea on a roadside dhabha—as a sign that we were meant to be together. Our love, however, was slipping through, like sand through a clenched fist, and the tighter we held, the faster it slipped. Eventually, we decided that enough was enough. I was glad it was an amicable split.
Even that day, our last day together, I think I nursed a hope, a silent one at that, that maybe, just maybe, she’d just read into my mind and would, out of the blue, say something that would shock me—that would tell me that we were just meant to be.

She walked up to me and placed our clearly abstract painting on my lap and said “Keep it. I want to paint again. Alone”
See, I told you, we were just not meant to be.
“I guess I’ll just go and watch TV”
“Suit yourself”

I don’t know when I had dozed off or for how long I had slept. But, when I awoke, I knew she was gone. I rubbed my eyes, and stretched and yawned and walked up to the kitchen for some water when something in the study caught my eye. It was the painting, her painting: there was a Rajasthani woman, precise and detailed, on the right side. There was a tree, much like my own, flowing and colourful, on the left. And in the space in between, perched on a wall, there were loafers popping peanuts, wearing designer jeans (jeans with designs), ogling at the woman, laughing and hi-fiving.