Monday, October 5, 2009

Grace Cathedral Hill, all wrapped in bones of a setting sun


The path unfolds before me like a thin, winding ribbon. Overhead, the Jacaranda trees softly drop their flowers, adding to the mass of purple patches draped across my way.Picking my way carefully along the broken bricks, I take care to avoid the flowers spewing their oil, slippery as a thousand tiny purple banana peels. Staring at the colour brought to the moss-covered path, I remember hearing of a couple. They were driving, not too fast, and skidded on the Jacaranda flowers on the road. They crashed into a wall, both dead.


Reaching the end, I flop down onto the grass, shadowed by a pine tree, a tower of needles and strength. My eyes dart with the dancing patches of shadow and sunlight filtering through the thin green needles. I imagine grabbing onto a patterned patch, cutting it out and draping it around my shoulders: a cloak of colour and dancing sun.


I am amazed at how nature contradicts human art. Here, all colours are complimentary. My eyes, clear blue islands in seas of white glance up at the turquoise sky splashed with tufts of white and grey. And as I tread the grass, feel the strong shafts light beneath my bare feet, my eyes become pools of green flecked with yellow then hazel, brown, near-black as I brush my fingers across the gnarled bark of the tree.


Sitting down again, I remove from my neck the cross I wear as a daily ritual. I finger it thoughtfully, rubbing the smooth surface. The pale, pearly white shine contrasts starkly with my hands, brown, orange, pink, depicting lifetimes and loved ones with rings of red, streams of blue.


Somewhere to the right of my mind, children are screaming.


Sitting in the College foyer, I am encircled by a pack of black children, leaving from learning. Every Tuesday they are taught by the rich and privileged and I sit surrounded. They chase one another up, down steps of our school. Theirs is mere flat land. Their pink palms clutch chocolates half-eaten, the remainder kept for sometime before next Tuesday. They wear an array of colourful jerseys over their neat pants, under their yellowed white shirts. Their feet are a rainbow of mismatched socks or none at all.


Though they play games, where has their childhood gone? What are you if your dad is a boy, your mother a girl? When you work from birth, witness poverty and violence as ritualistically as wearing a hollow cross. A little girl walks to her friends, keeps a serious face, swings her hips and I know she could have been a model in ten years. But her hips and breasts will fill and spread and she too will plough fields while her baby watches her back, look after another with pink hands, not only palms.


I sigh heavily as I heave to my feet and walk away slowly. Glancing down, my hands, momentarily, are pearly, pale white.

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