Anju Kishore
Colourb(l)ind
Pink is for girls and blue is for boys, smiled mom picking my clothes. And I was stuck with navy blues, blacks, and their boring cousins. I wished then that I were a rooster. Being human, what with the power of discretion and all, didn’t seem like a good place to be in if I wasn’t allowed to wear red. The nearest I got to using red was the Natraj pencil that in those days came only in red. Come to think of it, I might as well have been a Natraj pencil. No thoughts then. Or feelings either. Mom would have liked that. The world too.
marginalised colours spring sunrise
So I am all grown up now, very much a part of the natural world, and yet not. I was taught that big boys don’t gasp at the sight of blood. So I gasp at a pomegranate instead or a hibiscus. But it wouldn’t be appropriate to compliment the housemaid when she wears a red rose in her hair.
the traffic signal bleeds autumn rain
When I die, I am glad my folks will burn me. The body cannot get closer than that to wearing red.
winter dusk darkening ember drifts
About the Author
Anju Kishore is a Pushcart Prize nominee and an award-winning editor of numerous free-verse anthologies. She is the author of …and I Stop to Listen (2018) and My Conversations with God, Life, and Death (2025), and her poems are part of several significant anthologies. She has also dabbled in online theatre and continues to explore Japanese forms of poetry.