✦ We live in Color

They handed us a blank canvas.
 white, wide, and sterile with expectation.
 Said: paint carefully.
 Said: use only the tones they’ve named, with care.
 Notified us Red is anger. Blue is sadness.
 Subsequently, red became feminine. Blue, masculine.
 And anything outside those rules?
 Too much. Too loud.
 Too unacceptable to be boxed in.
 
 But not our red. Not our blue.
 Not the kind that comes from living in
 warm, cool, and dark hues
 That one can be desaturated.

They made us believe that black is to be frightened of
 Yeah, sure, ghosts only clock in at midnight,
 And angels only wear white, right?
 But we know ghosts speak in greyscale.
 And holiness is not a colour; it’s a frequency.

 We were born into a black-and-white story
 and told to pick a side.
 To forget that humanity
 is made of gradients
 the in-between tones,
 the imperfect blends,
 the messy brushstrokes of being.

But you and I are not shadows cast by their light.
 Pigments they can’t mix
 ochre, sienna, amethyst flame.
 You and I are skin made of stardust and cosmos.
 Joy that sings in a carousel.
 Grief that hums in rich velvet.
 Not ashamed to feel in full spectrum.

To bleed bright.
To laugh loudly.
To wear every emotion like a statement piece.

We feel in color
because we beam in color
veins marked with colourful stripes, like a tiger.
Because they danced in bronze shadows
and wept in shades of stolen sunlight.
Because the womb remembers every pigment
even when the world forgets.
 
We feel in color
 because it’s how we survive the greyscale,
 or when we live life in a collar
 like someone playing with our leash.
 How we speak when our tongues go silent.
 How we reclaim every hue
 They claimed it didn’t belong to us. 

 So now we reclaim the brush
 as it always belonged to us.
 We’ll mix emotion with memory.
 melanin with magic,
 pain with pigment.
 We’ll paint outside the lines.
 off the edges,
 Across borders, they drew in fear.
 Because we were never meant to live
 in black and white.
 
 We feel in colour.
 We heal in colour.
 And we are not here to fade.
 

This poem first appeared in the India Writing Project, and remains one of my personal reflections on identity, emotion, and creative reclamation a reminder that color is more than pigment; it’s memory, heritage, and resistance.