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 lights — light so pale it erased colour. Yet somehow, his colour never disappeared. It lingered like a shadow on his skin. Colleagues laughed, screens blinked, air-conditioners hummed, and every sound made him feel like a visitor in his own life.
During meetings, he noticed the pattern how people listened to words differently depending on who spoke them. His words always fell shorter, like they lacked weight. He spoke sense, but it was as if his sentences wore darker clothes than others.
Once, the HR manager told him casually, “You should smile more, Arjun, it makes you look approachable.” He nodded. But later, he stood before the washroom mirror and tried smiling. It looked strange, like the smile was borrowed from someone else’s face.
At lunch, his friend Reema spoke about her new skincare routine. She laughed, said something about tanning, and he felt an odd urge to leave the table. He didn’t dislike her he just disliked the air that surrounded such conversations, the invisible politeness that smelled like pity.
At night, he scrolled through his phone, through faces brighter than his. The world was full of whitened smiles, filtered skins, corrected tones. He thought of deleting everything, but didn’t. He needed to belong to something, even if it made him smaller.
Once, during a photoshoot at the office, the photographer adjusted the light. “Sir, a little brighter exposure, please,” he said. The word brighter stayed in Arjun’s mind like a small wound. That night he dreamt of standing under a white light that kept growing, until it burned everything except his colour.
He woke up sweating, touched his arms in the dark, as if to make sure the brown hadn’t faded. The fan kept spinning a dull, mechanical sigh.
Days passed. Weeks. The city remained indifferent, wrapped in advertisements that whispered fairness, beauty, lightness. He walked among them like a ghost mistaken for a shadow.
Sometimes, while waiting at traffic signals, he watched street children playing barefoot. Their laughter was wild, their skin darker than his. They didn’t seem to care. He envied that not their freedom, but their forgetfulness.
One evening, he saw a painter working under a dim lamp. The painter’s fingers moved slowly, painting a portrait of an old man — the colours rough, uneven, but alive. Arjun stood there for a long time, saying nothing. The painter never looked up. It was as if he painted not faces, but their silence.
On his way home, Arjun felt something loosen inside him not relief, not realization, just a quiet distance between him and everything else. The air felt heavier, but he didn’t resist it. Maybe, he thought, this is what truth feels like not bright, not heroic, just quietly unbearable.
He reached home, sat by the window, and let the darkness of the room melt into the darkness of his skin. The two seemed to understand each other perfectly.
And for a moment, he felt seen not by the world, but by the night itself.?
The nights began to lengthen. They seemed to watch him as much as he watched them. Arjun often sat at his desk long after midnight, the lamp dim enough to make the page on his notebook look yellow and tired. He didn’t write much—only fragments:
light refuses me,
I am the wall between two suns,
melanin remembers.
He wasn’t sure why he wrote them. They didn’t feel like thoughts but like messages sent from some older version of himself, one that still believed language could save him.
Sometimes the city sounded far away, as if the traffic outside was happening in another country. In those moments, Arjun noticed the small things: the brown of his wrist under the lamplight, the outline of his reflection in the window glass. The glass didn’t show his full face, only his shadow, and that partial image felt truer than any photograph.
He began to notice colours differently. White no longer looked clean it looked empty, like a sheet waiting for something to stain it. Brown looked steady, patient, unwilling to fade. Even darkness had gradients now, secret shades hidden inside it.
One evening, during a power cut, the building’s generator failed. The city disappeared into a temporary blackout. Arjun stood by the balcony and felt a strange calm. Without the light, there were no comparisons, no degrees of fairness or dullness. Every face, every wall, every object belonged to the same shade.
He thought, Maybe this is what equality feels like: a night without light.
When the power returned, it almost hurt his eyes. The white tube light felt arrogant again, demanding to be noticed. He looked at his hands his colour reappeared, soft but firm—and he whispered to no one, “You’re back.” It wasn’t madness; it was recognition.
The next morning, he went to work as usual. No one saw the difference, but he carried it quietly, like a secret pact between him and the shade that had stood by him all his life.
He no longer searched for brighter light in mirrors or cameras. He began to look for softer ones the kind that didn’t erase but revealed.
And somewhere, between the noise of office chatter and the hum of ceiling fans, he felt something inside him unclench, as if the world had stopped demanding an apology for his colour.
He started keeping a small notebook in his pocket.
Not a diary exactly more a place where the hours could breathe. On the first page he wrote: “The skin listens even when the ears do not.” He wasn’t sure what it meant, but it felt necessary to write it down.
Every day on the train to work, he opened the notebook and watched the passengers reflected in the window glass. Faces slid across the glass like moving stains of light. Nobody noticed anyone else; the city had taught them to look only long enough to avoid collision. He wondered if his own face, pressed faintly against the window, looked different from theirs, or if difference was just another trick of light.
At lunch he wrote again:
“What if colour is alive? Not a surface but a memory that keeps trying to speak through us.”
He waited for a reply from the page, as if ink could answer ink. Nothing came only the faint tremor of the ceiling fan above him.
In the evenings he began walking home instead of taking the bus. The streets after seven were half-lit, the sky bruised purple, and every wall carried the same tired posters of whitening creams and real-estate dreams. The faces on those posters shone unnaturally; even the smiles looked bleached. He felt sorry for them, the printed people who could never step out of their light.
One night, passing a half-closed paint shop, he saw jars arranged by shade almond, cocoa, walnut, ivory, biscuit. The labels read like a hierarchy disguised as vocabulary. He stood there a long time, thinking that perhaps society had been mixing its moral palette from the same jars.
Later, at home, he switched off the lamp and sat in darkness. He could just make out his hands, outlines within outlines. For the first time, he didn’t reach for the light. The darkness didn’t swallow him; it shaped him. It felt almost like a companion, steady and wordless.
He wrote in the notebook again:
“Maybe colour is not what the eye sees. Maybe it’s what the world chooses to ignore.
....... ...... ...... ....... ...... ................... ............. .....
Days began to fold into each other, like pages stuck together by damp.
He wasn’t sure which morning was which anymore; each looked washed in the same pale light, a colour that belonged to no sky.
The notebook stayed with him, but now he rarely wrote he simply held it, as though the act of holding could record thought more faithfully than words.
At the office, his colleagues spoke endlessly about “presence.”
They said confidence was about visibility about standing out.
But he had started to notice something else:
the louder they spoke, the more transparent they became.
Voices without weight, faces too polished to cast a shadow.
They existed only under fluorescent light.
That evening, when he looked at himself in the mirror of the office washroom, his reflection didn’t align perfectly his face arrived a second late.
He stared at it until the air felt thick.
It wasn’t fear exactly more like recognition.
The face in the mirror was not resisting him; it was simply waiting, like someone who knows that truth is never urgent.
He walked home slower than usual. The road was empty, but he could hear footsteps behind him his own echo, or maybe the city replying.
The smell of wet dust after light rain filled the air, and for a strange moment, he thought: Even the soil has colour. Does it feel proud of it, or tired of carrying our meanings?
That night he dreamt of a museum with no walls.
In it, human faces hung like clouds shifting, merging, disappearing into one another.
A guard in a white uniform stood beside him and whispered,
“Pigment is history’s handwriting. But remember, sir the ink never dries.”
When he woke, his pillow was damp, but he wasn’t sure if it was sweat or tears.
He spent the next morning in silence, tracing the lines on his palm.
Each line looked like a river branching from some invisible continent.
He thought of his ancestors the nameless ones whose bodies had absorbed sunlight for centuries.
He thought of how colour might be the memory of their endurance, not a punishment but a record.
The mirror no longer frightened him.
Sometimes it even smiled back, though its smile was never entirely his.
He began to understand that identity was not something the eye could prove.
It was something the soul negotiated each day between pride and apology, between being seen and being erased.
He closed his notebook finally, but not in conclusion.
He had realized:
The story of colour has no ending because the world keeps repainting itself.
And in every coat of paint, someone disappears, someone returns, and someone finally learns to live without asking what shade he belongs to.
End
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" My skin colour will decide to what kind treatment I will recieve from society"
--- mr philosopher
