Natural colours

Yesterday it rained, and the garden was flooded with the strange bright clear light you sometimes see late in the evening, just when you feel it’s time for twilight.

My garden is very tiny, but wild and unruly. And after the heat and unexpected rain – all the greens washed clean and glittering in the strange light with droplets of water - it all seemed unbearably lush.

Almost dazzling to the eye were the colours of the flowers. The bright yellow of the sankeshwar and hibiscus. The deep red of the bougainvillea. The shocking pink. In all that lush green they glowed vivid and alive in a way they never had before, as if I had popped some LSD.

Colour, if you think about it, belongs entirely to the natural world, particularly to flowering plants. All the colour we see otherwise is merely a reproduction. The city is filled with this synthetic colour. You see it in cars, buses, hoardings, clothes, shop signs, buildings – everywhere. It’s paint. Artificial, unnatural, plastic, sad.

It’s something you get so used to that you never stop to think it’s merely an imitation of the colours of nature, the colours that city people almost never see.

Yesterday I stood for a long time absorbing the bright yellows and reds and pinks and greens. And it seemed as if I was back in time at the very beginning of creation, in my own tiny garden of Eden.