What Color Are the Oranges?

 

What Colour Are the Oranges?

Photo credit–Sarthak Kanswal (Self)

 What Colour Are the Oranges

 

Every evening, there is this really beautiful little ritual on the streets of Laxmi Nagar market. The lights of the shops shine like an over enthusiastic stage lamp, scooters speed elegantly through any possible gap in the traffic, and people move with the peculiar rhythm of our beloved capital- Delhi, with half hurry and half hesitation. Everyone is in a hurry, as if they are running out of time, though they are not quite sure what it is that they are waiting for.

 

In the middle of this beautiful moving but strangely stagnant theatre, there stand two children, holding flowers and carrying a peculiar spark in their eyes. The boy usually carries roses wrapped in plastic printed with tiny red hearts, the sort of wrapping that can manufacture romance if it tries hard enough. The girl carries the lotuses with her, though hardly ever sold, maybe they don’t hold the same aesthetic value as the roses but she carries them regularly, I think she likes lotuses. Together they move carefully through this loud crowd of silent people, stepping around hurried shoes and distracted conversations.

 

“Flowers, bhaiya?” the boy asks from time to time. His sister tries her best, but how can she approach someone and exchange her beautiful lotuses for a small amount of money? Sometimes she just holds the lotuses a little tighter, as if they are not really meant to be sold.

 

One evening, however, there was something unusual, no no, the beautiful ritual did not stop, but a young man and his friend were moving slowly through the market, the way people sometimes walk when they have nowhere urgent to be. They noticed the children the way most people do. Most people usually just wave them away without even slowing down.

“Flowers, bhaiya?” the boy asks again.

 The young man looks at the beautiful flowers, then at the girl holding her lotuses as if they belong somewhere safer than a marketplace, then at his empty wallet and his friend, who practically was his wallet for the day. Before buying any flowers, he walks to a nearby ice-cream cart and returns with two cones. The children stare at them for a while with suspicion, as kindness usually contains some hidden condition, they learnt it the hard way. The boy eventually takes one and hands the other one to his sister. Soon the four of them are standing beneath a streetlight, eating ice cream while the ritual continues.

After a while, the man asks a question which seemed simple enough.

“Why do you guys sell flowers?”

The boy shrugs it off at first, but the question waited patiently. Slowly the story emerged. About a village somewhere far away, far away from Laxmi Nagar, far away from any Delhi Metro Station. About a small farm their family once owned. About trees that stood beside a river and a particular orange tree that carried bright fruit every winter. Though they were not rich, they were not forced to sell flowers.

The girl remembers the smell more than anything else, sharp and sweet in the morning air. Their father used to lift the boy onto his shoulders so he could reach the branches. “Be Careful,” he would laugh, “don’t drop the sun.”

Then came one monsoon that refused to stop. The rain fell day after day until the quiet river remembered that it was in fact, a river. The water rose slowly at first, then suddenly, and the small garden disappeared beneath it. The tree tilted into the current, and the oranges floated briefly across the surface like scattered lanterns before they vanished.

The farm was gone; the home was gone.

The man listened quietly. His friend said nothing, as for her this was new, and for the young man as well

When the boy finished this tragedy, the man asked another question, very gently.

“What colour were the oranges?”

The boy looked at his sister. For a moment the traffic noise faded, and somewhere in his memory there was a winter morning in his house facing the beautiful orange tree.

“I don’t remember the colour,” he said quietly.

“But I remember they looked like home.”

The sentence lingered in the air for little too long. The boy realized that he said something too honest to strangers, who’s only purpose was to buy flowers. Without another word, he grabbed his sister’s hand and pulls her into the moving theatre again. The crowd of Laxmi Nagar closes around them almost immediately, the hurried shoes, distracted conversations, scooters finding impossible spaces in traffic. The ritual resumed as if it had never paused. In their hurry, the girl accidentally dropped one of her lotuses, and it remained on the pavement, unnoticed, as the ritual of Laxmi Nagar went on.