by Vani Viswanathan
[box]A 29-year-old woman moves into a beautiful, breezy apartment, and finds that it has a strange relationship with mirrors. It’s all amusing until forces she can’t rationalise take over. Vani Viswanathan tells the story.[/box]It’s 3 am, and I’m expected to be at work in a little more than four hours to do a rush job for a client. I’m wide awake, staring out through the flying curtains in my enviable, little, breezy bedroom. The lights in Bombay are still on, and a flight begins its journey, reaching heights at an angle that never ceases to surprise me despite my three months in this house.
Three months – the number sends a shiver down my spine. I love this house, and I am upset that I’m moving out already. I’ll tell you why.
I’m not a superstitious person, so the house agent telling me that the house had been locked for three years did not bother me the least bit. As a 29-year-old, unmarried girl, living alone and away from my parents for the last 12 years, my poor mother was barely concerned about this move – she was still desperately trying to get me to meet one of the many single men she seemed to be miraculously chancing upon every now and then. The place was beautiful, it was of a perfect size for one person, it was a short 10-minute jog away from office, and the rent was within my budget.
Within three weeks the legal work had been done, and I had moved in. I’m not especially a warm neighbour, but I gave my three neighbours a box of sweets anyway. They seemed to be genuinely nice people, and never bothered me much; all we did was exchange cordial smiles if we happened to meet at the lift lobby – they didn’t even throw barely-hidden glances in my direction when I’d brought men home thrice and one of them had happened to see it each time.
Anyway, three days after I had moved in, as I unpacked bit by bit after late hours in the office, I noticed something. The house seemed to be full of mirrors. Of various kinds. Full length ones – two in the living room, two in the small bedroom – one on a wall and another on a cupboard door. Two mirrors of the size that usually hang above bathroom sinks, one in the kitchen and another in the bathroom. Three square-shaped mirrors hanging in a pattern in the living room, framed in jute. One circular one framed by a red oval plastic ring that had tiny circular mirrors on it, hanging above the grilled window in the kitchen.
That was not all. I used to pull open draws or open shelves to find pocket mirrors of various shapes. I kept tossing them onto a newspaper I’d spread in a corner of the kitchen, and at the end of the three days, I realised there was a neat little pile there. I was amused, bemused, and mildly annoyed. Why hadn’t the previous tenants – fine, even if they’d left three years ago – vacated the shelves of their stuff? And what was with the profusion of mirrors in the house, too? I dumped the mirrors in the trash can, and forgot all about it. I got used to the mirrors too, eventually. Yes, it was freaky in the initial days to see my own reflection reflected back in the mirrors whenever I walked, tried on clothes, combed my hair, or applied makeup, but over time I began to use the multiple reflections to check out how my hair looked, whether the top looked too tight on my behind, among other things.
It was three weeks later that trouble slowly simmered. Opening the store room to pull out a strolley for a weekend trip, I found another mirror that I hadn’t noticed earlier. This looked like the mirror I’d seen in the many houses I’d lived in – full of sticker bindis. This one was colourful too – pinks, reds, yellows, greens, blues too! Somehow, the woman seemed to have had a fondness for pink, though – there were pinks of so many shapes – oval, stretched, weirdly curved, round, even one odd square one. Staring at them, and stepping back, I slowly realised a pattern: all the pinks had formed a diamond on the mirror. I was amused, took my strolley out, and shut the door, and went on my weekend trip.
Three days after I returned, I unpacked and went to put the strolley back, and decided to admire the patient handiwork of the lady of the bindis again. Looking at the mirror, I jumped: it was the green bindis that seemed to be arranged in a – jeez – it was a circle this time. I shut the door and ran to my bedroom and turned the volume up on the music playing – it seemed to be the best thing to do to quieten my thumping heart. The house had been locked, as was the store room, and the maid hadn’t come those few days.
I asked the maid the next day anyway – she stared incredulously, for she didn’t have the keys to the storeroom. Who was jobless enough to do something like this anyway? Vague memories of the agent’s disclosure about the house being locked for three years came back to me. I rationalised that I had probably not noticed that the green bindis were in a circle the first time too, because I liked pink and was naturally drawn to finding the pattern in pink. That means the pink pattern should still be there, right? asked my mind. I shut the thought, hid the key to the storeroom under a pile of sarees, and left for work.
I managed for three weeks without thinking of the mirror again, thanks to long days working for a new client pitch, and I’d come back home at ungodly hours to crash and rush back to work after a few hours’ sleep. Client won and life getting back to normalcy, the mirror popped up again in my head. I gingerly reached for the key one evening after downing a couple of glasses of wine. I switched on the CFL lamp in the storeroom. The blue bindis seemed to have formed a line that was marching down the length of the mirror. I ignored the greens and the pinks, switched off the light and went to bed. The next evening, I bought a new lock for the storeroom and gave all its keys to my colleague at work, and told him to keep it somewhere in his house.
As I said earlier, I really am not a superstitious person, so the new lock, to me, was the best solution. The maid had probably found the key to the storeroom somehow, and was pulling a joke with the bindis. Twenty days went by without my bothering about the damned mirror. On the 21st day, I got the keys from my colleague to open the storeroom to get a bag for my coming week-long trip. I asked him to come home and get my bag out, as I didn’t want to see the mirror or the bindis. He pulled out my airbag, and told me ‘You have a mirror full of bindis in your storeroom! Are you bindi crazy? Didn’t think you were the bindi-wearing type.’ I rolled my eyes and didn’t answer him. I was not the bindi-wearing kind, though – he was right.
The week-long trip did well in terms of making me forget the mirror, and when I returned, I somehow felt brave enough to go into the storeroom myself, and keep the keys. The blue line was still there. I draped an old dupatta over the mirror and left. Three days later, after another couple of glasses of wine, I dragged myself to the storeroom again. The red bindis were now a squiggly line. The blues were in a quiet puddle in the bottom right corner. My buzz dropped like something had hit me. I staggered back into the living room, called my colleague, and slept in his house.
It was the strangest thing explaining this to him. I could see he was being very polite by not laughing at me. He offered to stay over with me. We left the office together the next day, and the lady next door mustered her politest smile when she saw me with him. I didn’t care. The bindis had shaken me to the core.
‘The pink bindis form a diamond,’ he told me after checking the storeroom, while I huddled by the French window in the living room. ‘That’s how it was when I saw it the first time!’ I whispered. The next day, he said the green ones were in a circle, and the reds were lumped in the bottom right corner. I shrank further, and he said I could put up at his place while I hunted for another apartment.
I spent the next week at his place, and found another apartment that was dingy, crowded and old. The balcony opened to another balcony at an arm’s distance. I was in tears. And so I decided that I’d brave another night in my beautiful – freaky – apartment.
It’s no wonder I can’t sleep, though. It’s 3 am, and I’m expected to be at work in a little more than four hours to do a rush job for a client. I’m wide awake, staring out through the flying curtains in my enviable, little, breezy bedroom.
I reach for my cell phone and push the button. I see a Whatsapp message from my colleague whose house I’d stayed in the last few days. He’s sent me an image, and a text, “Saw this when I went to brush my teeth.” 12.35am, a little over two hours back.
The image has been downloaded, and I click on ‘View.’
A row of five blue bindis seemed to have formed a line that was marching down the length of the bathroom mirror.
Vani Viswanathan is often lost in her world of books and A R Rahman, churning out lines in her head or humming a song. Her world is one of frivolity, optimism, quietude and general chilled-ness, where there is always place for outbursts of laughter, bouts of silence, chocolate, ice cream and lots of books and endless iTunes playlists from all over the world. Vani was a Public Relations consultant in Singapore and decided to come back to homeland after seven years away to pursue a Masters in Development Studies. Vani blogs at http://chennaigalwrites.blogspot.com
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