What colour is your paradise?

"When I was very young, I was obsessed with the colors of places and things my father told me about in his nightly stories. I wanted to know the color of Scheherazade's dress, her bedcover, the color of the genie and the magic lamp, and once I asked him about the color of paradise. He said it could be any color I wanted it to be. That was not enough. Then one day when we had guests and I was eating my soup in the dining room, my eyes fell on a painting I had seen on the wall ever since I could remember, and I instantly knew the color of my paradise. And here it is, I said, proudly pointing to a small oil painting in an old wooden frame: a green landscape of lush, leathery leaves with two birds, two deep red apples, a golden pear and a touch of blue."

from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi.

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This passage has stuck with me ever since I read it several days ago. What colour is my paradise? If paradise can be any colour I want it to be, then what might I choose?

In Nafisi's book, both her paradise and that of the student to whom she tells this story are rooted in a moment in childhood, and both have their basis in something common, everyday -- a painting in the dining room, in the case of Nafisi, a swimming pool ("swimming pool blue") that she swam in as a child in the case of the student.

But I have very few memories of my childhood -- I often find it curious that I remember very little about my past at all, and that I often have to trust that what others tell me about my past is true.

I find this more than a little distressing -- I feel as though who I am, by virtue of who I was, is constantly being created and recreated at the whim of others, that I have no say in this whatsoever.

Except, in this moment, when I can choose to be something, I can choose who I am, now, in the present, and whom I might like to be, in the future.

What colour is my paradise?

The answer to this question is made more difficult to form by the fact that I see very little in colour these days. In the book Sally Melville Styles, Sally Melville writes :

"There will be times in our lives when our ability to see color and put colors together is impaired -- when we are sad or grieving. Everything may be greyed out or everything may seem impossibly bright."

This has been my experience exactly. Either everything seems grey, like on an old black and white television, or everything seems impossibly garish, hard to look at.

When Nafisi asks her student if she sees the words of the poems she writes in colors, the student responds, "The Islamic Republic coarsened my taste in colors...I want to wear outrageous colors, like shocking pink or tomato red. I feel too greedy for colors to see them in the carefully chosen words of poetry."

I feel greedy for colour these days, but the only colour I seem capable of actually seeing are those coarse, garish, outrageous colours. I long for colour, but it seems to be an all or nothing proposition these days.

So, what colour is your paradise?

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BTW, I've made a small step towards reviving my food blog, so pop on over if you're interested, make a request, whatever. I've got shelves of cookbooks as well as the notebooks I keep on the subject, so...