Colours
Calm morning breezes tiptoed into the front lawns of the school through the dense trees lining the boundary walls. The birds sitting on the branches of the big old neem in the middle of the ground greeted it with loud chirps, but flew away soon as the shrieks of children’s laughter filled the grounds.
Some ran to the neem, giving their best shot at climbing it while others went to the top of the U-shaped mound only to roll each other all the way down, covering themselves in grass. I was one of them rolling myself down the mound, inciting my friends to copy me.
Meanwhile, the two teachers in charge of them were running all over the ground trying to make sure no one got hurt. After all, we were only five. The teachers finally decided it was enough fun and time to get to work. With a few calls and a round of dusting everyone’s clothes off, we kids sat down to work on our paintings of our summer holidays outdoors.
The laughter and talking never stopped though and the teachers let us be. We were sitting in a circle under the shade of the neem, sometimes running back and forth between the lawns and our class to change the water.
I was hard at work trying to perfect the skin colour on my palette, sometimes even painting on my hand to see if the colour matched. After a few tries, I was satisfied with the product and painted it carefully onto the drawing of me enjoying with my friends at the beach.
Before I knew it, I was done! I ran up to where the children who were good at art were showing each other their paintings in a rush of excitement. I too held up my painting for everyone to see.
Suddenly, there was silence. “What’s wrong?” I asked, confused at their reaction. “Surely it is not bad, is it?” They looked at each other then at me in silence until one of them spoke, “You know skin is not supposed to be that dark, right?”
They held their paintings out for me to see. Some skins were orange, others peach, but mine was the only one that was brown.
