Linen Cloth

At my ancestral home in Rajasthan, I noticed a linen cloth clipped over a broken mirror. Quiet filled the dim room. The air smelt of naphthalene and old varnish. Along the walls stood Godrej trunks and brass lotas, their corners dented and old stickers peeling at the edges. And the cloth—bright, industrial, with its synthetic lemon scent—did not belong here. It hung awkwardly over the mirror, ironed flat and clipped with two fluorescent pegs.

I asked my grandmother why the mirror was covered. She said a broken mirror meant seven years of misfortune. You do not leave a broken mirror open to the room. Her fingers, mapped with blue veins and wrinkles, smoothed the fabric as she spoke.

The room itself was a living ledger of stubborn things that had refused to be discarded. Potlis and handmade bags hung from brass hooks, their embroidery catching the dim light in dozens of broken reflections. Steel thalis and heavy brass tumblers crouched in the drawers, their rims bitten with names of their owners engraved in an unhurried script. Lining the walls like silent sentinels were rusted trunks and battered tin suitcases, still bearing dents from the frantic tosses and turns of a hundred railway platforms. They sat heavy and immovable, locks still intact, holding camphor, old clothes, and the crushed petals of rose garlands from weddings. There were heaps of books and magazines printed in the curling scripts of Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi, their pages spotting and smelling of that specific, sweet rot of decades-old paper.

And in the cabinet sat gallantly the heavy stone chakki, the hand-operated flour mill, its two granite wheels waiting for the hands that used to wake before dawn to grind the day’s wheat, the rhythmic ghirr-ghirr of the stone providing a bassline to the morning prayers.

None of these things were treated as relics. They were simply things, used and reused until they became extensions of the body, invisible in their utility. No one seemed to realize we were living inside a museum, where fortune had accumulated quietly in almirahs and trunks, packed into rooms that had been folded into fewer rooms, carried across a border, unpacked, and made ordinary again amongst lime-green furniture.

I scanned the room, regarding all of it, all these things that survived, the possessions of people who lived through the splitting of countries and selves, and still, a broken mirror, covered.