Bet on the blues: Do you long for a blue sky?

It’s not just our breath that our cities’ air is taking away from us. It’s also snatching from us our simple little pleasures — of being dazzled by a blue sky, of taking a walk in the park without consulting our watches, of rushing for a window seat so you can feel the breeze in your face and hair. We have lost all that and gained only a gnawing anxiety about what swirls around us.

In our new altered world, walking at dawn is out because the air is supposed to be the most lethal then, not that some of us late-risers are losing any sleep over it. Dusk is not good either, so you can tick off the evening walk from your list too. In Delhi, there are days so bad that children and the elderly are being advised to stay indoors. Delhi’s foul air is certainly giving the outdoors a bad name.

But once upon a time, in a place far away, the sky was blue and all the world a playground. As all our cousins gathered together in the summer holidays in Dehra Dun, we would spent the hot days playing outside, as thrilled to be out of our parents’ way as presumably they were to be out of ours. The games were unorganised and simple. Scrambling up litchi trees, playing hopscotch and chasing each other. The boldest amongst the cousins was our unopposed and uncrowned leader and to be chosen by her to participate in an adventure our greatest honour. On one such adventure that involved walking on a neighbour’s wall and then jumping onto their lawn, I remember being chased by a dog till we found an open door and took refuge in their bathroom. While waiting for the dog outside to leave, I ate up an entire tube of toothpaste, out of nervousness or boredom, I am still not sure.

As the days would melt into an inky darkness, we would reluctantly pick our way back home, managing to pack in a game of “dark room” before falling off to sleep, while the stars outside took over the sky. On summer nights, we slept outside in the open, in courtyards, lawns and terraces. Lying on our folding beds and charpoys, we followed the searchlight that the touring circus threw across the sky, thrilled to hear the circus lion’s roar and counted stars till we lost count.

As we grew slightly older, we added more games to our repertoire. Counting stars gave way to deciphering constellations and thus began a new game of upmanship. That star that lit up the entire night sky was Sirius, the Dog Star; the brightest star in the Canis Major left us so dazzled we even named our stuffed dog after it. That there was the backward question mark, over there the great bear (Ursa Major) and the small bear (Ursa Minor). The biggest happiness was, of course, to spot a shooting star.

In Delhi, on the rare nights that we sit up late on our terrace, star gazing is a luckless game. When did we last see a star-washed sky, I asked my husband recently. Pangong, he answered. And I remembered the lake in Ladakh with its sparkling blue waters and a star-dotted sky like a Roerich canvas hanging low over it. In Chakrata up in the Uttarakhand hills, where the stars have to squeeze in to find a place for themselves. In Dharampur in Himachal, where we made an unscheduled stop on our way to Manali and saw so many shooting stars that my mother was convinced we were all hallucinating.

But must blue skies and starry nights become mere memories that we lug back from our holidays? Memories that come upon unannounced on our grey everydays?

The day-time blue and the inky night sky have been the inspiration behind much of our art and music — from art’s most famous sky in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, which is said to depict the view outside Van Gogh’s sanatorium window at Saint-Rémy by dark, to the countless mentions of blue skies in Hindi cinema. But, more importantly, they have been part of our first memories. A child’s first canvas has always been a house and a family standing below a crayonned blue sky. Let’s hope our children don’t have to exchange the blue crayon for a grey one.