Mirror

Perhaps, I should have verified the truth of her story. If not for the sheer force of its narrative credibility, I would have paid no attention to it. The truth is, it had been awhile since something like this had caught my imagination. A lack of exercise, and a reclusive tendency had closed off any active engagement with the world. The circumstances, then, had conspired with each other, and I caught the earliest flight out of Sydney.

The debilitating heat that greeted me on arrival reminded me of Luvina and the desolate burning plains surrounding it. Despite the relative comfort levels, however, the streets led me to wonder if the Singaporean obsession for order was not in some way a need to mirror and bolster its lagging belief in itself. In my hotel room, I found an orange envelope with my name written on it. The hand that wrote it must have been old, for it held the mark of a long uncorrected pen grip. I knew immediately what it contained. But when I looked in the mirror at myself I knew I was dangerously close to death.

Three years ago, fiction-maker and prestidigitator, Kumar, achieved a singular coup with his first novel, The Flagellants by virtue of which he was awarded the highest prize for literary creation. An impossible occurrence even in the furthest stretch of the imagination, he turned down the award citing ethical reasons. His intrinsic motivations have never been made clear, but his closest friend, a woman known only as Sangeetham has been privy to this secret.

Kumar's tale, some critics argue, injects a much-needed aesthetic mysticism into modernist fiction with his total disregard for the conventions of modern fiction making. Not being one for such erudite, pompous artifice, I did not think much of a tale of a secret ancient monastic tradition that had survived detection for centuries in order to surface at the beginning of the Twittering Era, installing as its figurehead an idiot savant bent on world domination. The higher goals of the secret monastic cult were sacrosanct and members of the cult, save for a few elite demagogues, were kept in the dark. These demagogues kept the fate of the figurehead a secret even from him. On an insignificant day, he was killed, his steel heart smelted within his own body when he looked himself in the mirror, his use to the Cause outlived. Such literary rhetoric was blasé and fed quite cunningly on the modern day penchant for clever trickery.

In her flowing letters, Sangeetham told me that the prize-winning author was a man who lived in perpetual fear of doom. His home, I found out, was a simple, dingy affair, and he possessed not a single mirror. His fears may have been real to him, but I found it tragic that a grown man could be persecuted by his own image. Our Dorian Gray worked in a dark room where no shiny surfaces abounded.

In one of her letters, Sangeetham mentioned in passing that Mr. Kumar-Gray was now refusing to see anyone, even his closest friends, including herself. He had been tempted by a mirror that he had secretly kept locked away, and in a moment of weakness (vanity?) had looked upon it and claimed he saw his double. He insisted it was not his mirror image, but an actual doppelgänger he had seen and thus forecasted his imminent doom. The story intrigued me, not so much for its impossibility, but for its possibility. If Kumar had dreamt the doppelgänger, it was equally plausible that the doppelgänger had dreamt Kumar. Only a trial by fire could reveal the truth (or the lie).

The concierge, at the hotel, a pretty, muse-like creature, inspiring and playful, gave me a quizzical look when I walked across the hotel lobby to the reception. I was aware that my looks were ordinary. I was also aware, however, of a debilitating insecurity regarding them. The concierge's brazen glances unnerved me but I smiled at him and left the hotel lobby.

Sangeetham met me at a café we had frequented together many years ago when things seemed simpler, and the first thing she said to me confirmed the task I had to accomplish. The morning before I landed in Singapore, Kumar had told her what I now realise and believe were his last words spoken to any living soul: I sense him. He is very near now. He had lost all sense of decorum and had admitted her into his place dressed only in a loincloth which itself was torn and inadequate in the task of concealment. "It seemed," she told me, "that he was trying to negate his own identity." She loves him, I thought.

When I returned to the hotel, the concierge, to my relief, was not at the lobby. He surprised me, however, at my door. To avoid a scene, I bundled him hastily into my room. The man smiled sweetly at me from the window. Between him and I sat the coffee table upon which lay the orange envelope. He pointed to it and said, "You have not opened it?" His sensuous smile was, in fact, an invitation to do so. I fingered the mole on my neck, a brownish presence of useless skin, a characteristic gesture of mine when my conviction flagged. I stepped forward, lifted the envelope off the table and emptied its contents. My face must have suggested surprise or shock, for he said, "You knew the time would come. You had been prepared for this. It's too late now, everything is planned." He left my room more convinced than I was that the task would be accomplished.

The next morning I wired back a note to Sydney advising of my possible delay in returning. Then, I boarded a bus that took me through the heart of this burgeoning island's wastelands. His apartment lay in the north of the island, in a congested area where the dust rose from the gutters. Finding his apartment block was tiresome, but knocking on his door was nothing less than a nightmare.

I knocked. A cat answered with a soft meow of recognition. I pried open the aluminium shutters and peered in. The sunlight streaming in from a window at the extreme end of the apartment blinded me and cast a shadow over all the contents within. Slowly, I began to make out a labyrinth of books, piled head high on the floor and made to form a narrow pathway that snaked through the already miniscule living space. A voice, meek and frail instructed me to enter. It seemed to be whimpering in fear.

The door was unlocked. The stale air of the apartment gave me the feeling of being in a house of cards. The maze of books was only wide enough for one person to walk through. It circled around past the Ancient Greeks and their Gods. They gave way to the poesies of Bachelard and Lefebvre. Rabelais came next, then, the broodings of Holderlin and Rilke. At the bend heading left, Nietzsche stood high and tall, but he quickly relinquished his position to Kafka and the Vedas. At the end of this long narrow river sat Kumar on a throne-like chair with a high back.

He looked extremely emaciated. Gaunt and malnourished, he glared at me from behind the eyes of a trapped animal. Seeing him in this state, moments before my dastardly deed, filled me with dread. I touched my mole.

He smiled meekly, and then turned slightly to his left and lighted a candle that sat precariously on a pile of books that served as his side table. The electricity had been cut off, I surmised. He looked at me in silence, waiting for the denouément. We remained thus for some time, each waiting for the moment. Then, I revealed the Kris, housed for so long in its orange cocoon, and raised my right hand high above my head in a striking position. The seated man must have wanted to put up one last fight, for he tried to avoid my thrust, knocking, in doing so, the candle off its perch. The brittle paper of dusty books caught fire and soon the whole place was ablaze. If I did not want to burn alive, I needed to finish off and leave before the fire became noticeable. But the dead man put up more than a valiant struggle.

Somehow, I escaped the blazing inferno unscathed. I ran out of the apartment and looked back in. The tongues of flames were only beginning to lick at the open doorway and windows. I realised with terror that I still held the Kris in my left hand and quickly threw it back into the cauldron.

The last thing I saw of him was the mole on his neck, which had turned a deep purple.