The Night was Black

The night was black.



The thunder cracked like a whip off a reluctant horse. Seconds earlier, the dim restaurant had been lit up the flash of lightning. And minutes before that, an event had ignited a chain of thoughts in my mind.



Five Point Someone. Mr Bhagat's book was the ignitor. A cousin sitting at the table had said something that raised my thinking above the spinal level for the first time, ever since it had lay dormant there post-exams!



"All IITians or to be IITians hate that book. I wonder why", she said. Doesn't quite have the effect of "Charge for the guns", she said, but yeah, that was what she said. Try as i did, I couldn't conjure words to explain why. This inability didn't hurt me as much as the knowledge that somewhere deep down, I knew the answer.



The minutes rolled by. The food, drink and the dessert got us all purring like content cats. An eventless drive home later, the thoughts returned. What was it that was pinching me? Why did the need to justify myself overcome the desire of curling up in bed after a flawlessly brilliant dinner?

And then flew up another emotion. Maybe it was the food combined with the rain beating on the glass window. Maybe it was Floyd's "High Hopes" running in my ears. But right there, my levels of self-doubt reached the foundation rods. I questioned the basics of all that I had learnt to the extent that would've made punkism proud.

I have always sought one thing in life. My Holy Grail. The Golden Mean. That one position in life when you're in control of everything that u hold dear. Perfect optimisation. Not unlike the null-magnetic-field position of interacting magnetic fields.

A passing thought came to me. Does the golden mean exist? A moment of doubt and pain. The presence of Lucifer.

Two entirely unrelated emotions. Unrelated to my comprehension. Until this moment.

The night was black.