I was nineteen when I learnt about an artist who licked the colour yellow, and it made absolute sense in the corners of my mind. Vincent was overcoming the growing certainty of his starvation of life by feasting on the yellow he could see. Paint had never betrayed him, happiness had.

If he cloaked his sorrow like the canvas, wouldn't the sun shine on the paper of his heart and wouldn't the sky within him know the touch of alchemy that bees drink?

My lungs expanded with despondency and the calmness of it. The world was a heart stopping force of wounds and none was alone in the injury of it. All were craving a drop of yellow, honey powdered amber or champagne spill over the fire, just a brief familiarity of relief. Felicity came in extensive shades like the blue of ache.

There was a month that reeked of yellow when I was small. Something about the festivals and the celebrations of it was all about the colour of the sun. It was Magha, the month that comprises half of January and the initial quarter of February. A part of it was kissed by cold and bitter winds and the other glazed by sweetest syrup flavoured sunlight. It is still the same. A family of marigolds where yellow brews in the pot and listers pray to its font.

On January nights, when the luminous yellow sparks and the curtain of manjha (kite string) breaks, the air is greeted with peanuts and the smell of ochre caramel.

We call it “Gacchak.” I assumed it was named so because it was gur di chikki (peanut brittle glazed with jaggery). I never sought to confirm whether my presumption was correct for I didn’t want the dream of etymology to be broken by the reality of the world.

But why am I, dear reader, talking of this particular month? And why have I asked Vincent and you to come with me on this journey of yellow? Maybe I desire to find it myself. Like all, I have also lost the intensity of it, haven't I? And you too?

I open the door of a mystical time, and tie you to me. I share the yellow I saw and ate in the ebbs of time while I sat on the chipped floor inside a few centimetres long lemon coloured wall. After the day of kite flying, which as much as I enjoyed by forging the severed kites from the sky, I longed for the day after. After the fire goes cold and the yellow of the peanut cover goes fickle, the yellow of chickpeas sprout wild!

The night of “lohri”(kite festival in Punjab, India) dies, birthing the day of “Maghi”.

The day after, it is customary to eat something yellow. Something yellow to loiter over in your tongue and heart. My mother prepared rice, which were cotton and fluff and seemed as if she was “Indra” summoning them inside the wok. But my friend, you'd say rice is white? So where does the yellow hail from?

Every house did it differently, a distinct kind of yellow to place over the dish. My mother used the “chana dal”. In English its name is chickpea lentils. Within the cloud of rice, she delicately placed the sun of lentils. There were multiple suns in the cloud! And when I say multiple, I mean hundreds. She rained ginger and clove on the landscape covertly, so the cardamom could take its fervid revenge in the last bite.

The yellow beads of lentils glowed like the sun and I moved like a sun-facing flower, unable to convene my focus on one.

I had been eating yellow since I was a child without a thought. I eat it now with the yearning to fill my heart. Every Maghi, I eat it with the same love as moons ago, but now with a quiet desire to fill a void bereft of hope. If Vincent was my friend, I would share the fair part of my favourite dish with him so that no putrid colour displayed a repulsive taste over his blood.

Not only had I been eating yellow as a kid in Magha, it was a joyous tradition to wear it too. The day spring arrived in the place I lived was called “Basant”. The advent of spring just before “Phagun” commenced was the time of yellow. Not only was mother nature expected to be adorned with turmeric spots on the day but the people as well. Everyone dressed as bees and flowers and the butterflies and drones flapped near the cotton and silk clothes. The sky was itself bleeding yellow with mirrors and the people seemed like its little reflection.

Time moved and living within me shifted, yellow was moving away from my grip... Basant had arrived this year and the last and the year prior to that and I had not worn one stripe of yellow over me. As much as I wished to display the essence of it, I could only wear it tucked beneath the white and black of the woollen cardigan.

If wanting was living, I had lived my whole life.

As much sorrow as there is, the hope to grieve for happiness keeps the wish for joy alive. I may have lost the ability to wear yellow outside like I did but there is a treasure of it inside the spaces of my cells which I have procured by eating all the yellow of my mother's cooking. There is a paint of it over my skin which has been left by the constant wearing and tearing of my “basant clothes”.

I might not be an artist, but like one, I had been eating, gathering and hoarding yellow in my bones to feel warm. Through food, through culture and through tradition, I have been sending letters to the yellow post office.

May it write back soon someday and I hope it finds your address too. For we are all people, don't we all deserve to feel a little yellow?