The Man in the Mirror

“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”
– Aldus Huxley

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Ravi caught his eye in the bathroom mirror, as he prepared for his morning shave. For a moment, he couldn’t place the man. It was a common enough face, easily forgotten. He took in the graying stubble and the receding hairline, the face puffy from too many late nights in the office and too little sun. One of the many middle-aged men you pass everyday on the streets – of no consequence.

A common face, defined by a common name. And now, framed in one of the cheap plastic mirrors you find by the Bombay roadside in the hundreds.

Hell isn’t a snake pit filled with righteous fire. It isn’t a little red man wielding a farming implement.

Hell is a mediocre life in a planet of infinite possibilities. It is your bald landlord squeezing his luxury out of your necessity. It’s watching your dreams merge into grey nothingness, and slip away unnoticed among the cubicles. It’s the fourth seat on a Bombay local that feels like home. It’s winning a fight for love, only to lose it in the battle of life. It’s typing your name in google and getting 16,000,000 hits – none of them about you.

Hell is waking up one morning and finding a common stranger in your bathroom mirror.

Ravi stared at the man in the mirror. Was he trying to tell him something? The eyes didn’t look quite as dull as they had a moment ago. In fact, they were shining fiercely now, as if he wished to transmit his very soul through the glass and into Ravi.

Then the man spoke. “You don’t need to stay. There is a better world. All you have to do, is step through.”

The voice was his, and the words had come from him, but it was the man who spoke. Was he losing his mind? But he had always known that things weren’t quite as they seemed. He’d always felt the void. In a sense, the man in the mirror had always been there, watching him – waiting for the right moment.

The moment was now. Ravi felt it in his bones. He finally realised that he was the one in the mirror – on the wrong side of it. In Hell. On the other side, was the real him. The one he’d lost on the streets of Bombay a long time ago – the man in his mirror.

Once he’d realised this, stepping through was easy. In a way, he was already there, existing in both world’s simultaneously. It was just a question of perspective.

Reality is arbitrary – you can choose the one you want.

He was through. Everything seemed as before, but the man in the mirror was gone. Ravi smiled at himself, and felt ten years younger. He was out of Hell. In a new world, things would be different. He could be different. Time to change.

A little apprehensive, he headed for the door. He hoped the people would be kind, and not shun him. But he knew that however bad things got, they could never be as bad as Hell.

He opened the door and stepped out into the light, to find a sea of people prostrated before him. All of them chanting the same thing:

“Welcome, visitor from paradise.”