The Grey

My mind hurtled through the highway of my follies, masking each blotch with a better colour. A better colour that eventually turned into blue, regardless of my thrashing around the periphery. Blue is supposed to be the colour of calmness, of the equal sign that sums up all emotions. Sitting there on the tree stump, I huffed and puffed, and let out imaginary rings of smoke into the afternoon air. What was that colour I had seen on the train? Why did it keep dodging me? Why did it refuse to turn into grey? I had no name for that colour. Was it the result of a cosmic joke, or the merger of bitter elements? Was it a constant reminder to me that just around the bend lay nothingness, and that I had no time left? It had dazzled my eyes, and yet had made me place my palms on the window in restless thrill.

I could not have travelled in a time machine, for that fantasy of mine had not been invented yet. Yet the dirt road of time eluded my gaze when I turned round at the top of the hill and looked back as far as I could. The sky beat like the magnified surface of a drum, and the spectrum of some weak rainbows submitted itself to the rule of that colour. It spread out all over me slowly, gobbling every dormant cloud and vanquishing the rays of the distant star that gives this world life. The fingers on my hands. They, which had held so many brushes, giving shape to my imagination and my wildest dreams. Now they were idle, queued up like hungry labourers waiting for a truck to come by and give them back their purpose and will. They had distorted faces of tourists on the streets of Sydney, making their laughter crooked. They had swept across large strokes of thick brushes, catching snapshots of my nightmares in larger-than-life dimensions. They had held the ears of hares as I had pulled them out of my hat in India. They had glistened with excited beads of sweat whenever I had heard applause and cheers of appreciation. All those moments. All those flights across man-made borders, travelling on a shoestring, tasting the water and kissing the soil of each land. All the time, growing wiser by the day and nourishing my obsession with wanderlust.

My dreams had been in sepia, with specks of red thrown into the moments that terrified me. Like the one in which the huge wall of a tsunami raced towards me and I sat on the beach, frozen by my own urge to let myself be swallowed, while desperately screaming at myself to run for my life. The water turned green, then red and loomed over the world like a gigantic spectre of doom. Yet I just sat there, as if I was a part of the earth, my eyes glistening with the tears of forgotten horrors. The yellow blinding torchlight of my future self always woke me up just in the nick of time, saving me from an apocalyptic death, and showing me the indigo around me. That indigo, which like spurts of ink on a new shirt, refused to disappear. They held the memories of the people I have killed and the revolution which I worshipped. Until the Revolution, I had been nothing but a nomad, wandering across the latitudes, earning my bread and butter by putting brush to canvas, and playing second fiddle to Zach, the brilliant conjurer of poor men's fantasies.

Like the spread of oil on water, the colour now beckoned to me from the sky above. Or could I call it a sky anymore? Its eerie shimmer fell across the landscape, as I struggled hard to identify what colour this was. The trees waved in the rising wind, as their shadows also queued up to felicitate this new colour. The Revolution had sprung suddenly on mortal society, led by those who despised the false gods and the enslavement of mankind by the non-existence of free will. All philosophers who died before then, turned in their graves. The revolution made brilliant sense. Remove all borders. Wipe out all religions. Erase all existing currencies and stick to one. The birth of the new world. A world where white, black, red, yellow, green had no role to play apart from returning to the folds of nature, where they came from. Like a microcosm, it spread from mouth to atheist mouth, from idle mind to creative mind, from desperate will to crushing desire. Men and women trooped out of offices, fell out of social orders and disappeared from organised rigour. What led me to it? Was I insane? Or was I just swept up in the promises the Revolution showed? It was not Zach. In fact, poor Zach was simply sleeping in his hotel room, dreaming about his next trick, when I crept up and smothered him to death. I had to do it. His brilliance and my reverence for him was a huge barrier for the Revolution. I had to let myself out from under the shadow of morals. Many revolutions have gone by where the forces, the people who led the mobs, had selflessly fought, waiting for victory in some lifetime or the other. Not for us. We wanted immediate, overnight results.

I am not much of a speaker. But a voice I do have. For those Seven Days of the Awakening, as The Leader had named the Revolution, I bathed in grey every dawn, while the world fought a raging battle around me. I treasure laughter, and mine meant the most to me. I still heard it, as I sat on the tree stump, resounding in my mind like the blaring trumpet of blind ambition. Hundreds of us united in breaking free of the shackles, murdering everyone we saw who was not with us. We swore allegiance to the Leader, who was himself faceless, but always dressed in grey. It was the colour of the new time, and all we saw around was grey. The grey between morals and apathy, the grey between motive and mayhem, and the grey between order and chaos. Day turned into orange dusk, and bloody dusk turned into black rivers of dried up blood. I was on top of the world, just as all the other greys around me were.

Then the Leader showed us a colour I had not expected. He wanted all Creativity dead. He declared the goal of The New Society to be the Uniformity of Will, and the Absence of Idleness. He wanted this to become a perfect world.
The dazzling and overwhelming light of this new colour had hit me then. I realised, standing in the middle of vanquished cities, that I could never paint again. I could never dream of a magic trick again. The grey itself was a nightmare, and was going to be the colour of the tsunami now. And I thought I loved grey.

I had been a fool, but atleast I will not die one.

The dazzling colour, now so eerie, made me forget hunger and thirst. I ran like an enraged madman, over crushed cars and overturned trolleys, through smoke-filled buildings and over moaning bodies, past celebrating comrades and seas of grey.
Each grey I saw reminded me again and again of what I had to do now. I had killed Zach, and now I had to repay.
I ran until I was breathless.

(The shimmer of this colour now was creeping up my own body, as the star sank below the horizon, and the heavens yawned.)
Today is the Eighth Day of the Awakening, and we saw The Leader for the first time. An ocean of grey clapped and cheered. They looked wild, the men and women and children of tomorrow. Did they know what was in store? I then realised that this teeming mass of the new humanity was the tsunami, the one that I always gave into.

As The Leader was about to speak, I shot him. From the top of the tallest building. Straight through the head. A trickle of brilliant red ran down over his grey suit as he collapsed.

Since then, they had been looking for me. I had run into an abandoned train and hurtled it out of the city. I had gotten out of my greys and was now wearing nothing. They were hot on my heels, a furious mob, baying for my blood. I was not concerned about the murder I had just committed. The bigger crime was the killing of colours.

As I sat on the tree stump, I looked up the hill and saw the thousands. They swarmed down the hillsides. I think they have spotted me. They did not look like the ones I had fought with. Maybe it was this colour. I had never seen it before. My eyes flashed with a new fury, and this time they bristled with this new colour. It cracked on my fingers, and glowed on my skin. It made the whole world new.

I start running. Uphill this time. I am laughing loudly. The sky is again throbbing. The mob and its yell is nearer now. I come over the top of the hill, and I stop in my tracks. They are there, panting and waiting for me. All around me, is the madness. The madness I was a part of. I look up at the sky, and scream to the colour. I wonder if they see it.

I won't live long. But I know one thing.

I won't die grey.