Black. White. Black. White. Some more black. Some more white. White. Black. That is all he was able to see. He rubbed his eyes again and again, splashed running water over his blood-shot eyes, strolled and sauntered here and there to ensure he appeared fresh enough, and looked over. Black. White. Black and White. The proverbial grey was missing. Poking, peeping, peering, sneaking in, glimpsing, pondering - after trying these thesaurus-sounding synonyms and multiple other means of trying to look deeper, there was no grey, or none that he could gauge and comprehend at least.
"Maybe, I am deprived of sleep, and that isn't allowing me to think like a sane man", thought he and wondered at the veracity of the statement he had just uttered to himself. Could it be true? Could it be false? It could be either, but it could just be either. Could it be neither? Could a statement he just blurted out be neither true nor false? And, if it cannot be, where is grey? Black and white, much?
He was one of the thousand other twenty-somethings (or, twenty-someones - appealing enough for the "most prolific" writer in the Indian English landscape) who belonged to the aspirational flock. An option to pursue discretionary education was a privilege in the land he belonged to, and it was meant to make folks like him more rounded, humbler, saner and of course, more prosperous. Theoretically, that is. Sitting through a class where frameworks that pitted introverts against extroverts, and those who "judge" against those who "perceive" was mind-numbingly black and white. Grey - nowhere to be found!
However, he was unable to dodge the single-mindedness towards finding grey. That was not supposed to be how things should have been. Only "bigots" and "hypocrites" assessed perspectives through blacks and whites, and for the rest of the humankind, grey should be visible, or should dawn upon, he was told. The bigger question started eating him now. "Am I a bigot now? Blacks and Whites are everywhere, in the crosswords I solve, in the chess I play; the font - background combination I use to type is Black and White. Am I missing to spot the grey, in its physical sense as well as in the abstract construct? OR, am I intellectually incompetent enough to remain oblivious to it?"
He was choking within, and for no reason. "Why am I crying? Should I cry? Can I cry? Can I not cry? Is there a state between crying and not crying? Is there an intermediate state of being that would manifest between the moment I started choking out of happiness and the instance when the first real tear drop would fall off my eyes? And, is there going to be a grey area between ecstasy and emptiness?" His eyes - black and white - started getting moist. He stood transfixed, and let the colourless but white haze of tears blur his eyesight. The world around him started blacking out.
**********
Someone was whispering in his ears. The voice that seemed to sound from a distance started incinerating the cranium; the words were being uttered. "Let white flowers blossom throughout the world! Let the world wake up to nothing but peace!" Instantaneously, there was a whiff of fresh air that seemed to fill him; he woke up and sauntered a bit. Restless, he went to the void - a cabin full of nothing. Nothing except the one thing he cherished the most. Just one thing to rescue him from the deafening silence of the dark void. A solid structure made up of a sequence of black and white, in an order. "Black and white again? This is pathetic. I am descending into an abyss. I do not want to find grey", yelled he, as his hands reached out to the sequenced black and white objects.
A combination of the blacks and whites when operated together cajoled him to utter "Let white flowers blossom throughout the world! Let the world wake up to nothing but peace!" He went on uttering the following verses. A sense of euphoria started setting in. Gradually but surely. There was a chill in the spine and it spread within a moment throughout, making him shiver mildly. Euphoria gave way to a mad rush of tears. He closed his eyes, and with the able support of the blacks and the whites, continued uttering, "Let the yellow rays of the sun fill up the expanse! Let the heart and soul wake up, charged!"
And, at that moment, between the interstitial state of maddening excitement and exciting madness, the blacks, the whites, the void and everything else created a sense of indescribable calmness. "Grey, I found grey", he uttered.
They call the object with blacks and whites a piano. The construct that transforms verses into something that could create the state of 'indescribable calmness' is referred to as music.
