Mirror

About a week ago I saw myself for the first time in over 6-weeks.

I was on a marketing visit in the small desert town of Barbud with my loyal work companion and village chaperone, Deepak. We had walked into an unassuming barber shop for a few minutes to escape the anvil-like sun, and enjoy some freshly pressed sugar cane juice we had purchased from a nearby street vendor. The small parlor was empty, and we took a collective exhale as we stepped in and removed our gumchas, dragging our sandals with fatigued relief across the tiled floor. To our left the entire wall was mirrored, giving the reflection of counter tops littered with silent scissors, three tattered barber chairs, and two exhausted men.

I sat down on the cracked vinyl bench, elbows on knees, and quietly looked at myself. Unlike the port-holed images of hand-held shaving mirrors and blurry reflections I had seen in the milky windows of nighttime buses, I could now observe myself in candid clarity for the first time in almost two months - I had changed.

Though same in shape and proportion, my face was now worn with uneven hues of pink from the constant onslaught of salty sweat and desert dust. My eyes looked sunken and worn, tunneling out of my face with a fraction of the energy, optimism and aggressiveness to which I had grown accustomed over the years. And behind me was the backdrop of my new life in a foreign land - the walls were plastered with the angelic faces of fair-skinned models, and dotted with smooth cartoon images of Ganesh.

So I sat there sipping the murky waters of my sugar cane juice, shamelessly gawking at the foreign figure in the mirror. He was totally unfamiliar to me, and all I wanted to do was stare. I was now starting to see why everyone else did.