Never realised painting your house can be a nightmare…actually not painting but choosing the colours to paint them with. The decision making can be even more difficult when you need to convince / satisfy the colour needs of 3 women (my wife and 2 daughters).
Wife woke up one fine Friday morning(incidentally Friday is the Sunday in our part of the world)telling me she has had enough of our boring walls, though, in my opinion, It was made interesting by our daughter’s attempts at learning literature, elementary mathematics and modern art on them. I seemed to be quiet pleased watching the advances my daughter was making since I could see the writing on the wall already. Painting a house is something that you don’t want to hear on the 4th Friday of the month especially when the month has 31 days…
I nodded (meekly)and told them I will have a coat of the same colour (half white) done the next day. What followed was a discourse + argument + constructive discussion on topics ranging from Primary, secondary, complimentary colours, vibrancy, inner tranquillity, Vaastu, Fengshui…for the next 4 Hours or so which made me order a working lunch too. (Add it to the hidden costs of the painting).
We had a painter ooops! Sorry, a colour consultant pass by who dropped us a catalogue consisting of 160 shades!!!! He told us to ping him once we chose the colours and he could get it done in a day for a fortune. The first row on the catalogue read something like this, Cheese Cake, Banana Smoothie, Mango Juice, Orange Tart, Papaya, Ripe Apricot, Strawberry Jam, Cotton Candy, Cream caramel, Chocolate mousse, chocolate…wow, I said to myself, most of these were already there on my wall in various designs and shades… We were in fact thinking of giving a coat to exactly hide all the above stuff that my daughters creatively managed to adorn our walls with during breakfast, lunch and dinner. What intrigued me was both the Chocolate mousse and chocolate looked dark brown, when I drew up the courage to mention this, I was scorned at by the 3 women, one of them as young as 4 asking me if I was actually colour blind, to not see, the subtle difference between lightish dark brown and dark brown!!!
The names of the colour shades made interesting reading. I have listed a few that impressed me. To be read in the following order, the catalogue description, a mortal’s effort at colour identification, comment.
Blonde Ambition: /Yellow/ well not sure if I’m ambitious enough or am I yet to meet an ambitious blonde!!!
Lerkespore: / Creamish Light Yellow (thank God for ‘ish’, makes your description sound closer). I didn’t even know what it meant,the first thing that came to mind was WTF, googled it and found out that it was a flower. No part of it was close to the shade, not sure of the colour of the pollens though.
Mystic River: / Green / Never seen a mystic river, have seen dried up rivers but they are light brown.
Plum lips / Brownish Pink / Badly bruised lips.
Blush Cheeks / Kinda Pink / Looked more like slapped cheeks!!!
Ballet slippers / Light Grey / A slightly dirty Bata Hawai chappals
There are many more…, Angel Dust, Silent fall, Cheeky Menace, Sensitive spirit, Serene Soul, but the winner was the next one
Bank Account / Greyish Blue / I’ve known or seen them all these years in different shades of RED!!!
Mad with all this, I asked for a cup of tea and Voila …there was a shade called Morrocan tea (Orange) and that was it for one of the walls and quickly zeroed in on a Fairouza Blue (Blue) for the opposite wall since that was the only one that could balance the vibrancy of the orange with the inherent pigmental serenity of blue. (Whatever that means). The kids settled for a Gemini Twin (Purple).
At the end of the day my wallet turned RED and I was battered black and blue & made me realise that there was life and colour beyond the rainbow. I grew up watching the VIBGYOR on the other side of the window but I knew the time had come for me to throw them out of it too!
Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red would soon vanish from our colourful vocabulary.
I wasn’t kidding with all those shady names…Click on this
link to find all the names of shades listed above.
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