In the night
A mirror for the little dead one
A mirror of ashes
—Alejandra Pizarnik

My father’s greatest worry was my marriage. I was turning 37, and still, no one had agreed to marry me. Many suitors came to see me, but they didn’t like me. I wasn’t beautiful enough, for some my nose was too big, for some my ears were too short, some said I looked blind in one eye, and the last one said I looked like his friend Rafi from the Shia College.

We were two siblings, I was the eldest one, Rukhsana, who was younger than me. She was beautiful. They said Ruksana looked like Meena Kumari, from the movie Pakeezah. She had deep sad eyes. I had seen the boys of our neighborhood in Lucknow, getting awestruck, their cigarettes falling from their salivating mouths, when she walked on the street. I never envied her. She was my sister. She loved me; she called me Badi aapa, and always cared for me. She had been inside my mother’s womb for a time. She had been a part of her. I loved my mother more than anything else; I still had a photograph of her when she got married, dressed in an old red wedding gown.

Abba said I look like Amma. He said I was her shadow. Maybe every father said it to their ugly daughters. Sometimes I would stand in front of the mirror and look at my face carefully, touching my big nose, and pulling my short ears so that they could become big. I would apply Ruksana’s maroon lipstick on my dry lips, and kohl in my eyes which opened very little. I would take out Amma’s red gown and dress like a bride ‘I don’t look that bad’ I would say. ‘You look like a queen’, my shadow on the wall by the window would say. I would smile. But my reflection in the mirror would laugh like those young boys laughed when I went to college dressed as a young girl, in that stripped skirt that I bought from those shady shops under the Sahoo Cinema, that sold the first copies of expensive brands. They would run after me and cry ‘Old horse, old horse, where is your boss?’ they would shout, and then laugh with their hands over their belly. The way my reflection in the mirror laughed.

I would kick my reflection in the mirror, I would try to break the mirror, but it won’t break rather I would enter inside, it would be dark, like a house locked from outside. I would hear voices calling my name, young boys and girls laughing aloud, ‘Old horse, old horse, where is your boss?’. I would run to find a door so that I could go outside, but it seemed there was no way out, I would cry ‘Mother, mother’, and then the dream would end. I saw this dream on many occasions, sometimes the dream went on for nights, and once even a man came on a white horse to save me. ‘Come fast. This isn’t a good place to stay’ he extended his hand and made me sit on the horse. I wanted to see his face, but it was covered with a golden mask. He made me sit in front of him on the horse, and together we would gallop outside the mirror. I would wake from that dream every day. Sometimes when we couldn’t find that door to the outside world, then the masked man would make love to me, lying on that horse, so that the time becomes bearable. Sometimes I wished how good it would have been if the horse was blind, and the masked man could make love to me till the world ended.

I never saw that masked man in real life. Maybe I saw him without a mask, but didn’t recognize him. Sometimes I would look carefully at the horsecart drivers, their eyes looked like that masked man of my dreams. What if he was a horsecart driver who came to my dream to make love to me? Maybe that old horsecart driver who used to take me to Christian College, who once gave me a red rose when I had passed the Class 12th examination. I told him to Rehana, my friend. But she said who accepts a proposal of a horsecart driver. They are poor and dirty. They chew tobacco and smoke the stolen cigarettes from the sherwani of their customers. No one loves a horescart driver. Not even the horses they drive. I told him everything that my friend had said. He looked very sad that day. He never talked to me after that event, neither gave me a rose.

Rehana told me about a boy who used to look at me sometimes. She told me to give him the rose, the red rose that the horsecart driver had given me. His name isn’t important. I won’t say I forgot his name, but I would like to believe that I have forgotten his name, and his beautiful face, the face like a candle’s flame in a dimly lit room. I believe that I have forgotten him, but right now when I am talking about him, everything is back, like the pain of an old wound. I was 19 then, we were in the first year of our graduation. Rehana told me that maybe that boy liked me and that I should talk to him. She told me, that she had seen him watching me then and there. I told her, I wasn’t interested and was afraid if he complained to the teacher, and then everything would have reached my mother, who would have surely hanged me in the room, where she always sat with the neighborhood aunties, knitting sweaters, and getting a note of the gossip of the events in, and around Aminabad. ‘See, he is looking at you again. When I looked at him, he moved his face back. That day without even asking, she wrote ‘I love you’ on a piece of paper, wrote my name, and handed it to him during recess. Two days later, when I was coming back from the washroom, he was standing there in the lobby. He handed me a little piece of paper, on which he had written the reply of my note. We smiled at each other. I noticed there was a gap between his teeth, the same as between the teeth of that horsecart driver. I forgot his face and at that moment, it felt like he was my same old lover, who had joined the college so that I could accept his love. I felt so sad and happy at the same time. I wanted to hug him and make love to him lying naked in the college’s alley. But then I was scared. In those empty classrooms and the alley, I heard a chorus of laughing voices again, ‘Old horse, old horse, where is your boss?’

We smiled at each other for around 8 months, till the first year exams. We just smiled whenever we looked at each other’s faces. Nothing much happened. Every day we would just look at each other, and smile. One day he asked me to wait for me after college was over. There was no one in the classroom. I was standing near the window, watching a myna on the mango tree. He was there at the door, like a ray of faint afternoon sunlight. He then came closer, held my hand, and put his lips on mine. I wanted to kiss him. But Rehana had advised me not to kiss the first time or he would think I wasn’t from a nice family. I moved my face away and then ran away outside the class. Like I had seen those Bollywood heroines running outside the class whenever the hero tried to kiss them. The next day I tried not to look at him. Then by recess, I noticed he was also avoiding me. After the exams were over I stopped seeing him. Rehana got his address from the admin section. One afternoon after college was over, we traced his house in the narrow lanes of Maulviganj. If I tell you what I saw there, you would say I am a madwoman. I tried to forget him. For the next 2 years till I completed my graduation, I didn’t look at any other boy. Most of the girls who were beautiful in my class got married including Rehana. She went to Delhi where her husband’s family ran a publishing company. Those who couldn’t get married enrolled in the master’s course. It was that time, I met my third lover. He was the new accountancy teacher. He was stall so tall that it seemed his body was bent from the middle. His eyes were very small, like a black point. He spoke in a very soft voice, like the newly married bride. God knows how we started meeting. But between 2 months of his arrival, we were having sex every day at his rented room in Shifa Manzil. The room was very small. There was no kitchen, and he cooked under a shelve of books on an electric heater. The room smelled of pulses and urine. The washroom didn’t have any doors. The room was so small, he had to bend his feet to sleep. When he made love to me, he would be lying all over the room. It was an uneasy experience. I also had the guilt of committing a severe sin. Amma was alive then, and whenever I came home, I couldn’t look into her eyes. She would look at my disheveled hair, and my smudged kohl and lipstick, like the face of that woman whose little girl puts all the makeup on her face when she sleeps. ‘Where have you been all day?’ ‘At Rehana’s home,’ I would run inside my room. Amma and my little sister would look at me as if I were a clown running from a circus. I asked Kemal to come to my home, and ask my hand for marriage, ‘I can’t get married not until I reduce my height’. He said there was a saint in Rustam Nagar who could help him. No one knew the way to the saint’s home. And those who knew asked for money. I stole Amma’s necklace which she had saved for my marriage. I gave him the money. That Friday after college he went to see the saint. I never saw him again. Two weeks later I saw his photo pasted over the dilapidated walls over the movie posters. Whenever I saw some young boys peeing on those walls where Kemal’s photo was pasted, I felt a surge of happiness in my heart. I thought of jumping from the rickshaw and giving them 10 annas each for doing an act of heroism. Amma was distraught when she got to know about her stolen necklace. She thrashed the housemaid with the broom. The poor girl took the vow of all the saints whose name she could remember. Amma couldn’t sense that it was her daughter who was the silent thief. She could have never known it if I hadn’t become pregnant. God what a calamity that was. My belly was swollen like an overflated balloon. My two sisters would hide behind the door and peep at me when I slept as if I were a new animal at the zoo. My poor mother, I am responsible for her death. I am not a thief but a murderer also. She had to beg the midwives to abort my child. My child. My mother. She died that winter. Lying over the crumpled sheet of my bed, like a young bride after the wedding night, I decided—I would never get married.

Abba became sick after Amma’s death. Thanks to God and Amma who made sure Abba couldn’t know what happened inside that closed room. Amma said I was sick. My innocent father never suspected what his daughter had done behind his back. After Amma’s death, he developed stomach ulcers and needed properly cooked food with utmost care. He ate very little and had grown physically weak, his eyes looked sullen, like the eyes of a very depressed man. His only worry was my marriage.

He had requested that her sister Saffina get her son Ahmed to marry me. Ahmed had asked for my photograph. Aunt Safina who wanted to help his brother, sent Rukhsana’s photograph to him. Abba complied with her sister’s crime. Sometimes it felt like Abba knew everything and wanted me to get out of the house. I was enraged by their act. And that day for the first time I shouted at my father. ‘It’s a sin to cheat someone’, I also told her that when he would get to know the truth, things would fall apart, and both our lives would be destroyed.

Ahmed hadn’t seen me for a while, especially after he had gone to Aligarh for his studies. We used to play hopscotch together. We were always in one team. I thought he liked me. He may have liked me because I was a child then. Amma always said that children are beautiful. We get ugly when we grow old. If he had thought I would have grown so ugly, he wouldn’t have allowed me to be part of his hopscotch team. Aunt Safina made a serious mistake when she sent Rukhsana’s photograph. Ahmed agreed to the marriage, but he wanted to see me in person. Abba denied saying it’s against our family’s principle to showcase our daughters. He must have sensed something fishy about it. He then showed the photograph to Naqueeb who was our neighbor’s son, and his friend. Naqueeb told him that he was being cheated. Ahmed came to Lucknow in a hurry. He was furious and called names to our ancestors for cheating on him. Aunt Safina was hiding behind the curtains crying. Abba broke everything that came into his hands. He got more furious than Ahmed. I tried to calm him down. But he was angry like Nawab Wajid when Dalhousie told him that he wasn’t fit to rule over Awadh. ‘Are you going to marry your daughters by deceit? Is that the only way?’ Ahmed kept on crying standing at the door. Safiina Aunty tried to calm Abba. ‘If Ahmed likes Rukhsana, let him get married to her?’

They got engaged the next year. A year later they were married. It was very awkward for me, especially when Ahmed was around. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t a part of his mother’s trap. But we never got to talk.

In 1978, Ahmed completed his medical degree. He got employment in Riyadh as a medical officer and traveled with Rukhsana who was two months pregnant. That year Aunt Safina died of a heart attack. Ahmed couldn’t come because Rukhsana was about to deliver. We buried her at Karbala. I read the Koran for forty days so her soul could travel peacefully to heaven. I stayed in my room and didn’t come out. Abba’s health deteriorated. He retired from the post office where he worked as a clerk for forty years. Now he had nothing to do so he worried for my marriage.

After my sister’s marriage, the house was deserted. It was just me and Abba, and the haunting silence of an old house. I locked most of the rooms which were not in use. Rukhsana sent money once in a while for Abba’s medicine and our food. I didn’t like taking money from Ahmed. I wrote her a letter and asked her to stop sending the money. I started teaching Urdu at Shia College. Rukhsana came a year later with little Ali and Ahmed. I tried to avoid his gaze, but he constantly looked at me. He must be thinking about what his life would have been if he had married me. He must have thanked God for saving him. I also thanked God because he saved me from sin. It was no one’s fault that I was ugly. Not even God’s he couldn’t make everyone look like Meena Kumari.

It was at the college, I met Ali Rizvi, a famous poet those days whose poems were the talk of the town. He was accused by Naiyer Masud of plagiarizing Mir Anis’s poetry. He was a senior teacher in the Department. He was a close friend of Principal Tehseen Hasan. Ali had been married to Tehseen’s sister. She died in a road accident when they were coming back from Daryabad, after a wedding. His wife died on the spot. Ali was saved but he lost his eyesight.

We met mostly in the staff room, where everyone lauded the poetry he read. I still remember the day when he read, Faiz’s ‘Don’t ask my love, for that love again’. My heart swayed like the branches of Gulomhar tree outside the staff room. Every day after lunch they would request him to read poems—if he was in a good mood he would read his own poems, if he was a bit disturbed by some news column, he would read poems of his favorite poets Faiz and Nasir Kazmi. One day when everyone had left, I went closer to him and said that his poems were better than anything Mir Anis had written. ‘He doesn’t have any variety. They are all elegies. But your poems are like a rainbow’ He smiled, like the way blind men smile. ‘And you must be a beautiful woman. Only beautiful women can praise my poem, praise the beauty of my poem’ he then put his brown hand in the pocket of his loose sherwani and took out a fresh red rose. He thanked me again. I kept on looking at the rose, and the memories of the past flared before my eyes. The horsecart driver’s hairy hand and the beautiful red rose he gave me that day when the exams ended.

That April’s end he invited me to his home for dinner. He was dressed in a white Kurta and was smoking a cigarette when I knocked on the door. I had brought white roses for him. He smelled and smiled; then he read some poetry that I can’t remember now. I was nervous. He was cooking biryani. He asked me to sit in the lobby. He gave me the morning newspaper, which I kept aside. I saw his wife’s portrait on the wall. She was beautiful, prettier than Meena Kumari, and Madhubala. I looked at my reflection in the glass, it felt as if someone was painting my face over his wife’s. I tried to wipe it with my hand and suddenly it fell. He came upon hearing the sound. But he didn’t ask anything. He put on a cup of coffee and went back to the kitchen. I picked up the pieces of glass and put them carefully in the dustbin. Then I put the portrait back on the wall.

We ate dinner together under the yellow light of that chandelier. He asked me about the food. I said the food was really good. I wanted to say that I was amazed at the way he could cook the food without any hindrance. The next day in the staff room, I told him, I was amazed at the way he could cook, and walk in the house without any hindrance. He was silent and then left the staff room I said it to Ali the next day, and he advised me never to ask anything about his blindness, it irks and upsets me more than anything else. I told him the food was really good, and it was unbelievable how he could cook such good food. ‘He was always a great cook. My sister loved him so much; they always had friends over to their house for dinner’. I told him about her sister’s portrait. ‘What a beautiful woman she was?’ He remained silent for a while. Then he said can I ask you something? ‘Would you like to get married to Ali?’ He asked so abruptly I didn’t know how to respond. Thanks to God the next moment Ali entered the room. Ali made coffee for the three of us. ‘I hope I haven’t disturbed you’, she said. ‘Yes you have, we were talking about you. She was telling how bad a cook you are?’ he laughed. ‘No, he is lying, I didn’t say anything’, I felt nervous and made a face looking at Tehseen. Abba died that year’s Ramadan. I got married to Ali after Eid. Rukhsana couldn’t come. She was pregnant with her third child. Nabila and Naqueeb were there for the marriage. Ahmed came alone. He looked at me for a while. I also looked back at him. Then he stopped looking at me. Ali drove us to Ali’s house. I noticed that someone had removed her wife’s portrait from the wall. I didn’t ask him why?

That night, we kept lying on the bed talking for hours. There was a little dim yellow light in the room. He lit a cigarette and was lost in a whirlpool of thoughts. I looked at his eyes, which were looking two white stones, behind his eyelids. He then looked at me, took my hand, and kissed me. Sometimes it seemed like he could see everything, and was acting blind. ‘Are you looking at my eyes?’, he then asked. I got flustered. ‘No, I was just looking at your beautiful face’, he pulled me closer to his chest. ‘You are more beautiful than me, my love, the most beautiful woman ever born on this earth’. His cigarette was finished. He then moved away, to light another cigarette. ‘Can I ask you something? I asked, in a much lowered voice. ‘Anything, my love’, he said. ‘Do you feel sad, that you can’t see anything?’ ‘You can’t be sad about anything, which was meant for you. Sometimes, I wish I was dead like my wife. Life is much easier when you are dead’

And then he told me a very strange story. The story was about the time when he was seven years old. He used to go to school in the day, and after 04:00 PM a cleric used to come to teach him Urdu and Koran. The cleric’s name was Hadji Murad. The man must be in his forties and was the distant cousin of his mother. He told me that the man was the nastiest devil he had ever seen. The man told him that when he was of his age, his mother was madly in love with him. She used to come to his home, to work in the kitchen for his paralyzed mother. And after dusk, they used to sleep together. She also became pregnant, and that’s why she got married at a very early age. Ali told everything to his mother. And she said, ‘Your Uncle likes to joke. He had always been like that, don’t take his jokes seriously’. Ali also told her that he was trying to touch him at inappropriate places, to which she told, him she would talk to him. The next day when he came, and started teaching him, her mother knocked on the door. There was a scarf over her head and a tray with tea and biscuits in it. She then asked Ali, to leave and closed the door. He stood outside, but couldn’t hear them talking. A little later, she came out. Her face was bruised. Mirza told him that day, that if he told anything ever again to his parents. He would take out his eyes, and make him go blind, in past also people who have messed with him, have gone blind because he said he could create an idol of the person and then take out their eyes, and in reality they go blind. This went on for two years, everyday Mirza, would come, and then his mother would come after a while. They would stay inside the room, and when she would leave, Mirza would start teaching him again. One such afternoon, he told Ali, that he had really beautiful eyes, and if he would give them those eyes, he would tell Ali, the verses which if recited in a correct order for 47 days would make him the King. ‘I am losing my eyesight, I want your eyes, my son. Won’t you help your father?’, and with that he began crying. ‘Stay away from me, or I will tell my mother’ Ali said, and then he will beat him like a dog. That night Ali, told everything to his mother. She consoled him, took a vow that he won’t tell anything to his father, and promised that the Hadji would stop bothering him. That evening Ali’s mother knocked on the door again, while he was teaching him the Koran. Ali left the room. Around twenty minutes later, when she came out, Hadji was dead. Ali believed that her mother poisoned the tea. Later in the evening when his father came, the neighborhood doctor Kareem was called, he was declared dead, from sudden cardiac arrest. ‘I think, he cursed me that day. And I knew one day I would go blind’. He lit another cigarette, smoked slowly, and then closed his eyes. I moved my face, to the other side, I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. I looked at the flower vase kept on the window. The roses were becoming bigger, like shadows of little children. I kept on lying on the bed, looking at the large roses which covered the whole room. In the distance, the muezzin called for the dawn prayers.

In 1987, I became pregnant. I still consider it to be the happiest day of my life. I broke the news to my beloved husband. He had just arrived from college, I brought a glass of water, took his beg, and kept it near the stack of books. Then I sat on the sofa beside him. ‘I have to tell you something’ ‘Not now, please bring the food first. I haven’t eaten anything since the morning ’ ‘It’s something important’ And then I told him, I had been feeling dizzy, since the week, and then I told it to Rukhsana, who took me to her gynecologist, and she ran me through some tests, and this morning she told me I am pregnant. He just got numb for two minutes, tears rolling down his dried cheeks wetting his mustache. ‘I just hope, my son isn’t blind, and unlucky like me’.

Happiness is just a moment, sadness is a very long day. That year something very unfortunate happened with my sister Rukhsana. She came back to India with her two sons. And started living at our father’s house. I went to see her. The door was open, and her two sons were playing outside, in the courtyard, with a stem of a rose. There were thorns in the stem, so I took it back and then pulled the younger in my lap. ‘Where is your mother’, I asked Zeidan, the elder one. He pointed towards the guest room, the room where Abba used to sleep, after his work, the room I hadn’t entered since his death. As I moved the curtains and went inside, there I saw my two sisters seated on the sofa. I let the child go on the carpet. Rukhsana broke into tears and ran to hug me. We embraced each other for a while. ‘Aapa, I am glad you didn’t marry that devil’, she was inconsolable. The little toddler started crying. I asked her to go and feed him, and then we will talk. Then I sat with Rukhsanaa, who told me the whole story. Ahmed got into a relationship with a senior doctor’s wife. The manager caught them red-handed one day when they were inside a car. He got him fired from the hospital. He asked him to leave his wife alone, and he would get him reinstated at the job. But he was mad for that woman. The woman also filed a divorce from her husband. She had two daughters, but she didn’t care. As if she was under a magic spell. ‘And god knows who had performed magic on whom’, said Rukhsana. Ahmed had stopped giving any money to Rukhsana. Her children were dying of hunger. She even went to the flat where he lived with that woman, she pleaded with him to come home, but they both threw her outside the house. She then sold the jewelry, and the furniture, and with the help of a travel agency, came back home.

That weekend, Ali came home late from college, he then told me he would be going to Daryabad to see his ill Uncle. I stayed at home for four days. Ali asked me to get the house and the garden renovated, as he had been too busy to take care of the house. He had also asked me to help him translate his poems into English for a publisher in Delhi. I was also bored of teaching at the college and thought I would tell Ali that I wanted to stay at home for a time. The house was big. The garden in the backyard had a dozen of pomegranate trees. One day when I was watering the plants in the garden, something very unusual happened. A pigeon, a dead pigeon fell from the sky. I thought someone had shot the bird and it fell into our garden. I ran to see the bird. She was dead. The gardener hadn’t come that day. I took the shovel and tried to dig a little grave to bury the dead bird. Under the pomegranate tree, I found two dead bodies buried together. When I removed the funeral cloth from their faces, my body froze. Those were the bodies of Ali and his wife. Ali that day didn’t lose his eyes but his soul also. He was dead. I cursed Tehseen who lied to me. But maybe he thought only a dead man would marry me.

I bathed and then tried to sleep. Around 04:00 pm, I found myself seated on the mirror table, rubbing my hand over Ali’s portrait kept by little flowers in a glass. I looked at my face, my disheveled hair in the mirror, like a woman whose husband had died. My husband has died. But he died long ago before he was my husband. I knew now that my husband was a ghost. So what if he is dead? Who can say that he isn’t dead? Who can say with confidence that he is alive? I also fell from the roof when I was a child. We were playing hopscotch and then a monkey came from the neighbor’s rood. Rehana ran downstairs, my legs slipped, and I came flying down in the courtyard, like those young girls who try to commit suicide. My head was crushed like watermelons run down my horsecart. Doctor Kareem saved me. Amma seated beside me, wiping her tears with her torn scarf, asked me to be careful, and said I could have died. What if I really died that day? And like Ali I was also a ghost. A ghost would only marry a ghost. Maybe Ali saw it in me, the sign of being a ghost. And that’s why he proposed for the marriage. It doesn’t matter whether we are alive or we are ghosts? What matters is the love we had for each other. I tried to console the child inside my belly. Lying on my pillow wet with my tears, I slowly entered that dream again, like a housemaid entering the house when her master sleeps. I was inside the mirror in my old room. I kept on walking till it became too dark. I waited for that masked man to come and take me to the other end of the world. I waited for my lover, my horsecart driver. I waited for a very long time, but no one arrived. I couldn’t see anything, but then I heard the voices of those little children, ‘Old horse, old horse, where is your boss?’

…

Andleeb Shadani is a writer based in Lucknow. His research work ranges from history of cities, migration, and cinema. He is working on a collection of stories, Reconstructed Portraits of Forgotten Ancestors.