Mirror

by Amita Basu

Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3a, 3b,

part 3a

I free my shoulders from their sleeves and let my dress fall to the floor. I step outside it, stoop to collect it, and go to hang it up behind the bathroom door. The Stranger stands rebuttoning his shirt around a clothes hanger. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder; still he ignores me, staring straight ahead into the closed bathroom door. Into my hands surges the desire to throw my belt around his neck and garrot him.

It’s a stiff tweed belt; I could double-fold it. I’m as tall as he is, and as broad-shouldered. Look at him: dead man walking. Hear the silence in the house: he’s dismissed the servants to the other wing: nobody would hear him scream. Then I could collect my trunk, and Chintzy, and Galzy, and the other pups, and walk out. Free.

I would have to leave the Nation. They don’t know what he’s doing. They would think I’d done a terrible thing.

Leave my Nation? Leave Uncle? A sob chokes me.

The Stranger flinches. I turn my sob into a cough, then a laugh.

I can’t leave. Not like this. I must show them what this man is. I must, at least, see for myself why he’s doing this.

I hang up my dress. I turn the lock in the bathroom door. He always waits for me to do this. We’ve not spoken a word, these six months — but we’ve worked out who must do what.

I lean on the wall across the mirror that runs, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, down my bathroom’s east length. Yes: you’ve seen through me: it was this mirror that seduced me into selecting this apartment, of the dozen that Uncle threw open to me. The bedroom is small and dingy. When I chose it, Uncle looked around, puzzled; then he peered into the bathroom and laughed.

The Stranger releases his shoulders from his suspenders. He steps out of his trousers. Too proud to support himself against the door while I’m watching, he hops around on one foot shoeless, still socked. I want to laugh. I want to scream.

I’d rather think of Uncle.

* * *

They say a fairytale never lasts. Mine has: living with Uncle, these two years.

All through his rise and even after he became the Nation’s Guide, we thought Uncle was a man apart. Aflame with passion, married to our Nation, working all day to ease her suffering, dreaming all night of her salvation.

Dreaming? No. None of us at school believed that our Guide dreamed, or slept, or ate, or did anything but work.

He inspired us to make the best of ourselves. For our Nation’s sake.

The boys spent hours in gymnasiums building their muscles, as Uncle bid them. We girls stole our mothers’ handbooks on obstetrics and childrearing, and our mothers’ waist-cinchers too, making ourselves desirable and motherly, as Uncle bid us.

The boys tried to grow a mustache like his. The girls drew endless portraits of him and rated each other’s boyfriends’ eyes for blazing blueness.

I snubbed this tomfoolery; I, as his niece, had my dignity. But I was in love with him. We all were: all us boys and girls, and many men and women, too.

The world laughed at us. They told us we boys and girls had all turned into infatuated schoolgirls. They told us we men and women had all turned into idolatrous savages.

The world didn’t understand. This has nothing to do with sex. This has nothing to do with religion. He encourages sex — the right kind, among the chosen people — but strictly demarcated from public life. Religion he’s effectually banned, but the Church still funds him.

So what is this about? The world will never understand. For they don’t want to understand. They want to “other” us, silence us and shut the blinds on us.

This is about reclaiming our destiny. Asserting our rights as heirs to civilisation itself. For down the gray river of the whole history of civilisation runs our blood in a single, indissoluble ribbon. From time immemorial, our blood has fuelled history itself. Now we march to victory.

And history ends with us. After history, only a fairy-gold eternal honeymoon.

He is neither beloved nor God. Or perhaps he is: but only incidentally. What he is — is our Guide. It’s he who told us: we are the chosen people.

So, when Uncle invited me to live with him, to housekeep for him, I knew I was being invited to live, not with a man, but with a more-than-man.

* * *

By the bathroom door the Stranger stands hang-headed. Naked, clutching his trousers in front of his groin. I, underwear-clad, still lean against the bathroom wall, watching him in the mirror.

Elsewhere, the west is mourning in garish crimsons and immodest yellows the sun’s death. Here, twilight suffuses the bathroom: powder-blue, homogenous. Here in this mirror, I can study the Stranger: stripped of light and shadow, submerged in underwater blue.

* * *

After prison, Uncle rebuilt his party. They resolved: no more coups. A series of feeble governments, bickering in a riven Parliament, carpeting the streets every few months with election pamphlets — had hamstrung the Nation’s aspiration for peaceful ‘recovery’: or, rather, exposed that aspiration as an illusion. But it was through Parliament that my Uncle saw his party’s path forward.

Uncle kept designing posters, making speeches, recruiting followers. Over six years and two dozen elections, Uncle hauled his party onto the Nation’s stage. The party’s following grew.

But so did the following of our enemies within, on the Left.

Riven between Right and Left, our people at large were still trying to stumble onward. Forgetting their own sufferings, blaming themselves for their own sufferings, trusting in the scions of the old order who led our new democratic governments.

But we rose to our knees only to be knocked flat again, noses in mud. Millions who’d lost their jobs now lost their homes. Cities crumbled into crime and disrepair. Families fragmented. Men took to drinking and wife-beating. Women took to prostitution.

Our Nation again defaulted on debt repayments. Then the enemies restructured our debt, but that restructured debt still had to be paid, and it was paid by squeezing stones for blood. By squeezing our starving people to pay for a war we hadn’t started, a war we’d been told we’d lost, a war Uncle told us we hadn’t really lost.

Finally, our people had enough. Fourteen years after he joined the then five-man party, Uncle’s now-mainstream party was elected into power.

Now, Uncle spoke on the Nation’s largest stage. He commissioned stages larger than any in our degenerate times: when, from cheering public listeners, we’ve become pondering private readers. On a vast white marble stage; from a podium gleaming ebony black and guarded by a monumental eagle rising behind him, gold kindling crimson in the autumn twilight, stood Uncle, erect, a man bearing on his shoulders the weight of a Nation, leading a Nation to its destiny. He now spoke to all the Nation, over radio and in person to a hundred thousand of us. Stalwart young people, uniformed, shouldering flags red and black and white.

We gazed up at the golden eagle: embodiment of the thousand-year empire behind us. Our eagle had risen from democracy’s ashes. Now it hovered, ready to soar again, to lead us into our Promised Land. Under the eagle, alone on the stage, Uncle exhorted us not to forget our recent sufferings, our ancient glories.

Uncle assured us that our glory now would be greater still: that the Promised Land was no metaphor; it awaited us eastwards. In a time before history, our Atlantean heritage had predestined us for Elysian splendours. All we had to do was recruit our willpower and spurn the old Code.

Still the newspapers protested: ‘He raves like a madman. Entrancing the starving masses with drug-addled fables preaching hate. He’s called down, upon those he calls the enemies within — as did Moses upon the Pharaoh — the plagues of Egypt. He exhorts his Followers rush to do his dirty work for him, openly in the streets that he promised to cleanse... And what has he achieved? His promises are big. His achievements, null.’

Far away, to outsiders, the newspapers protested. Well: until that night, I believed them, too.

Over the rally grounds, night fell black and chill. I passed my hands around my neighbours’ elbows. At first, just to keep warm. I gazed up the stars. They twinkled: benign, almost warm. Still Uncle’s words rang, over loudspeakers, through our heads. Uncle’s cadence was staccato, his voice high-pitched, the loudspeakers’ output crackling like iron nuggets cast into fire. I longed to go home to bed. To sanity.

Then up into the black skies — in unison, sending up our spines, into our skulls, shiver after shiver, making our knees buckle and our eyes glaze — raced fifty columns of white light. Floodlights, borrowed from our newly revived Air Force, installed, face up, in a row, running behind the marble stage, running round the rally grounds, walling Uncle and us all into a temple of white light, the skies above us black and pregnant with possibility.

For some years, I’d been grudgingly infatuated with our Guide: the infatuation of a spectating child. Privately resisting his charisma. Publicly cheering him. Riven between the Nation’s judgment and my own.

That evening, as I stood, at the party’s annual grand rally, in the chill of an October evening, warmed in a vast crowd of people suffering like me, yearning like me, looking like me — I became a Follower. Ready to do, with my hands and my brains, the work that my Guide told me my Nation required of me.

Now I felt ashamed that I’d believed our perfidious journalists. That I, too, had been a city-bred adolescent, looking down my nose, dismissing Uncle’s speeches as funny, raising to Uncle’s methods prissy-priggish objections. My family were all excellently educated; I, too, had grown up an outsider. Now I distanced myself from my deracinated bourgeois family — the better to dissolve myself in the classless, Nation-proud, Nationwide Family headed by our Guide.

That evening, when I was thirteen, doubt was washed from my heart at last, leaving me cleansed. Our Guide lifted us, as individuals, out of our shoes, skywards; then we fell back but now as single cells in the body of the million-celled Nation. Have you ever felt the fabric of your soul knitted into a vast grand tapestry?

That evening, at the rally, drugged at last, I called Uncle ‘Guide’, with a hundred thousand of my compatriots, rending our own eardrums with our screams, our flags thrust skywards.

And back home, kneeling by my bed: my prayers now beginning and ending with ‘My Guide.’ As, now, did the prayers of millions of children and many adults, too. We, the chosen.

If you, an adult, fell in love with our Guide, other adults would mock you: ‘You’re in love with an image. You must think for yourself.’

We children are also in love with our eagle and with the man before it; we no longer distinguish between the two, and our Nation doesn’t require us to. We would defend you.

And we’d attack those other adults: ‘You’ve been thinking for yourselves these twenty years. What good has your thinking done us? The Nation kneels in the mud, chained, gagged, starved. It’s not pride, only vanity, that keeps you standing apart. It’s not scepticism but unpatriotism that keeps you from seeing where your duty lies: to Him.’

So, five years later — five glorious years in power — when Uncle invited me to live with him — you can see why I was thrilled.

And you can see why Pa was ambivalent. A great man attracts dubious dependents.

* * *

Proceed to part 3b...

Copyright © 2023 by Amita Basu