Colourful

I guess he had tried his best to imagine how it is going to feel, but he fell short of expectations nevertheless.
“How does it look, Dan?” I asked eagerly, after he put on the special glasses for the colourblind I had got for him.
He kept staring through them but didn’t reply.
“Dan,” I held his arm.
“This… this is… Amazing!” A tear rolled into his greying beard.
He had been colorblind since birth, for 51 years.
He was still staring straight ahead of him, his hands on his mouth. It took me a while to realise he was overwhelmed. How was he supposed to know where to look and what to look for! My eyes welled up.
I turned and stood beside him, “Look at those hills. Look how green those trees are!”
“Oh my god.”
“Look at the black road’s far end. Do you see the mirage?”
“This black is so beautiful!” He remarked, and I realised mirage has no colour really; and how beautiful that black was indeed. Why had I never looked at it like this before?
He turned to the car, and wiped it with his palm. It picked some dust. He looked at his hand, thought of something and then looked down at his feet. He bent down, picked up some soil and laughed in fascination as shades of red fell from his hand.
I looked at him again. Tears were flowing down his eyes. And mine.
“Look there, at the balloons on our car.”
“Is that red?” He asked, pointing at one.
“No,” I choked, “this is blue.”
“Cyan or Royal?”
He was pointing at things like a toddler and I was naming colors for the next 15 minutes. Once the shades on the hill were exhausted, he hurried into the car, and began picking up whatever things he could find, one by one. After that, we talked about which color would be his favorite.
“Your world is so beautiful!” He smiled, and then corrected, ” – colourful.”
“Now it is yours too.”

 

 

Disclaimer: the inspiration for this piece is a short video of a similar event that I encountered sometime somewhere in the huge mess of internet, but could not track down later.