Eight-year-old Rehan Ahmad. A village boy of Zampathri. A class 2 student of Rainbow International School. The school bus he is travelling in is stoned by some people at Shopian. He suffers serious head injury. He is physically hurt. And most disturbingly, his rainbow looks smashed…..all its splendid, diverse and deep colors are mutated. Psychologically.
A seemingly ‘simple’ happening hits the nascent narrative in the humdrum life of Rehan. That moment in slow motion….when he was stoned and scared; when bus windowpane holed in horror; when with each millisecond of it, the somber reality of his life unfolded in front of him the symbolic rainbow colors, one by one.
Violence is the first color he recognizes. Amidst relentless curiosity, a hope-driven desire to observe and learn—Rehan starts humming violence, signaling a retreat of his childish belief in the immortal beauty of colors. Blood is frighteningly red for him. It reeks of gory scenes and slaughtering sounds.
Independence is the color Rehan hasn’t perceived so far. He lives his life in the dominions far from the core of things that confound its shades as per the ‘suitable’ understanding. The antiquated common sense has clouded the grisly prudence that attempts to define this color for Rehan. He is too small to take the mammoth making of this color.
Books bewilder him. Even as they turn all the life’s beauties and treasures into colors, their own color defeats Rehan. The precariousness of life poses profound questions about the nature of failings and justices, and of course, about the assumptions books construct in the bookish world. Their color doesn’t touch Rehan. Nor do the meanings. A few poems, paradoxes, plays….Dramatically departing from real situations to what is scribbled so superbly, for Rehan books prove pointless.
Guns are grotesque. They roar pandemonium. This shade of reality is chilling. Rehan is still unaware of the traumatic transformation guns have already caused in his rainbow. He naively tries to capture everything that won’t reduce his idea of life to a ragtag rhetoric. But guns, with their multi-hued power, seem to render all wisdom weightless. For their impact is revolting, invisibly expanding like a smoky sepulcher, devouring all other colors.
Yearning to live. With enormous empathy and scrupulous sincerity. It makes the most adorable color for Rehan. He yearns to make others see the overtones of this color through his eyes. Unremarkably, his artlessness sees ordinary and questions nothing. Rehan, as an 8-year old child, doesn’t know anything about facing the quivering difficulties with a quiet dignity. But his simplicity serenades the sufferings of the time he brushes along the way. That’s why his rainbow is appealing to him. Even as it may not appear so for the rest.
Oppression is a streak of everything dark in Rehan’s rainbow. It is starkly dominating. It forms the repository of all the experiences he has accumulated since his childhood. And today, with an injured self, he has a personal history to paint on. With this shift, this color seems truer to him than anything else now. It has instilled in him the hue of fear—of vulnerabilities, victimizations and vilifications. This color has wounded Rehan. And somewhat smudged the aura of his rainbow. It will take him years to muster courage and be entirely guileless in narrating his version of the reality, and come out of the shock of today’s agonizing episode.
Resilience is the color that reclaims Rehan’s rainbow. In the middle of tough times hitting him, offering no hope, resilience swathes Rehan’s predicament. It helps him to recuperate. To be courageous. To face the ordeal. To fight the pain. To defeat the distress. The actual colors of his rainbow aid him heal! His faith liberates him.
Bottomline: Rehan has a long way to go….life is waiting for him with blithe and bliss as it unfurls the promising reality of his world, his rainbow. There is a bittersweet connection that joins Rehan’s rainbow with his history and his future. Traversing the roads to his school, he will always carry the scar of his injury inside. Until he matures enough to know and own it, while making it a part of his spirit, study and struggle.
The stone that injured Rehan will turn to be a stepping stone towards momentous self-actualization that he is destined to achieve…it is going to change his life and turn his world around. Rehan will wake up to his self, the best possible self, and recognize the deeper insight and compassion than he might have ever expected to realize in this world.
Get well and grow up soon, Rehan!