Rain-coloured rose

She had been searching for it a long time, a rose the colour of the rain sky. The florist waved a hand inviting her to look around. The wrinkles beside her eyes deepened in an appreciative way. Slowly, supporting herself laboriously on crutches, she moved over to inspect the white flowers. She was looking for a flower which held in its depths the gloom of rain clouds, its outer petals glowing with the dull radiance of a downcast sky.

  But why particularly such a flower? – the florist asked half laughingly, although by now he had grown familiar with the odd ways of the old artist.  Her face crinkled into a smile.

  Coming out of the shop she looked up at the sky. It was just such a day, calm, half-glow, drizzling. Just such a day – like the one (oh! how long ago?)on which her friend had presented her a rose the colour of the rain sky. Stealing out of the hubbub of packing, two little personages in small frocks and shoes had taken refuge in the garden.

  “Look”, she heard the voice of her friend becoming clearer, “Look, you have my phone number and I have yours. We can talk to each other anytime we feel lonesome.” Her friend was always the pragmatic one, the adult of the two who had a protective, reliable air about her. But this time, she failed to comfort her. Her tears were like the sky’s, persistent, quiet.

  “When I grow up I will buy a house next to yours, and then we can be together again” – but to no effect.

  In desperation, she broke off a flower from a nearby bush. “Here”, she held it up to her. Through her tears she discerned that it was a rose, a white one; the softly glowing petals spiralled into a heart as coldly dark as the clouds above, as if it has drunk of the essence of the sky. The jerk to the flower as she took it shook off dewy drops onto her hand. “This is my gift to you. When you are lonely, remember me by this.”

  She smiled now; a smile that disappeared into the creases of her cheeks. The rose had been a very fragile thing. After two days of careful preservation, decay had begun to show. The white petals turned brown and fell off one by one in small heaps at the foot of the vase in her new home. After a few years of maintaining contact, the two girls had drifted apart, inevitably drawn by the current of life.

     Turning homewards, she let the umbrella spread its great, dark wings over her. There, where now the three-storey apartment stands, was the peepul tree under which she sat through the mild winter morning sun, holding the rush hour on the main road in the stillness of her sketchbook.  That glittering ice cream parlour beside the road used to be a snack shop which she frequented with her part-time colleagues. Three blocks down this lane and there would be the vacant grassy plot where once stood the kindergarten she took her daughter to, her tiny paws clinging nervously to her hand. It was as if she had blinked and some magic had changed the world around her.

  These days, as she neared ninety, old, far-off memories would come back to her, and emotions which she thought she had forgotten long ago, as the present grew distant and alien to her. How strange certain images would flash suddenly, disjointed and emerging vividly out of the blurry stream in her mind – as if the long stretch of years had never come between her and them. Walking into the small room which she used both as studio and bedroom, she arranged the flowers in a vase on the window seat. She settled back tiredly on the bed and looked around at all that reminders of her life: that ripple on the water she had captured as a dragonfly flew away with a drop of sun on its wings; yellow trees whose leaves had fallen off minute by minute even as she drew; the chaos of wings as a crow cut off her vision of the orange sky; fallen flowers that discoloured and melted into the earth…all this, and so much more now reduced only to a sight, a sound and a feeling as she tried to remember. But those that had receded far back into her mind as she lived her life on time’s wing, now returned like spectres in the quiet of twilight.

  On rainy days like this, a something unknown would quicken in her blood and she would go out hunting for such a flower the colour of the rain sky. But she never found it again. The flowers now placed against the tear-drenched window were a pale lemon deepening into rosy yellow.

  For a long time, she looked at them and past them…into the far distance of the past. Then she stirred, got up, removed the big canvas from her easel and adjusted her sketchbook. She faced the window and the flowers. The creamy ivory darkened with the grey and blue of the square of sky. Each raindrop, living and dying every moment against the glass now lived forever on the paper. And in the vase, there was a single rose. A rose as sad as the rain and clouds. The sun was setting now and taking the last of the blue light in the sky with it. The darkness invaded the room and towered over the old artist and her picture.

 About two months ago, she had stumbled upon her old friend’s address on the internet (which she was gradually learning to use). Her address, a photo of her which she unmistakably identified through the cascading wrinkles and liver spots, and the information that she had added on a Mrs to her name – nothing more. Suddenly an idea had seized her, so quickly and thrillingly that in the first flurry of activity she quite forgot the usual deliberations and calculations she would otherwise have let bridle her imaginations and bring them on the path of concrete reality. She had written a letter to the address.

  The answer had come this morning. It lay on a table beside the bedroom door. The address identified not her friend, but a man with the same surname. It was still unopened. She could not read it…not till she found her rain-coloured rose on the paper.