As orange popped everywhere!!!

I was cast down from early that morning. That happens to me. Then I become silent and highly contemplative. I feel detached but will make an effort to not appear so. That, however, rarely stops me from carrying on with my day. So I was on my way to work. Thoughts kept crossing my mind, which is a pool of realized/unrealized ideas, formed/unformed opinions, amongst a myriad of other things.

In the solitude of those collected moments, I was gripped by my own chain of thoughts. How visions moved swiftly inside my head! It started with the image of a woman, an orange vendor, which I had recently shared on social media. I thought the photograph nice. It was involuntarily taken at a special moment when she was laughing a full, raw, unmasked laugh. There was nothing artificial about it, only reflected the sunshine of her spirit, which could be permanent or just fleeting, who can say. Nevertheless, the moment was ignited with it and I was able to capture that by chance.

I was thinking of that image -- the woman and her oranges that she had put out for sale in her doko -- when my mind centred on the oranges. I love orange, fruit yes, but colour, more so. It brightens up my soul, I think, if there is such a thing as souls brightening up. It exudes a kind of friendliness that I cannot explain. Thinking of a distant memory, I associate orange with something that made me feel at home, far away from home. Resisting my urge to digress, I will say the colour orange makes me happy.

And that is just what I needed that morning, happiness or something to resemble that, as I travelled to work in the warm sunlight but with cold breeze brushing past my face.

Then I had an impulse… to spot everything orange.

My senses opened up to anything and everything that colour. What a treat that was. They started to appear everywhere!!!

An orange house, a bike with orange framework for wheels, Kurkure packets on display in shops, packaging of sanitary pads in a pharmacy, an orange car, orange cloth bags, bricks lined on the roadside, fruit vendors selling oranges with sunlight hitting them such that they looked even brighter, a girl kicking the fruit -- one fallen on the road -- like a ball, a shop painted in the colour, a lady standing dressed in an orange kurti, orange flowers entwined with the leaves and together forming an arch over a gate, a beautiful coat of the same colour on a glass display, and such, and such!

These simple and mundane things which would have passed by me without notice, had it been any other day, came into my focus from all directions, as if through giant lenses. How simple it was for my heart to open that breezy yet warm morning.

All it needed was a splash of orange.