Seasons of Colour

How the light and the festivals of one city repaint the same streets, year after year, until the calendar becomes a thing you can see.

I learned to read the year in Ahmedabad before I could read a clock. The city tells you the date in colour. You only have to look up.

January, and a sky full of paper

Winter here is short and gentle. The mornings arrive wrapped in a thin fog that softens the edges of the old city, and the light comes in low and amber, the colour of the jaggery we fold into sesame for Uttarayan. On the fourteenth of January the whole of Ahmedabad climbs to its terraces, and the sky fills with kites. Thousands of them. Magenta, parrot green, a yellow so bright it hurts.

From a rooftop in the old city you stop seeing individual kites and start seeing one moving field of colour, stitched together by string you cannot see. Children shout when a line snaps. Someone passes around chikki, amber and brittle. The light holds gold until evening, and then the paper kites give way to paper lanterns, and the dark fills with small drifting flames. For one day the sky belongs to everyone.

The orange that announces spring

Before the heat truly lands, the kesuda tells me it is coming. The flame of the forest blooms along the roadsides and in the scrub past the city, a hard bright orange against bare branches. My grandmother's generation boiled these flowers to make the colour we threw at Holi, long before anyone sold powder in foil packets.

I think about that every spring. The colour was never invented for the festival. It was borrowed from a tree that blooms on its own schedule, and the festival simply learned to arrive when the tree did. Holi paints the city in a single afternoon, gulal hanging in the air like coloured smoke, and by evening everyone wears the same dusty rose, the same green hairline, the same pink ears. The colour outlasts the day. You find it in the creases of your knuckles for a week.

Summer, when the light bleaches everything

Then comes the heat, and the heat has its own palette, which is mostly the absence of one. By April the sun stands directly overhead and burns the colour out of the streets. Walls go pale. The dust turns everything the same soft ochre. People move in the early morning and again after dark, and the middle of the day belongs to no one.

The trees refuse to surrender, though, and this is the part I love. When the ground is at its most bleached, the gulmohar catches fire. The flame trees throw out a red so saturated it looks lit from inside, and the amaltas hangs down in long chains of yellow, dripping over compound walls. Bougainvillea climbs in magenta sheets across the dust. The hotter it gets, the louder these few colours shout. I have come to read it as a kind of defiance. The city refuses to go quietly grey.

The grey that the whole city waits for

And we wait. All of Ahmedabad waits for the sky to change. When the monsoon finally breaks, usually near the end of June, the colour that arrives is grey, and it is the most welcome grey of the year. The first rain hits hot stone and lifts a smell out of the ground that I have never found a word for in any language. Petrichor is the dictionary's attempt. It does not come close.

Within a fortnight the green returns. It comes back fast and slightly disorderly, pushing up through pavement cracks and along the Sabarmati, which swells brown and full and moves with purpose again. The greens of the monsoon are not gentle. They are deep and wet and almost too much, the colour of a city exhaling after three months of holding its breath.

Nine nights of mirror and thread

When the rain thins out, the festival season opens, and the palette turns from what the land gives to what we make. Navratri lasts nine nights, and for nine nights the city dances. The chaniya choli come out of trunks and off the racks, heavy with mirror-work and embroidery, every shade of the spectrum spinning in a circle at once. Under the lights the tiny mirrors throw the colour back in fragments, so a single skirt becomes a hundred moving points of red and gold and blue.

This is the part of the year that lives closest to what I do. I make clothes, and during Navratri I watch a whole city remember that cloth can hold light. The colour is not on the fabric so much as caught by it, released a little at a time as the wearer turns. A garment that sits flat on a hanger becomes something else entirely on a body in motion, under a string of bulbs, on the seventh night.

The year closes in gold

Then Diwali, and the year ends the way it began, with small flames against the dark. The marigolds arrive by the cartload, orange and yellow strung into torans that hang over every doorway. Women bend over the thresholds drawing rangoli in coloured powder, and the houses fill with the soft uneven gold of clay diyas. It is a quieter colour than the kites of January, more inward, but it rhymes with them. The year opens and closes with light held in the hand.

And after Diwali the fog returns, the mornings turn amber again, and somewhere a shopkeeper begins to hang the first kites of the new Uttarayan in his window.

What the year taught me about colour

I did not set out to learn anything from all this. I simply grew up inside it. But the longer I work with cloth and dye, the more I understand that the city had been teaching me a grammar the whole time. Colour means more when it arrives in its season. The orange of kesuda matters because it comes after a bare branch. The grey of the first rain is beautiful only because we waited for it through the heat. Even the bleached ochre of high summer earns the blaze of the gulmohar that cuts through it.

So I have stopped chasing colour for its own sake. I let it belong to a moment instead. A garment, like a year, is richer when its colour answers something, when it arrives the way the kites arrive in January, expected and astonishing at once. Ahmedabad gave me the calendar. I am still learning to dress by it.