I painted the summer

Done with rain this year, I thought of settling with summer. I felt the need to love the summer this year. Somehow, oddly! So I thought of painting this summer. A summer in three colors. Red, yellow and blue. A touch of white if you say. You like bright skies and white clouds, don’t you? But no birds fly. No rivers flow. No butterflies live. Only three colors. Red, yellow and blue.

When he came home, I covered his eyes and took him to into our room. Meant to be a surprise. I took my hands away and he finds himself in a dark room. Is this our room, he doubts? I have hung the summer paintings on the four walls of our room. And yet it’s dark. He turns from his side to side, lost like a child playing hide and seek, doing the seek job. I watch him from a corner of the room. We stood silent in that room but I thought I heard his heartbeats. He came running to me the next moment and hugged me tight. But why? I wish he knew that he had actually squeezed every bit of breath out of my body. I was breathless.

The next morning, I ask him at the breakfast table:

‘Why did you over react last evening?’

He looks busy reading the newspaper. But I saw him smile.

‘All right, if you wish not to say. I am planning to paint spring tomorrow.’

He looks at me worriedly.

The next moment I find myself breathless in his hug. What about this over reaction, I ask myself.

And then he tells me, now when I am not asking him:

‘It’s good to try new ideas. But you don’t lock away the bright summers in dark rooms.’

After a long stare into the sky through the window, he added ‘and it does rain sometimes in summer too. At least it should in yours I say!’

Perplexed. Me.