Me & the Mirror

By Mrigashree Pant

BA (Hons) in Miranda House, Delhi)....

It’s the most unbiased I think; when I stand five feet some inches tall in front of my mirror. A bushy black mane, a few inches of forehead, two chequered holes on either side of a flat-compressed nose, lips somewhat in shape and a protruded chin - I scan myself. It is this sheet of truth that introduces me to myself. How would I know myself, identify what I looked like had I not met myself through this silver screen. Observing myself in the age old mirror in my room, I fall back to the days of yore. Those dust coated lipstick marks on the wooden frame of the mirror take me back to the age of three when I had inscribed my first ABCs with mom’s lipstick on the mirror and its frame. It still wears the ripped stickers of my then cartoon friends, all yellowed with time. It still captures my anger in the form of scribble marks after I had the first quarrel with my parents as a teenager, it knows about those fits of self admiration when I would pose as a model...Mom’s high heels complimenting my feet...they would raise me up to a woman’s stature. It holds fast to the panic of the first pimple on my forehead and it also nets the moment of that juvenile maturity when I saw myself draped in a sari for the first time on the day of my farewell, the day I adored myself as a woman for the first time. I kept moving on with the wheel of time, but my mirror stood still all through the years, telling me the truth each time I approached it. Personalities change, people come, perform their respective roles in the play of life and fade away...but the mirror remains unchanged, unbiased...telling them all the true tales of their lives. My mirror is that unidentified friend in front of whom I stand still, gazing at it for hours when in distress, and it understands my entire tale without me letting out a word to it. It captures every moment of mine when I have questions about my identity. Ask my mirror...it knows much more about me than my memory holds. My tongue might slip a truth...but my mirror will always say what I really am.At times, I sit and wonder if humans have ever tried to adopt the attributes of a mirror.....then either the world would have become Utopia or a gruesome murdering ground where the 'play of truth' decides the fate of life. (The writer is a student of BA (Hons) in Miranda House, Delhi)mrigashree@gmail.com