An Experiment in Brown skin

  Every morning Arjun woke up in the same room where the ceiling fan made a sound like something slowly dying. He didn’t hate the sound anymore. It had become the rhythm of his mornings the only thing that stayed when everything else kept changing.   He ironed his shirt the same way, stood before the mirror the same way. The mirror, a silent witness, never said much. It simply showed him  brown, tired, somewhere between invisible and unremarkable. He often wondered if invisibility was a form of peace or punishment.   At the office, faces glowed under white tube