Kools Commentary : Sep 9 PR - Page 3

An Orange evening:

The other day the friends were stealing a chance walk along the spacious Marine Drive promenade. For almost a week, the continuous rains have banished and deprived the denizens of their daily dash of evening walk. The rains have ceased and Marine Drive esplanade has a sudden rush of activity though heavy over cast was clearly indicating the imminent breach of cease-'rain'. The promenade, the parallel broad express drive way, trees, buildings everything was yet wet out of the previous downpour. A kind of dusky grayness pervaded all around.

In that brief truce of the rain before it'd resume its assault, there occurred a magic. By a freak of nature, there passed a pocket of void in the dense, heavily laden, rushing currents of south-west monsoon, carrying billions of liters of much petitioned fresh water to the sub continental hinterlands. For a brief interlude of 10 minutes the sky had suddenly revealed itself. The Orange illuminated the evening.

Even for a place used to the brilliant sunsets, that sudden outburst of crimson twilight was ethereal. The few walkers and joggers or those few who had come there to seat on the recently refurbished continuous waterfront parapet to marvel at the monsoon's magical pull on the tumultuous sea, all these interim inhabitants were gasping in wonder to this sudden change in the Surrounding-from gray to a bright glow of Orange sans any visible sign of the customary fiery orb of setting sun. The environ posed bathed in a strange wet orange- a liquid gold.

The comfily paved promenade was aglow in evening light through out its visible arch of four kilometers- from the distant Chawpaty beach in the north-smeared crimson to that nearby tip of Nariman point in the south where the tall, creamy white towers of hotel Trident Oberoi and Air India mirrored orange. Those precious numbers of Badam trees on the waterfront were also trying to accommodate in this strange interplay of colour with an equally strange and seemingly paradoxical assumption of an orange hue by its broad green leaves. Far in the north the distant tip of Raj Bhavan and the ancient hill of Malabar were shimmering on the bay in a futile attempt to encompass in an almost complete circle. Its numerous sky-scrappers were appearing to cast their curious search into the western horizon for that long absent globe of Sol. Then not so far away in the north jarring outline, of princess Street Fly over was annoyingly hiding the soothing visage of spacious open grounds of three adjacent old time gymkhanas- Parsi, Islam and Hindu.

The breeze itself was donning an orange glow. The colonial era art deco buildings - all standing erect in a majestic symmetry of uniform height-7 floors each- forming a leisurely rich backdrop to a beautiful sea front avenue-that legendry famous, gently curving queen's necklace gracing the stormy bosom of the bay, were all bathed in a happy wash of Orange. Their innumerable French windows were unanimously reflecting Arabian's monsoon whipped surfs coated in a strange colour of flame. As if in a timeless whisper, the waves were warning those modern structures, 'Yo there, which had been carved out from us, beware, we will reclaim you sooner or later.'

And then the east started turning dark and west started turning grey with the fresh minions of the monsoon clouds ready to pounce on city of Bombay, but certainly not before imprinting a scene which is sure to last till the end of memory.