The Symmetry of Smoke

She entered the world of muteness as if she had just stepped into glass.

It was, once again, like her childhood. In those days a few gypsies used to come and stay in a place close to their country-house. A place where, when they cooked, you could see the smoke rise from your window. And that’d suddenly seem so far that you’d find all the more reason to rush to their tents. Their tents were constructed in perfect symmetry. Each of those was equidistant from every other. Each tent resembled the other exactly. And in the centre of all these tents was the one tent that really intimidated her. The gypsies called this ‘The Maze of Magic Mirrors’.

The tent was also a source of their primary income. Children who stayed inside various neighbourhood windows from which the smoke could be seen followed its trail to watch ‘The Maze of Magic Mirrors’. Inside the tent it was perfectly dark, except for a very bright light that seemed to originate from nowhere and invaded only a tiny, particular circular space inside the tent. And when you went and stood in that light you could suddenly see there’s actually a mirror in front of you. And in it, there’s not one but infinite numbers of you, standing in a cluster everywhere – beside, behind and diagonally to every single you. It was like a battalion of children where there was only one child – You.

When she used to see her manifold selves in the mirror, her first feelings were not of amazement but of pity. A pity which stems from concern; which, in turn, stems from some helplessness. She felt helpless as she thought she was her only self who could transcend the barrier of the mirror. She was concerned for all her other selves as if they were her own sisters. What a pity that they shall be trapped forever! And that’s when, for the first time, she could think of the world of muteness. Of absolute silence.

 

It was, once again.

 

She entered the world of muteness as she had done innumerable times before. And although she knew everything that was to happen, it all seemed equally uncertain. And ominous.

She had come down the road that promised to lead to his home, where beside a window he must have sat waiting, puffing a cigarette. She came down the road that promised to keep its promise. And when she thought of promises she thought of a mirror. When we make a promise we think of a future. In the present moment when we’re trying to keep that promise, we’re juxtaposing that future moment in the present times. So that the present resembles that distant future. In exact precision of a mirror image. When she lost her way, her mind was already preoccupied with a few other questions.

It was the beginning of dusk, and the road that promised to keep its promise but would no longer be able to keep it, was already lonely. And as she sank deeper into herself, she realized there were no directions.

What, for instance, would it be if one kept reliving a promise belonging to the distant future over and over again in the present? Say, for example, a man has promised his wife that he’ll bring her roses when he comes back home. So that he’s been bound into an agreement to bring roses to his wife every time he returns home. He must keep reliving the promise in every single instance of the present. And each of those singular presents would be a mirror image of the distant future. Like the infinite children of a single child.

And then, suddenly she stumbled upon a question that really frightened her. When we bring our promises to the present, the immediate – we’re fulfilling the promise. So that it no longer belongs to the distant future. And for every time that we’re fulfilling a promise, we’re actually annihilating the future. We’re annihilating the space where the promise had originally belonged. Is that how the children in the mirror annihilate the child outside?

She was brought back to her senses with this question and realized that she had not only lost her way but had actually invaded the world of muteness.

 

She was reminded once again of the promise she had made of meeting him. And she knew that she won’t be able to keep it once again. Like it has always been in the past. For every time that she had to take the road that promised to keep its promise, the promise shall be broken. And she would find herself walking deeper into the defying silence.

She could feel, as she walked, the last traces of sound recede farther away. The absolute silence is different from the absence of sound. Sound is a property that flows in time and diminishes through slowness. The absence of sound simply presumes that there are no sources of sound in the present. But what about the sound from the immediate past? The traces of sound still keeps rolling into the present however diminished in its magnitude. A silent morning could never be as dense as a silent night because the traces of sound are in different magnitudes.

The absolute silence is different because there are no traces of sound in its core. None at all. And its depth is immense. Almost deafening. And this is when she would want but find that she couldn’t scream. Or whisper.

 

The purple haze that gradually invaded could only have been a precondition of the muteness that had become heavier. Unbearable to be carried alone upon two shoulders. But then, as always, she’d learn she’s not alone in the muteness.

The first time she caught a glimpse of him was walking ahead of her. And he seemed so farther up ahead as if he were a property of the future. Like a promise. And she remembered her destiny was to walk behind him, silently, in the muteness.

He walked slowly as if he were tired too. She tried to increase her pace of walking to catch up with him and found that she couldn’t. And then she realized that they were all walking in the pace in which the silence dictates. They could neither move any faster nor any slower. It was a destiny that they all share in common.

All?

And then she remembered the succeeding moments. She must discover others following him too from the various directions of the purple silence. Each equidistant from him, forever. All sharing a common weariness that grew like happiness on being shared. And even though she couldn’t see any of the others following her as of yet, she could feel the muteness falling under a blanket of weariness rapidly.

Since they were all following him from the various directions, he was the centre of them all. And since they were converging in him, the distance between each other receded. Diminished. They each came closer to the other’s weariness. The unbearable weariness of the solitary. And the aroma of the sweat.

She recognized this weariness too. It was part of her childhood. On a day she ran. Ran far too long. Trying to run further away. She thought the gypsies were behind him. Because she had stepped inside ‘The Maze of Magic Mirror’ with a stone in her hand and done the forbidden. And then as she ran, she just wanted to run so far away that the smoke that led her to the tents would be found no more. She wasn’t sure what her exact fears were. Was it the gypsies who she thought were behind him? Was it the sound that the glasses made as they shattered? Was it her guilt? Her liberty? The first sensuality of adolescence? Or something very different?

Now, as she walked deeper into the purple silence of weariness, she found the same questions returning. And the answers receding, as always. But receding answers bring more questions. What brings him here? Why must others follow him even though he belonged to her and her alone? Was he actually like smoke and they captivated by its symmetry, like children? And why must she ask this very question that she’s asking right now, over and over again every time she returns to muteness?

He stopped.

In a place where the purple silence seemed so dense that it seemed to bathe him in its light. And once in the light, he turned to face her directly. And then for the first time she noticed that it wasn’t him at all. It was her. It was she herself dressed in a man’s robe, standing in front of her. Smiling, looking at her. And she found herself smiling back, even though she didn’t want to. She had no choice but to. And then, she suddenly noticed standing beside her on both sides and diagonally, were many women who looked the same. Like her. All equally uncertain, smiling at the self who stood in their centre dressed in a man’s attire.

Then, suddenly a feeling dawned on her. She was just an image. A mirror image. An illusion. That she didn’t exist at all. She was just one of the manifold reflections of the woman standing in their centre with a piece of stone in her hand. And she realized that her thoughts were only a reflection of what the original woman thought. Just as she can sense right now what the woman has been thinking of. She has been thinking of him, sitting beside a window, waiting, puffing on a cigarette. And she has been thinking of taking the road that promised to keep its promise, to lead to his home. And she has been thinking of her childhood. And ‘The Maze of Magic Mirrors’. And the infinite children of a single child. And the running away from the symmetry of smoke. And hoping there’s a place where the window won’t show you the rising smoke no longer. And hoping.

She saw the woman in a man’s attire throw a spherical stone, which she had been carrying secluded in her palm, towards her. And before the stone would crash onto the mirror that both divided and multiplied them, the woman turned around and ran for the road that promised to keep its promise.

Narcissus

[This is anything but fiction]

Narcissus was born inside a mirror. Many people who came to see the baby were disturbed on not being able to take it in their arms. They didn’t have access to the other side of the glass and so was the case with Narcissus. What, however, frightened them even more was their own absence inside the mirror. As if the mirror was a barrier between them and the baby. They realized later that the mirror itself was Narcissus’ mother and like all mothers it protected the child from the big, bad world.

Time passed and the town grew up with Narcissus. And Narcissus grew up with the townsfolk. Some claimed they cared for Narcissus much more deeply than they did for their own sons and daughters. They had watched him smile, weep and celebrate. Silently. Narcissus was deaf, for there was no sound on the other side of the glass. But all the same Narcissus was a beautiful baby right from the day he was born. The townsfolk could forget all their incompetence and incompleteness as they watched him smile. When he wept, unable to provide him with the warmth of the human touch, they recognized their incompetence. And as he celebrated his personal world on the other side of the glass, they became yet more incomplete. And then, he smiled again.

But as he grew up, people realized that Narcissus had become more powerful than the mirror. His beauty had overgrown the space on his side of the glass and now spilled on to this side. He had imposed himself inside the head of the townsfolk and went with them to all the places they went. There were people in the town. He watched each other with their eyes; smelled how each had its own fragrance; felt each one breathing on the other’s skin; but most importantly, for the first time, he heard voices. Voices inside their head. Voices, undesirable.

Voices, undeniable.

In their growing frenzy, he found that each claimed that Narcissus was in their head. They also claimed that he wasn’t present in anyone else’s head. Each claimed that he owned Narcissus, now. At these times Narcissus wished he could speak. No, he couldn’t. But he had other powers. He knew all of them would have to slee……

I couldn’t complete the story last night; so, I slept. Or perhaps, I couldn’t complete my story last night because I fell asleep. It was a sound sleep. A sound that was unbearable. A strange form of silence. It crashed into itself a thousand times creating even smaller grains of silence, each of which was the mirror image of the other. And the only thing I noticed as I slept was that the silence became deafening. Even when I woke up in the morning the silence reverberated in my ears.

I woke up to find myself on my writing desk. The pieces of paper on which I had been writing were scattered all over the floor. They were the different parts of the story. I remembered that I had written the beginning and the end of the story; also, many of the parts in the middle. Last night, as I wrote I had been assembling the pages in their correct sequence. So that when I finished writing all the parts all I had to do was connect the separate pages with the appropriate verbs and conjunctions. But that was not to be. A wild wind last night had scrambled all that I had wrote. I got up from my chair to pick up the sheets and I saw myself in the mirror.

“Where is Narcissus?” was the first question I had to ask myself.

“Where am I?” I had to ask myself, then.

“Why was I present where he should have been?”

“Maybe, he is present now, where I should have been.”

Slowly, it occurred to me that the replacement was complete. I was Narcissus, now. The man whose smile was oblivion; whose silence was music and who was more powerful than the mirror. I was so glad with this revelation that I suddenly felt the urge of letting the world know who I had become. Narcissus, the almighty. I put on a dress and went out.

Once on the streets I started feeling as if I was walking through the mirror. I found Narcissus everywhere. I met thousands of Narcissuses on the streets. The entire town had transformed. They had turned into him.

I had, too. I had become a part of the collective him. Identity-less. Like ants. Not an individual anymore.

And yet I couldn’t hate that face. It was mine.

Then, weeks passed…… like soldiers, marching. In synchronization with each other. And in these weeks I found my story getting completed gradually. One of the Narcissuses would come and write a paragraph or two and go away. Another would come to pick up from where he had left. When the story was finished I suddenly realized that there was only one character in the story: myself.

And there could be only one reader: Narcissus.

Somehow, it all seemed so futile. I had written a story on which I had no control. It became what it wanted to be. But not what I wanted it to become. I wanted it to have all the beauty and the brevity that each of my other story had. But not all stories that are finished, complete. As for this one it became the more incomplete the closer it came to its completion. I sat down in my darkened room that night and wept. I have created a crooked child.

And in my crooked mirror the Narcissus that was me wept as well. He no longer had that common face. He looked different in every mirror of the separate houses. He would have to assume the face of the person who used to live in that house before he had transformed into Narcissus.

It is true that as Narcissuses we have all become creators more powerful than the mirror – We can steal the identity of the person living on the other side of the glass.

Amen.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical