It was still dark outside and I had just spent another fitful night tossing and turning in bed.  I woke up  to go to the bathroom and a moth fluttered into my face. I brushed it aside and glanced accidentally into the mirror. And I got a shock.

Who was that creature looking back at me? For it was a creature, a grey looking hag with scatty ,scanty hair. Where  was the sleepy,  hint of sexy, just out of bed with tousled and mussed up hair  mirror image of me, Asha Mahajan, that normally stared back at me?Where had she gone?

I fumbled for the light switch and within seconds the harsh glare of incandescent light  bounced off the speckled brown granite counter. In one corner near the mirror, my tooth brush and toothpaste stood stoically near my collection of creams and body lotions . In the other corner was a neat stack of rolled up napkins and a pot pouri of lavender and musk. Even the shower stall was exactly the way it was as I’d left it eight hours.But something had changed. I looked around and found that all that had changed was me……….clutching on to the counter top and staring horrified at the reflection that stared back.

I reached out to the image hoping to touch it away. But it didn’t vanish.  I put my hand to my head and found a clump of fine wispy hair literally come away in my hands. Seeing the strands of black and grey, my emotions soon morphed from horror to panic. If just touching my hair caused it to come away in clumps, I could see myself turning bald before the end of day.

I carefully picked up the fallen hair and put it in the bin. Then I went into the kitchen to make myself a hot cup of tea and get a hold of myself. As the tea bubbled in the pot, I could feel all those emotions I first felt six months ago when I first received that email saying ” Ma, I got married last week end. I know this sounds crazy but when I went to LA last week for Ritu’s wedding I met up with her cousin Binky and we drove down to Vegas tied the knot.”

And that was it! A mother of a grown child expects to learn one day that her child has found its significant other – a person so significant that he qualifies to become one’s better half but nothing quite prepared me for the chilling moment when I learnt of this news so suddenly, without warning. My heart started pounding so hard I thought it would pop out of my body. I didn’t even know that she was seeing some one let alone contemplating marrying him!!!!! This beat even Mrs. Sinha’s daughter who ran away with the driver and married him in Goa.  I had stopped in my tracks at the first sentence, a cold fear seizing my heart but ignoring  my dry mouth and  lurching stomach, I went on to read that she was sorry she hadn’t told me before, but she knew that she was making the right choice and was sure that I would be happy for her………..

But was I happy? How could I be happy when I knew nothing of how she felt the first time she met him? What made her heart flutter? How he filled up her life? How he made her feel special? How he made her smile?

More than anything else, I was simply stunned with her behaviour. It seemed so unlike her to be so secretive, sly and deceptive. How could she do it, I thought? For six months I grappled with this reality and tried to make sense of why she did what she did. I visited psychics and astrologers, counsellors and psychiatrists. I walked miles and miles each day to sort out the questions in my head. I spent nights staring out in the dark sky, looking at the clouds asking for answers…….

And now I realised starkly that I was slowly going mad.

I went back to the loo and stared hard at the woman in the mirror looking for answers yet another time. And suddenly it all came back to me.

In flashes I recalled, my sister-in-law, a frightened young girl  whose extra curricular activities in college ended the wrong way. Unknown to her mother, she got mixed up with a wild crowd and things grew out of proportion. But destiny has its own path and  my mother-in-law exchanged my still born son with the lovechild of my husband’s sister; I had my baby and the family retained its honour…..

Suddenly, the hag in the mirror cracked a wry smile of recognition. It wasn’t strange why my daughter did what she did. After all, she was the mirror image of her mother…………..only, her mother wasn’t really me.

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda