To The Woman in the Mirror

Cochin, 2008

I saw you sitting with your back towards me in a busy eatery. I was on the table diagonally behind you. I saw your face in the ornate mirror in front of us, part of the decor. We both sat facing the same mirror. I saw your face, only when you removed your dupatta from it with your hands, to try and eat your dosa, then the noodles and then the Pepsi. For the rest of the time, I saw your lowered eyes listening to your husband and your head nodding, all under the green veil. Every time you heard him approach with a new delicacy for you, you moved your head away, pulled your veil down and froze, in that moment.

I know he was your husband, and you still froze. You refused to look at him, or show yourself to him. The mehendi on your hands and feet had faded. It had been a few weeks of marriage, I’m guessing. And you still froze when you heard his voice and looked away into nothingness when he spoke. Can it be a mark of respect, that emotion best conveyed eye-to-eye person-to-person when it shines from within? No, I think not! Was it fright, then? I can’t say! Or was it something in between the two, that not just me but you too fail to understand as you follow, or are made to?

I sat there wearing a tucked in tee with many Buddha faces and skinny jeans, enjoying my mouthfuls of food and easy banter with the two men in my life – my son and my husband. But every time the man in your life approached you with a new dish, I compulsively looked up from mine. At that brisk movement of your hand with 200 bangles quickly veiling your lovely face! I would look at the draped green head and shoulders in the mirror in front of me and wonder – why? It’s not pity I felt, no, but a lot of incomprehension. I thought veils were to protect women from strangers’ gaze. But yours was only to keep it hidden from your own man, and removed when you were alone in the middle of stranger men.

And then suddenly in such a moment of no-husband, you caught me looking straight into your eyes, which had caught mine in the shared mirror – staring rudely. And I caught the look of incomprehension in them too. For me and my kind! For my eyes which were stuck on everything to do with you. Or was it for my cropped hair, my clothes, my uncovered head or for how freely I had ruffled my husband’s hair? How he and I looked at each other and smiled every time our son burped? How we were man and wife! No veil, no secrecy, no external signs of matrimony and no added respectful reflexes? Sitting together, sharing food, drinks, laughter, looks, liberty, moments, memories, smiles and equality! 

I ask you - Are those things you don’t understand, or are those things you don’t want to understand? Or are those things you were never allowed to understand? You are perfect – for what they reared you to be. I can see that! I can see that in every movement of yours and every stop, in your laden hands and shuffling feet, your voice that is a whisper’s whisper and your eyes that hardly ever see. 

I wish I could know who you are. I wish I could spend that evening talking to you. I wish I could ask you if you ever swallowed your thoughts, your opinions, your ideas about yourself and replaced them with someone’s else’s, for someone else. I wanted to ask you if it was You and Your Face sitting under that veil that day, and every passing day, or was it someone else born out of 3 odd decades of bending backwards for the "given" and the taught?

A little bit of me in you, and a tiny bit of you in me. And a shared mirror!  

I felt very guilty. For the contrast that I saw, between your situation in life and mine. And then I breathed a silent thankful sigh, for the situation that is mine, only. As I write this, I pray to the power that made me free to make you free too. Soon, and not in another life, but in this one itself! 

And I just want to tell you, that I Respect You – not just the face I saw in the mirror but the stronger one hiding within you too.