The Color Blue

On dreams, women, and the mornings that change us.

Blue has always been my favorite color. I never really knew why.

Maybe it was the color of the sky that made me dream. Maybe because mountains looked blue from a distance. Or maybe because sadness never looked black to me.

It has always been blue.

I was walking on snow, wearing oversized boots that made my feet look twice their size. A walking stick in one hand and the kind of excitement your chest holds when you're seeing something magnificent for the first time.

Was it Chakrata? Or somewhere in the Himalayas?

No.

It was Switzerland.

The memory arrived before the name did. The same mountains. The same crisp air. The sun slipping through snow-capped peaks, exactly as it had years ago. I remembered standing there in 2018, thinking the only thought a place that beautiful allows you to think: 

“How lucky am I to be here?”

I stood there for a while, memorising everything. Storing it somewhere inside me so that years later, on an ordinary Monday morning, I could shut my eyes and return. Again. And again.

Then I started walking.

The snow crunched beneath my red boots. The air grew colder. With my very next step, afternoon dissolved into night, and I found myself holding a pocket torch. The world had turned blue. A deep, dark blue. I looked to my left. The mountain that had filled me with gratitude moments ago had begun to move. Then it began to fall. Like milk spilling over the edge of a glass. Like white paint slowly washing across a wall. The very snow that once made the world magical was now rushing towards me, ready to bury me beneath it. Closer. 

Closer.

And I opened my eyes.

Blue.

The room was blue.

My AC blinked at 22 degrees. The fan spun at its highest speed.

“What time is it? I had gone to bed at ten last night. Surely I hadn't slept the entire day. And even if I had, why hadn't anyone bothered to wake me up? Well..A twenty-hour nap doesn't sound too terrible.” Those thoughts were still settling when I heard footsteps in the corridor.

I opened the bedroom door.

Mumma was exactly where she always is whenever she’s in the living room, sitting on her favorite chair, while my sister paced around, talking with the kind of seriousness only siblings reserve for conversations they believe might somehow fix the world. Neither of them noticed me immediately. All I could think about was coffee.

I’m not a coffee lover really, I prefer chai, but I love my mother’s coffee. It tastes a zillion times better, cozier, than anything a machine could ever make. You could place a café latte, Vietnamese coffee, or even a mocha in front of me, and I’d still wait for the one Mumma brews in our kitchen.

Mumma eventually got up and walked towards the kitchen, my sister trailing behind, their conversation refusing to end. I could’ve gone back to bed or scrolled through my phone, but instead I stayed. Waiting for my coffee. 

Waiting, without realizing, for the morning to become something else entirely.

A friend once told me loneliness is deceptive. It doesn’t always arrive like an empty room. Sometimes it arrives disguised as comfort. You choose solitude often enough that, one day, it starts to call you home. You’re not unhappy, just absent. From people, the world, reality. Comfortably miserable. Perhaps that's the cruelest kind of loneliness.

Maybe that’s why I became so good at disappearing. Not physically, but mentally. Whenever life grew too loud, I only had to shut my eyes. Over the years, my imagination built itself a permanent home. A tiny wooden cottage tucked away in the mountains. Autumn leaves outside. A room full of books and manuscripts. One cat, two dogs. Mumma’s coffee. Me. Writing on my sunflower-coded typewriter in its familiar rhythm, tak... tak... taktak... tak.

I think that’s what happiness sounds like. People often confuse my love for solitude with loneliness. I don't.

Or do I?

Smiling at the thought, I picked up my coffee from the kitchen slab. The warmth settled into my palms while the conversation between my two girls carried on. I wasn’t really listening. Not yet.

I had no idea my coffee would turn cold, my little cottage would begin to collapse, and that, for one of the rare times in years, I would shut my eyes and find nowhere safe enough to disappear.

As I took the first sip, everything still felt ordinary. Mumma leaned against the kitchen slab, my sister stood in front of her, and I let their conversation drift in and out of my ears.

“…it’s like they’re trying to erase women altogether...” I heard my sister say.

I looked up. They were talking about Afghanistan. Not the Afghanistan of mountains tourists once photographed, nor the Afghanistan of poets, carpets, bazaars and kahaaniyas.

But the Afghanistan that wakes up every morning and tells half its people they no longer belong outside their homes.

Snippets of girls in classrooms came to my mind. Universities buzzing with conversations. Young women in jeans, laughing. Teachers, journalists, doctors, artists, dreamers. Women. Life was never perfect, but these lives still existed. Girls woke up worrying about exams, the next book they'd buy, or who they'd fall in love with. The kind of worries that seem insignificant until someone takes away your right to have them.

Then the Taliban returned.

Slowly, almost methodically, ordinary life began disappearing. Schools closed their doors to girls. Women were told where they could go, what they could wear, whether they could work, travel, or simply exist as themselves in public. Windows were painted white so women inside could no longer be seen. Beauty salons disappeared. Libraries emptied. Entire professions lost the women who once kept them alive. It wasn't one law or two. It was an avalanche, one handful of snow at a time, until an entire mountain collapsed over millions of women's lives.

The room suddenly felt quieter. I shut my eyes. Usually that's enough. Usually I find the mountains, the cottage, my room full of books. This time, there was nothing. I couldn't imagine a world without women.

No girls fixing each other's kajal. No mothers bargaining with vegetable vendors. No little girls running through parks. No women laughing too loudly, reading on park benches, carrying shopping bags or arguing with auto bhaiyas.

Just men.

Everywhere.

The city became unfamiliar before it became frightening. It wasn't the silence that terrified me. It was the absence.The absence of us, of women. 

How many ordinary mornings had I lived without realising they were privileges? The privilege of stepping outside. Of waiting for Mumma's coffee. Of growing bored. Of saying no. Of becoming whoever I wanted to become.

I returned to my room and stood before my bookshelf. Imagine dying because you wanted to read a book. Imagine your greatest act of rebellion being education. Imagine dreaming of becoming a teacher only to watch classrooms become forbidden places. How does a country survive after teaching its daughters to stop dreaming?

How? How?!

Where is GOD?

What happened to all the good wishes people send into the universe? What prayers are left when the previous ones have only echoed back as silence? What miracle, what lucky number, what sacred stone could possibly convince the world, the universe, that a girl deserves to wake up and live another ordinary day? I could almost see people who never believed in God folding their hands and whispering prayers. Desperation has a strange way of making believers out of us.

Then a thought crossed my mind.

Maybe GOD is a man. I mean, c'mon, he has to be. Because if God were a woman, how is she surviving all of this? How does she watch little girls fold away their uniforms year after year? How does she let white paint cover the windows? How does she hear women cry into their pillows every night and still let morning arrive?

No. She couldn't be. So maybe God is a man.

Because only a man could sit so high above it all and still remain untouched by what women have endured below.

"You've been staring at your bookshelf for so long..." my sister said.

I smiled, kissed her forehead, and went back to bed. Outside, it was just another Monday morning. I had no office to rush to, no meetings waiting for me, nowhere I needed to be. I couldn't get myself out of bed; not because I was tired, but because I could see the avalanche without having to close my eyes.

I realised avalanches don't always begin with snow. Sometimes they begin with laws. With a classroom door that never opens again. With uniforms folded away. With white-painted windows. With teachers being killed. With dreams becoming dangerous.

I looked out of my window. The sky was impossibly blue. The kind of blue that once reminded me of Switzerland. I wondered if the sky above Afghanistan looked any different. I suppose it doesn't. The same sun rises there. The same clouds drift by. Only one of us wakes up with the freedom to decide what to do with the day.

I looked at my bookshelf. The coffee had gone cold. The room was still blue. And for the first time in a very long time, I didn't shut my eyes.

I simply couldn't.