the colour of the sky

“Alsana would say, ‘Little man, how about the blue one for Amma, hmm?’, pushing him into the primary colours section of Mothercare. ‘Just one blue one. Go so nice with your eyes. For Amma, Magid. How can you not care for blue? It’s the colour of the sky!’
    ‘No, Amma. The sky isn’t blue. There’s just white light. White light has all of the colours of the rainbow in it, and when it is scattered through the squillions of molecules in the sky, the short-wave colours—blue, violet—they are the ones you see. The sky isn’t really blue. It just looks that way. It’s called Rayleigh scattering.’
    A strange child with a cold intellect.”

—Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 2000.