Grey

I have forgotten what cities looked like. Were they always this grey? The roads are oddly so. As realistic as the metaphor of a concrete jungle could be visualised. Grey surrounds you. Everyday I go to work in a grey cab on a grey road surrounded by other grim faces wondering when did everything get to this level of grey-ness. All the while we are nestled by grey roadblocks trying to line our cabs in a neat column between the grey pillars that lift the currently under-construction metro station, that is also grey, that one can only assume would host another serenade of people going to work in a grey metro.

I reach my office and pay the auto driver chatting away with his friend, probably another auto-wala dropping another grey person.

I get into the grey building adored fortunately with a line of blue mirrors. I walk up the grey stairs and push the grey door to stare at the bright white desks and black chairs; as irony would have it, white and black together would make grey but that’s me being too harsh on the city. It’s not its fault, not all of it at least because I also see grey lives in this grey city.

The grey people have embraced the grey city to earn just enough money to buy colors whenever they find the time.

They don’t keep the colours here in the city. They keep those in their home towns along with their music and festivals and cultures. But that they never bring to this city. This city only gets grey. Or it only accepts grey.

I enter the room of grey people in my office with muffles of cusses thrown at the gray city blaming it for their grey lives.

I sit on my desk and wonder. What is greyer? The city or the people?

I wonder for a while longer before I, like everyone around me, open the lid of my expensive grey laptop and do work until it tires me enough to not ask preposterous questions about colors.