Reflections of a Mirror

I don’t know how else I would have talked if not for this long worldly association of mine. In my period of pristine shining, the entirety of my following expression would have been reduced to two sentences of uninvested commentary.

Well, what I was going to say was, I don’t like this boy. Very unlike his disciplined grandfather and piteous father he is. I have observed his grandfather right from the days of his schooling. He was virtue itself in the shape of a man. After his bath, he would pull me, and from the cupboard within, take a bottle of coconut oil and apply a palm of it to his dense straight hair. With head bent, as if in the presence of superiority, he would tie the towel round his vitals and exit the bathroom without a glance at me. Upon marriage to a girl after completion of his Law, he would very occasionally look at me when he came in the night. Maybe, at these times, he saw his little wife in me, because he used to show some of his teeth and redden at the sides. Such a product he was. If I had had eyes, they would have emptied themselves on the day he died.

His son was not unlikeable. I have been seeing him from that night he was considered mature by his parents and was introduced to the usage of our eastern toilet. In his college he studied not Law but Medicine. He would come in the night and practise his proposed manoeuvres aiming in his mind the attainment of his lady junior’s hand. He used to bring in roses and extend them to me a thousand times, all done differently without exhaustion. He used to squat without purpose and write love letters and later hide them in the joints of the cupboard within me. But his attempts stopped at these, it seemed. Because he ended up marrying a woman of his father’s choice, while his was tragically married off to another.

However, his son – the boy who makes me close my eyes every time he stands before me (the frequency of which exceeds the cumulative scored by his previous two generations) – is very different. I can’t know what is happening outside this bathroom, but with strength I can say the world is spinning in the wrong direction. He does things here in the bathroom that make me ashamed. I haven’t learnt the words to describe them, but I know he is self-obsessed and dreamy and perverse. Daily he takes a marathon of smokes, all in secrecy, hides the stubs in the joints of the cupboard within me and makes me smell so bad. At nights, particularly at late hours, he brings his classmates – boys with tattoos and girls of polished arms. Well, I don’t have problems with tattoos and polished arms, but I certainly mind the dark liquid they take turns to drink before me. On one such night, the boy locked the bathroom and took from within me a cylinder of perfume. He sprayed too much of it that he began to sneeze ceaselessly. Sprays of phlegm were sprinkled on me. I couldn’t stay there, held by wood, thinking I was having on me the despicable’s droplets! But, soon after, a girl came in to pose in all ways before me, with her hands on various places of herself, and then raised her camera to capture a pout. At last, in an attempt to simulate the touch of her opposite, she blindly walked her long fingers all over me and finally took them to her face. In her excited process, she wiped me clean.

Whatever the case is, I certainly don’t like this boy. I prefer his grandfather in his place, which, I admit I am aware, is impossible. To this day, like a true romantic, I breathe in the present, but live in the past, of days when the air smelt of coconut oil and the word ‘bathroom’ meant what it meant.