After the Indigo Fades: A Story on New Beginnings | Thursday Tale No. 18

  We all chase the perfect morning, the ideal day, the flawless start. Yet life has a way of turning even the most carefully orchestrated plans upside down.

  After the Indigo Fades is the story of a woman's pursuit of a perfect day, and the shades of life between expectation and reality. 

After the Indigo Fades

Photograph by Ricardo Oliveira on Pexels.

  Laya opened her eyes. 

  Her room was indigo with the morning light. 

She turned off her alarm. It was 6.00 a.m. 

  As usual, the sparrows that frequented the tree by her balcony chirped unceasingly: Cheep! Cheep! Cheep! Cheep! 

  In the far distance, a cuckoo cooed its joyful song. 

  Feeling as fresh as the tender shoot of a leaf, Laya sat up and stretched. She put her feet on the floor. A chill from the marble floor pushed her toes into retreat. 

  Putting on her socks and drawing her fuzzy blanket around her shoulders, Laya walked to the window. The sun was still tired from the previous night’s celebration, and it crept slowly from behind the horizon.

  Without waiting for the indigo to fade, Laya washed her face, brushed her teeth, showered, and sipped on a warm cup of chukku kapi. By the time she was ready for her walk in the park, the sun sparkled through the glass pane of the window overlooking her balcony. 

  In the park, Laya covered 4 kilometres—her recent personal feat. She also performed her exercise routine, focused on smooth joint movements and core-strength building. Throughout her time in the park, she saw fewer of the people whom she regularly met. Perhaps today was their cheat day. 

  Laya returned home and cooked for herself a simple, warm meal: upma. She added a bowl of fruit and a cup of milk to her breakfast. After finishing her meal, she washed the dishes. Then the next few hours were spent practicing music and reading. 

  It was an ideal morning, as it had been for a few months now.

  At noon, Laya went to the market. She bought some onions, tomatoes, potatoes, ginger, garlic, and a few other groceries to restock her pantry. She also bought some freshly slaughtered chicken to cook for lunch. Could there be a special day without chicken for lunch? 

  Laya got back home. She put her phone on the phone stand and her purse in the drawer. She replenished all the empty baskets and containers. She put rice on the stove to cook. As the rice cooked, she quickly trimmed the bundle of coriander leaves and put them in storage, ground ginger–garlic paste, chopped onions and tomatoes, pickled some onion for the side, and rinsed the chicken. 

  Soon, the rice began boiling; the onion–tomato base for the curry was simmering in a kadai. Laya needed only half an hour before her perfect lunch when her phone rang. Laya drew her phone out of the drawer.

  It was Marisa from work. 

  “Sorry to trouble you on a holiday, but it is urgent. It is the client, as always. Please send me the document quickly.” 

  Laya looked at the curry; it required her to add and stir the other ingredients only after ten minutes. So Laya thought, “Once I send this off, I can then return to my cooking and to my perfect afternoon.” 

  Laya opened her laptop and typed: Final Pitch 3. But the document was not found. Confused, she checked if there were any typographical errors. She typed it again, slowly this time: F-I-N-A-L SPACE P-I-T-C-H SPACE 3. Still, the document was not found. 

  So Laya rummaged through thousands and thousands of PDFs and Word documents to find every other file except for the one she was looking for. In the search, she also stumbled across a “to-do list” from 2017 and an essay from her undergraduate years. 

  Laya was still searching for the document when the smell of pungent smoke filled the living room. Laya quickly sprinted to the kitchen and turned off the stove knob. The curry had burnt; it would taste bitter. As she was about to leave the kitchen, the boiling rice overflowed out of the pot with a hsss. The rice had also become mushy. A terrible combination to eat with chicken curry. Laya swiftly turned off the stove, but the starchy water burnt her finger. Now she had to clean the gas stove and the kitchen countertop with a blistered finger.

  “Let me at least strain the rice first. I will clean the kitchen later,” Laya thought to herself.

  Laya took out the rice pot’s lid and began straining it when her phone rang. As she left the rice pot halfway through the straining, the phone stopped ringing. Overwhelmed, Laya looked for her phone in the drawer. “No. It is on the phone stand.” It was not there either. 

  The phone rang again, but from the kitchen. She finally found it in the cabinet by the fridge.

  “Hello, listen. I can’t find the doc on my laptop. I think I have saved it on my work PC. Who is there in the office today?” inquired Laya. 

  “Clark.” 

  “Please tell him to check. And don’t forget to get back to me.” 

  “Okay. Do share your PC password with Clark.” 

  “Sure.” 

  Laya sat there, waiting for Clark or Marisa to call back, and the kitchen sat waiting for her. After a short wait—which seemed long to Laya, who was on the verge of having a meltdown if she were not consciously telling herself to inhale and exhale deeply—her phone rang again.

  “Hello. We found the document. Carry on with your day. Once again, sorry to bother you,” Marisa informed. 

  “No worries.” 

  “Have a nice day!” 

  “You too!”

  Nice day. A nice day with a kitchen full of mess: a pot of unstrained rice, another pot of half-burnt curry, the crunchy pickled onion turning soggy, and the rinsed raw chicken slowly losing its tenderness. 

  It was 2.00 p.m. already, the ideal time to eat lunch, at least according to Laya. 

  Smiling—because Laya knew what it took to have a perfect life—she returned to the kitchen. Laya quickly strained off the rice and rinsed it in cold water to avoid as much mushiness as possible. She removed the stove’s griddle, wiped off the starchy spill with a washcloth, and wiped it many times till it was sparkling. Then she scraped off what remained of the burnt curry, transferred it to another kadai, and set it on the stove. She added a few more chopped onions and tomatoes, added all the spices, rinsed the chicken with salt again, mixed them all, and simmered them. While the curry cooked, Laya quickly did the dishes, filled her bottle with fresh water, and set up the table. Laya chose a show to watch, served herself, and ate her lunch in the late afternoon.

  The rest of the day was spent peacefully. 

  At night, just before bed, and just as she had been doing for the past few months, Laya picked up her journal and wrote: 

“1 January 2026, 

Today was not the best day. I have seen better days, especially over the past few months. Despite that, I had secretly wished that if I started the habits early, I would get the ideal new beginning I have always visualised on New Year’s Day. But life is life. 

Perhaps I will never have my ideal New Year. But that is the beauty, because I get to have my new beginnings every day, every moment.

‘After the indigo fades, I will have azure, pink, purple and all the other

lovely shades.’

With love, 

Me”

  Laya set her alarm for 6:00 a.m. She turned off the light, and fell asleep.

- Mercy Rebonica