The hand us a bucket of paint. It can be any colour. I choose blue, because that's my favourite colour. 

They hand us a white piece of canvas. We are to paint the first things that comes to our heads. I make a fence. It's pretty fence, really; with even spokes and neat outlines. When they ask me why I painted a fence, I have nothing special to say. "It was the first thing I thought of." I tell them. The others laugh at me, they've all painted seemingly profound things - a green heart with jagged lines and a black horse.

I look at my blue fence and try to come up with an explanation. I can't.

The canvas is still lying somewhere in my desk.

An art project at age 8, where we were being subtly psychoanalyzed.

Every corner I turned – the sky was a different colour.

The cab I was in drove past a school and I looked up at an orange-pink sky. The children trickled out of the school. The tiny ones, whose school bags where bigger than them, wavered a little under all that intellectual weight. They looked ecstatic on seeing their mothers who’d come to pick them. They dropped their things and began to run about in circles.

As we drove on the sea link, the sky soon became blue, with only a slight hint of the dark side. We crossed all the young couples sitting on their stationery bikes. The sea wind drove their hair into a frenzy. They had to chase after their scarves, which hopped away with the fierce breeze.

As we turned onto the all-too-familiar street, where trees swayed lazily and the home winked at us from a distance, the sky turned a dark graphite grey. People quickened their pace and cars rushed past so as to reach home before the it started to rain.

I walked into the building under the slate coloured expanse above me, with all its stars tucked away. There was a sense of doom to the whole thing, but only in the nicest possible way.

The amateur's painting

Hold the paintbrush at an angle, so that the watery blue looks thicker, more pronounced if you will.
Cobalt blue; is that really the colour of water? The 12 bottle poster colour kit definitely thinks so, because the other blue is the colour of ink. Then again blue waters are a magical, mythical thing. Just like how little girls colour the people in their pictures with a chalky pink. No one is pink really. Nothing is pink.

The sky looks a little patchy but so does the sky outside so I guess it isn’t a complete miss. The clouds have a shade of grey that is far too realistic for a painting. I wait for them to rain all over the picture. Little children always ruin pictures. Either their limbs look too awkward or their raincoat sticks out at an odd angle or their faces look far too happy. The landscape stands a better chance of looking picturesque without the scrawny human figures.

Making V shaped birds is alright till about the fourth grade. Beyond that, there is nothing clever about making crows fly around your sky in this manner. There is a branch swaying on the left; the leaves aren’t all the same shade of green. Some are a dark spinach coloured mass, the others are a more amiable green – the colour of parrots.

There are a few rocks at the foot of the tree, round and even, all a smooth brown that looks like a clever amount of white was mixed in it. The trick is to mix in a little ochre. The greater trick is to mix in any number of colours because if you do see a blue-green rock in reality, I am sure you won’t question Nature about its colour.

The piece of art is left to dry, under a fan, held down with a talcum powder bottle and a old chocolate tin. These items, when picked up after some time, leave a wet ring on the page where they once stood. You shrug and say it merges with the picture anyway.