> "Sometimes, I wonder if I was born into a silent dream. A dream without blue. A dream without red. Only shades of waiting."

I am Aritro, and I have never been able to see the color of the sky.

They say Rajshahi is one of the most beautiful cities in Bangladesh—crimson sunsets over the Padma River, green mango orchards stretching beyond the eye, the golden shimmer of early morning fog. People say these things with stars in their eyes.

But to me, it’s all black and white.

Not figuratively. Literally. I was born achromatopsic—completely color blind. The physicians told me I would never see color, not even the hint of it. Only light, dark, and all stand-alone shades in between. My life is a movie strip that no one else is watching.

And maybe that's why I stopped trying to explain myself.

I am not at Rajshahi Government Model School. I walk through congested corridors like a specter: silent, invisible, irrelevant. I don't mind. Muteness is kinder than inquisitiveness. The only time I am really alive is the rooftop—after school, after night, after everyone has gone home.

There is a rusty gate that leads up there, chained but not locked. No one uses it anymore. The paint is peeling like worn-out dreams, and the iron stairs creak like old melodies. I prefer it. They remind me I am not alone.

This evening, the wind smells of impending rain. The sky—gray as always—is low over the metropolis. Neon signs flash in the distance. Far beneath me, the azan of the mosque drifts serenely over the rooftops. Even in its absence of color, I know that it is beautiful.

I sit against the water tank and take out my sketchbook. My hands move automatically now—smudged shading, charcoal lines, forms of things I see but can't describe. Today, I draw the Padma River as it winds like a sleeping snake in the twilight. My drawings are never completed, never meant to be. They're fragments of a world I still try to understand.

Then I hear it—footsteps.

I remain still.

No one else arrives here. Not even the seniors. I hug my sketchbook to my arm, ready to disappear.

The girl materializes unseen like a stray note in a gentle tune. She's wearing the same thing—navy blue skirt, white kameez—but to me it's only a collection of shadows. Her black hair is unbound. Her eyes, even in black and white, seem to shine.

She spots me and freezes.

".Oh," she grumbles, clearly taken aback. "Didn't think anyone else would be here."

Neither did I.

A silence, the sort that draws out like creased rubber bands.

She doesn't move closer to me. She looks up at the sky, breathes, then stands and walks over to the other end of the rooftop and sits with her back to me.

I wait. But she doesn't say anything more.

So neither do I.

Minutes pass. The city murmurs dimly below. Wind blows, dislodging a few leaves, that dance, that dance, against the roof. I glance at her once more.

She is singing.

Slow and unfamiliar, off-key but, oh so beautiful. Like something out of a time, long, long, before color was invented.

I ought to say something. I should ask her name. I ought to stand up and walk. But I open my sketchbook yet again.

And this time without really knowing, I draw her.

Not her face. Just her silhouette against the fuzzy horizon. Her hair in tangles from the wind. Her stillness.

When I look at the page, I can sense something. The gray is warmer. The pencil lines are softer. As if they know something I don't.

The girl stands up.

She passes me, eyes grazing mine for a moment.

"You're not the only one who sees the world in black and white," she says.

And then she's gone.

The door shuts behind her with a creak, and I sit here, shaking sketchbook in my hands.

I never got to know her name.

But for the first time in seventeen years, I wondered what the color of her voice would be

“Some people arrive in your life like quiet thunderstorms—unannounced, uncolored, unforgettable.”

The next morning, the sky still looks the same.

Pale. Flat. Borderless.

I sit near the back of the classroom, where the whirring ceiling fan drowns out whatever the teacher is saying about light and wavelengths—colors I’ve only ever read about in textbooks.

Outside the window, the Padma flows like ink: slow, heavy, infinite. Inside, my world stays the same.

But my mind isn’t here.

It’s still on that rooftop. On her.

Her voice keeps looping in my head.

“You’re not the only one who sees the world in black and white.”

What did she mean by that?

Did she…?

The door clicks open.

I hear footsteps—late, unhurried.

Then I see her.

Same uniform. Loosely tied hair. And those eyes—somehow full of color, even in a world without any.

She gives the teacher a quiet nod and slides into the empty seat one row ahead, a little to the left.

The teacher calls roll.

“Jyoti Ahmed.”

She raises her hand.

I whisper her name to myself before I even know why.

At lunch, I stay in the classroom again, sketching.

I’ve drawn the silhouette from last night four times already, trying to capture something—something in the way she made the rooftop feel less empty.

I’m shading in the sky when I realize she’s sitting beside me.

No sound. No words. Just there.

She looks at the drawing.

“You draw the world like it’s sad,” she says, not as a judgment—just an observation.

I keep my eyes on the page.

“It’s the only world I see.”

She leans forward a little, resting her elbows on the desk.

Her breath is quiet. Steady.

“You were on the rooftop last night. Alone?”

I nod. “Usually.”

She nods too. “Me too.”

We fall into a silence that feels… safe. Not awkward, just familiar—like two people who’ve lived too long inside their own heads.

I glance at her. She doesn’t look uncomfortable. Just calm. Real.

“You said something before you left,” I say.

She turns her gaze to the window. “Yeah.”

“Did you mean it?”

She closes her eyes for a moment, like she’s weighing something. Then she nods.

“I’ve had achromatopsia since I was a kid,” she says. “For the longest time, I thought I was the only one in this city like that.”

I stare at her. Not in disbelief—more like recognition.

“…You too?”

She nods again, softer.

“Color’s always been a myth,” she says. “People talk about ‘sky blue’ or ‘blood red’ like they’re describing memories we’re all supposed to share. But for me, it’s like hearing someone describe a dream I’ve never had.”

The way she says it—quiet, practiced—I can tell she’s had this conversation in her head a hundred times.

I swallow.

“Do you hate it?”

She’s quiet for a second. Then, a faint smile.

“No. I just wish I didn’t have to pretend so much.”

I let out a small laugh—dry, but honest.

“Same.”

She turns to me, eyebrows raised, like she didn’t expect that.

“You pretend too?”

“Every day,” I say. “I faked knowing what green looked like in class two. Kept nodding along, hoping no one would ask questions. Eventually, I just got good at it.”

Her smile grows, just a little. Not out of amusement—out of understanding.

It’s the kind of smile you give when you realize someone else has been carrying the same invisible weight.

The bell rings, sharp and sudden. Students start moving around us.

Jyoti stands up, grabs her bag, then pauses.

“You go up to the rooftop again?” she asks.

“Almost every day after school,” I say, a little quieter than I meant to.

She nods. “Then I’ll see you there.”

And just like last night, she walks away.

But this time, she leaves something behind.

Her name.

Her story.

And a space beside me I didn’t know I’d been saving.

For the first time in a long while, I don’t feel like just another shadow in this grayscale world.

I feel like something real is beginning.

“Even in black and white, the sky feels wide enough to carry a secret.”

After school, the hallways burst with voices—bright, messy, full of colors I’ve never seen.

I pass through them like I’m walking underwater, each laugh and shout bouncing off me without ever quite touching.

I climb the staircase to the rooftop, the one place that never tries to be more than it is. The steps groan like an old friend clearing its throat. Above Rajshahi, the sky hangs low again—dull, thick with smoke-colored clouds. The kind that never fully rains.

And there she is.

Jyoti.

She’s by the old water tank, sitting with her knees up and shoes off. Her white socks are already dust-stained, like she’s been there a while. Her bag’s half-open beside her, a sketchpad open on her lap. She doesn’t look up. Just keeps drawing.

I hover for a moment, unsure if I’m interrupting something. Then the breeze flips a corner of her page, and I catch a glimpse.

She’s sketching the sky—her sky.

All shadow and light, no color, no make-believe.

It looks like mine.

For a second, it’s like staring into a part of myself I didn’t know could exist outside of me.

She glances up and smiles. Not surprised. Just soft. “You came.”

“I said I would.”

I sit down beside her, close enough to feel the quiet but not break it.

She brushes some graphite from the page. “The clouds look different up here. More honest, maybe.”

“Yeah,” I say. “They don’t try to be anything else.”

She tilts her head, amused. “Didn’t think you’d get that.”

I unzip my bag and pull out my sketchbook. “I think we’ve been drawing the same world this whole time.”

She leans closer as I turn to a recent page—last week’s sketch. Steel-gray sky. Radio towers like broken fingers. A ghost-moon fading into haze.

“Why do your clouds look like paper?” she asks.

I blink. “Paper?”

She nods. “Like… fragile. Like they’d tear if you touched them too hard.”

I pause, looking at the drawing again like I’ve never really seen it before.

“Maybe because I keep thinking the sky’s going to fall apart someday,” I say. “And maybe then, we’ll finally see what’s behind it.”

She’s quiet for a second, staring out at the clouds.

“When I was a kid,” she says, “I used to think there was another world behind them. A colorful one. Just waiting.”

“Do you still think that?” I ask.

She exhales slowly. “Sometimes. Less now.”

The silence that follows isn’t empty. It feels lived-in, like an old quilt. Somewhere below us, a rickshaw bell rings. A burst of laughter from the field. Life moving on without needing us to keep up.

Then she asks, “Have you ever tried to describe a color to yourself?”

“All the time,” I admit. “I’ve memorized what people say. ‘Blue like the ocean.’ ‘Red like fire.’ But they’re just… metaphors built on more metaphors.”

She nods slowly. “To me, blue sounds like silence.”

“…Silence?”

“Yeah. Like the quiet between raindrops.”

I look at her, and for a moment, she seems like a poem I’ve only half-read.

“And red,” she continues, “feels like a sudden touch. Warm. A little too much, but not in a bad way.”

I glance at the pale sky. “What about green?”

Jyoti smiles at the clouds. “Green… feels like hope that doesn’t say too much. Just enough to stay.”

Another silence. But this one feels like a bridge being built, slowly, word by word.

I want to tell her something—something that means more than it sounds like. But all I manage is,

“I think we should keep drawing this world. The way we see it. Just us.”

She looks down at her sketch again, then rips the page out gently and hands it to me.

“Then start with this,” she says. “Our first shared sky.”

I take it like it’s something precious, even though it’s just pencil and paper. But it feels heavier. Realer.

That night, I tape the drawing to the wall beside my window.

It’s only shades of grey.

No colors. No lies.

But it glows with something else—something no one else could possibly see.

Not color.

Something deeper.

And as the moon rises—faint, pale, and far away—it feels a little bit closer than it did yesterday.