Manav Chouhan
Chapter 1: The Letter from Chowk
The rain had barely stopped drumming against the windows when Meher Chaudhary found the envelope waiting on the windowsill of her Delhi studio, damp but intact, as though it had arrived with the storm itself. Its paper was of an oddly antique texture—off-white and fibrous, sealed with wax that bore an insignia she didn’t recognize. Her name was written in precise Devanagari script, the kind used in legal documents a century ago. Curious and mildly amused, she opened it, half-expecting an invitation to an art exhibition or a forgotten commission. But the letter was from the Heritage Conservation Council of Uttar Pradesh, formally inviting her to undertake the restoration of a damaged mirror housed within Begum Manzil, a Nawabi-era residence in the heart of old Lucknow. The letter claimed the mirror was once part of the private chambers of Nawab Afsar Ali Khan, a minor ruler known more for his poetic indulgences than political relevance. It mentioned the mirror had been hidden away after a mysterious tragedy and was recently rediscovered during structural renovations. Though hesitant, Meher found herself drawn to the project—not by its professional merit, but by the odd tension in the phrasing: “We trust only your hands can restore it to its former truth.” That choice of words—truth, not beauty or clarity—lingered in her mind. Two days later, with her toolkit and sketchbooks packed, she boarded the Lucknow Mail under a sky smeared with ochre clouds, unaware that she wasn’t just heading into a forgotten palace, but into a past that refused to stay buried.
The journey into Chowk, Lucknow’s oldest quarters, was like being absorbed into a painting left unfinished for decades. The roads narrowed into curling arteries of stone, where ornate balconies leaned forward like gossiping old women and the scent of rose attar mingled with street dust and age-old secrets. A weathered ambassador car, sent by the palace caretaker, took Meher through gullies too tight for modern thought. When they finally stopped before a sagging archway marked “Begum Manzil,” time seemed to pause. The building loomed with silent dignity—its lime-washed walls pocked with cracks, its latticework windows dark like sleeping eyes. Inside, the air was thick with dust and stillness. An elderly man in a sherwani greeted her without expression. “Zameer,” he said simply, not offering a hand. “I remember when the mirror was last touched. She screamed,” he added in a voice that might have belonged to the peeling walls. Meher offered a tight nod, unsure if he was serious or just indulging in the local flavor of theatrics. He led her through faded hallways where portraits of long-dead Nawabs watched like forgotten judges. Finally, in a high-ceilinged room where the afternoon sun dared not reach, stood the mirror—covered in a heavy velvet sheet. “It has waited long,” Zameer said before retreating into the shadows. Meher stood alone before the veiled artifact, her fingers twitching with instinctive anticipation. But something about the room, about the mirror itself—still unseen—felt not like an invitation, but a dare.
When she pulled the velvet cover away, the mirror revealed itself like a half-remembered nightmare. Its gilt frame was carved with intricate floral designs that had faded into thorns over time. Shards of glass jutted out from the center like the remains of a cracked eye, fractured and angry. Yet oddly, the damage didn’t seem entirely the result of neglect. Some parts had been deliberately struck—like someone had tried to obliterate whatever it once showed. As Meher knelt to inspect the base, her breath caught. Though the glass was broken, the fragments were unnaturally clean—as if someone had recently polished them. Stranger still, for a moment—just a moment—she thought she saw movement inside the mirror, not her own reflection, but the suggestion of silk fluttering across a floor, and the echo of an anklet in the corner of her ear. She blinked, and it was gone. Must be the light, she told herself, though there was barely any in the room. She set up her equipment methodically: gloves, brushes, solvents, graphite pencils. But her hands hesitated before touching the frame, as though seeking unspoken permission. She reminded herself that every object tells a story, and that she had spent her career learning to listen. And yet, as her gloved fingers finally touched the gilded edge, a chill swept up her arm—not a temperature, but a pressure. The kind one feels when stepping into a room that hasn’t been entered in decades. The kind that whispers: something here remembers.
Chapter 2: Arrival at Begum Manzil
The next morning brought with it a fog that blanketed old Lucknow like a shroud, softening the edges of reality as Meher stepped into the courtyard of Begum Manzil. The palace stood in stillness, its crumbling walls tinged with melancholy rather than grandeur, as though it had been built not to host royalty but to mourn them. Stray creepers coiled around marble jharokhas, and faded tiles whispered tales of rain-soaked monsoons long past. A marble fountain, long dried, occupied the center of the courtyard, choked with brittle leaves and feathered dust. Above, crows circled lazily, as if expecting the day to unveil a forgotten ritual. Meher glanced up at the broken dome and caught her own distorted reflection in a shard of windowpane—her face stretched and hollowed, eyes larger than natural. She turned away quickly and followed Zameer down a corridor lined with niches that once held lamps but now housed silence. “The mirror was never meant to return,” he murmured, mostly to himself. “After what happened, the Begum sealed this wing. Some said it wept through the walls at night.” Meher did not respond. She was trained to disbelieve superstition, to reduce every anomaly to art, science, and chemistry. But in Begum Manzil, logic wore thin as the plaster on its walls.
The room housing the mirror was now hers to inhabit, work in, and live beside. It had high ceilings with cracked cornices, a fan that groaned when it turned, and a narrow wooden bed covered with sheets that smelled faintly of mothballs and rosewater. The mirror still stood veiled against the northern wall, but Meher had not approached it again since the first day. Instead, she focused on studying the frame design from photographs provided in the council files. It was distinctly Persian-Mughal, with repeating motifs of lotuses and vines, but what struck her most was the deliberate asymmetry at the top of the frame—a stylized peacock that seemed to be bending its neck unnaturally, as if shamed. Such imbalance was rare in royal artifacts, where symmetry equaled power. That night, as she lay in bed listening to the creaks of wood and distant sounds of azaan from an unseen mosque, she couldn’t sleep. The mirror, though shrouded, seemed to throb with quiet life. Once or twice, she imagined she heard faint humming—like an old lullaby sung by someone without breath. She tried to tell herself it was the wind funneling through lattice windows. But when she finally drifted off, her dreams returned her to the Nawab’s court—not as a visitor, but as someone seated among silken cushions, her hands stained red, and a woman with a pale face screaming soundlessly behind her.
The following day, as Meher finally began preliminary cleaning, she noticed something the files had not mentioned: there were dark stains along the inner rim of the mirror’s wooden back, almost hidden beneath the paint. She scratched at them gently with a scalpel, and the flakes came off in brittle curls, revealing not rot or mildew—but what appeared to be dried blood. Not fresh, not from an accident. A smear soaked into the wood, as though someone had pressed against it violently long ago. Her pulse quickened. Was it theatrical—applied later to stir rumors? Or was it authentic? She documented it, photographed the segment, and reached for her gloves. Just then, Zameer appeared silently in the doorway, his expression unreadable. “It remembers,” he said flatly. “The mirror. It never shows what you are. Only what it needs you to see.” Meher’s gaze shifted involuntarily to the shards. One of them caught the sunlight in such a way that it seemed to flicker—like candlelight behind glass. She turned sharply, only to find the corridor behind her empty. A draft stirred the velvet curtains. It was only after Zameer left that she noticed a thin crack had deepened down one of the central fragments of the mirror. Not recent, but not as old as the others. And it hadn’t been there yesterday. Her breath fogged in the air, though the afternoon sun burned outside. The mirror, she realized, was not waiting to be restored. It was waiting to be remembered.
Chapter 3: The Mirror with No Reflection
By the third morning, the air in Begum Manzil had settled into a routine of whispering silences and unseen eyes, as if the palace had grown accustomed to Meher’s presence but was still unsure if she belonged. She approached the mirror early, the sky outside still tinged with pink, her breath forming a brief cloud in the unusually cold air of the chamber. The velvet sheet she had left partially draped now hung limp, revealing the fractured glass like a wound reopening. This time, Meher moved with practiced hands—her tools laid out like surgical instruments, her gloves snug, her mind armored in method. She began with the frame, brushing away centuries of dust and grime, uncovering details so fine they made her gasp. The vines weren’t just decorative—they twisted around each other like strangling fingers, and the peacock’s eye had been inset with a now-missing gem. As she polished the upper rim, her eyes flicked down to the mirror itself. For a brief second, she expected to see herself hunched in concentration. But there was nothing—no reflection. The shards caught light but gave back no image. She turned her face from side to side, waved a hand. Still nothing. Unease crept under her skin. The mirror wasn’t broken—it was withholding.
Later that afternoon, still puzzled by the mirror’s refusal to reflect, Meher stepped back to document her progress. She snapped photos from multiple angles, ensuring every detail of the frame was captured. But when she reviewed the images on her camera, her throat tightened. In one of the frames, a blur appeared—too defined to be a trick of light, too human to dismiss. It was a woman in a red veil, standing behind Meher, though she had been alone the entire time. Her face was indistinct, but the veil had a pattern—golden vines that matched the motif on the mirror’s frame. Meher’s fingers hovered over the delete button but didn’t press it. Instead, she zoomed in. Behind the woman’s shoulder, barely visible, was a throne—a high-backed wooden seat not present in the actual room. It was as if the mirror had captured a different space, a different time. That night, unable to sleep, Meher took the photo and compared it to sketches in the Heritage Council’s archives. One painting caught her eye—a court scene from Nawab Afsar Ali Khan’s reign, featuring his court performer, Zulekha Begum, who had mysteriously disappeared from records after 1796. The throne, the veil, the woman—they all aligned too closely for coincidence. But if the mirror had indeed captured a scene from the past, what did that make her? An observer? Or something worse—an intruder?
Sleep came in fragments, like moth wings against her eyes. When Meher finally closed them, her dreams turned jagged. She stood in the mirror chamber, but the furniture had changed—the bed replaced with brocade cushions, the walls lit by oil lamps, and the air heavy with oud and rosewater. Music played from somewhere beyond the corridor—a haunting sarangi melody—but no hands touched the instrument. Then, the mirror flickered before her, and in it she saw the Nawab—not as a painting or historical figure, but a man of flesh, pacing, angry, his voice a low growl she couldn’t quite hear. Behind him knelt the veiled woman—Zulekha—her hands raised in silent plea. Then, blood. A sudden smear across the mirror, and Meher screamed—not in fear, but in recognition, as though some long-buried memory had surfaced like a gasp. She woke drenched in sweat, the faint scent of attar still clinging to her nostrils, though her room smelled only of mildew and time. She sat up, heart hammering, and stared at the mirror across the room. One shard, near the center, was fogged—just slightly—like a breath had been exhaled upon it. Slowly, it cleared. And in its wake, Meher thought she saw her own eyes staring back at her for the first time. But they were not her eyes. Not quite.
Chapter 4: Whispers Behind Glass
By the fourth day, Meher stopped checking for her reflection. She had accepted that the mirror was no ordinary surface—it did not reveal, it remembered. And what it remembered seemed to awaken only when touched with care, as though time had sealed it shut until the right hands arrived. Each morning, she approached it as one might approach a sleeping creature—respectfully, with measured silence. She began cleaning the shattered glass itself, segment by segment, using cotton swabs soaked in distilled water. The jagged shards resisted her at first, then seemed to soften under her touch. As she leaned close, brush in hand, she noticed that the fragments—though broken—did not seem randomly shattered. They formed an unsettling pattern, like a spider’s web spun around a central crack. She paused and tilted her head. From a specific angle, the webbing resembled a sunburst—no, not a sun, but an explosion, as though something had burst from behind the mirror outward. Her fingers froze. Then, in the heart of the central shard, something flickered. She leaned closer, holding her breath, and there it was again—the veiled woman, Zulekha, standing in the exact same position as before. But this time her hands were stained red, and her mouth moved silently. Meher stared, unable to look away. The woman lifted one hand—slow, deliberate—and pointed. Not at Meher, but at the mirror’s edge. Then, like smoke, she dissolved.
After Zulekha vanished, Meher examined the spot where she had pointed. The bottom edge of the mirror’s frame had a hairline split barely visible to the naked eye. She fetched a slender chisel and gently pried it open. A thin plank loosened with a soft crack, revealing a hollow space behind the wood. Inside, wrapped in brittle muslin, was a small leather-bound book with a tarnished clasp. Meher opened it carefully. The pages inside were yellowed, edged with mold, and written in a flowing Urdu script. The first page was dated 1795. It began: “In the house of mirrors, truth is never straight.” It was signed, in a delicate hand, Zulekha Begum. Meher sat back on her heels, the diary trembling in her gloved hands. This was no mere artifact—this was a voice the palace had tried to bury. As she flipped through the pages, a story began to unfurl—fragmented, poetic, and full of fear. Zulekha wrote of her place in the Nawab’s court, not merely as a performer but as a companion, a confidante. She wrote of jealousy brewing among the court women, of whisperings in corridors, of a secret she had discovered—a betrayal not just of the heart, but of bloodlines and titles. And then came the final entries—hurried, smeared with ink and emotion. She feared for her life. She believed the mirror was being used to watch her, that it was more than glass. “The mirror does not lie,” she wrote, “but it shows the truth only when it bleeds.”
The weight of Zulekha’s words clung to Meher long after she closed the diary. She sat in the dim room, lit only by late afternoon light slipping through the broken jaali window. The air felt heavier, as if the act of unearthing the diary had woken something dormant—not malevolent, but deeply wounded. Meher reread the final lines, which hinted at a night of violence and silence. “I will be erased,” Zulekha wrote, “but my blood will remember. And the mirror will show her—when the time is right.” Meher exhaled slowly. Her? Did she mean another woman… or had she meant her? As in, Meher? The thought chilled her. She looked at her own hands, dusted with flecks of age and history, and felt the strange shiver of time folding in on itself. The diary proved that something had happened—something covered up, not just forgotten. Meher knew this was no longer just about restoring a mirror. It was about restoring a voice. A story. A truth. But the more she uncovered, the more uncertain she became: was the mirror offering her pieces of a past that longed for justice—or was it using her, drawing her into its broken heart like a moth to flame? In the dim light, the shards gleamed faintly, like eyes just about to blink.
Chapter 5: The Diary of Zulekha Begum
That night, Meher couldn’t bring herself to sleep. The diary rested beside her on the desk, and though she had read it thrice already, she kept going back to the same lines—the ones where Zulekha described the mirror as “alive, but not breathing.” Meher had spent her life restoring objects, paintings, sculptures, even centuries-old manuscripts. She had never encountered an artifact that responded to her presence as though it had memory. Each passage Zulekha penned seemed less like a diary and more like a conversation between two women separated by time, bound by something far more intimate than coincidence. “The Nawab’s anger was not his own,” Zulekha had written. “He was a man swallowed by shadows, whispers, and a fear of losing control.” Meher pictured the Nawab—a man with dark eyes and clenched fists, caught between love and legacy. Zulekha had hinted at a betrayal that threatened the bloodline itself, a secret whispered into the wrong ear, resulting in her banishment, and, later, something more violent. The final pages were increasingly fragmented, inked in haste and desperation. One entry simply read: He watches me even when he sleeps. I see my end in the mirror now, not in dreams. And then, abruptly, silence. The rest of the diary was blank.
In the days that followed, Meher found herself slipping into a pattern that blurred the lines between present and past. She would wake at dawn, light a diya near the mirror out of instinct more than ritual, and work quietly through the morning, listening for sounds that had no source. She began to notice small things—the scent of rose attar drifting through the hallway at dusk, despite the absence of fresh flowers. The scratch of ghungroos at odd hours, always distant but distinct. And the mirror, though still fragmented, began to pulse with clarity in specific shards. One would glow faintly when she cleaned another, and sometimes, when she paused to wipe her forehead, she’d catch a glimpse of movement—just at the edge of her vision. Always the same: the rustle of silk, the flicker of a veil, a hand trembling. One afternoon, while tracing the golden etching on the lower rim, Meher felt something sharp prick her finger—not a splinter, but a hair-thin wire embedded in the frame. She followed it with tweezers and discovered it ran through a carved channel behind the wood, connecting several ornamental symbols. A mechanism? A trap? No—something else. She jotted down a note: Possibly ceremonial. Non-functional now. But even as she wrote, the memory of Zulekha’s voice in the diary echoed: The mirror responds not to light, but to emotion. It is not for looking—it is for seeing.
Unable to contain her curiosity, Meher returned to the council’s archives, poring over digital copies and handwritten letters exchanged between Nawab Afsar Ali Khan’s court and the British Residency. There was no mention of Zulekha Begum beyond her being a “court entertainer of exceptional grace.” No record of her dismissal, her disappearance, or her death. That erasure gnawed at Meher more than the mystery. It wasn’t just that Zulekha had been silenced—it was that no one wanted to remember she had ever spoken. Meher returned to Begum Manzil feeling the weight of that loss settle deeper into her chest. That evening, after locking the outer chamber, she placed the diary atop the mirror’s base and spoke aloud: “I hear you.” The mirror didn’t respond. But when she turned away to wash her hands, the shard nearest the diary lit with a dull shimmer—as if reflecting a candle that didn’t exist. When she turned back, the shimmer faded. And for the first time, Meher didn’t feel alone in the room. She felt watched—but not threatened. As if someone had been waiting centuries for her to arrive, someone with a story, aching to be seen. The mirror, the diary, the silence—it was all beginning to align into something not quite paranormal, not quite historical, but entirely personal. And Meher, once a restorer of beauty, realized she was now restoring pain—delicately, patiently, and without any guarantee of redemption.
Chapter 6: The Cracks Beneath the Gold
On the sixth morning, a thin fog had crept indoors as though the outside had grown tired of waiting. Meher awoke to a strange stillness—not the silence of abandonment, but a pause, like the house itself was holding its breath. She dressed slowly, her limbs heavy, as if weighed down by the dreams she couldn’t quite remember. When she entered the mirror room, she found the diary open to the last written page, though she was certain she had closed it the night before. The ink had smudged slightly across the parchment, and beside it, a fresh flake of gold leaf lay curled on the surface—though she hadn’t begun gilding yet. Her heart thudded once, sharp and clear. As she turned back to the mirror, the central shard, once the dullest of the bunch, now gleamed with a sudden brightness, catching the early sun in its fractured surface. Meher approached, drawn not just by instinct but by something older, deeper—an inheritance of sorrow that didn’t belong to her but had begun to settle into her bones. She traced the gold pattern on the upper right of the frame and felt the texture shift beneath her gloves. The wood was soft in a way it hadn’t been the day before. Curious, she pressed harder—and with a soft crack, a corner of the ornamentation broke away, revealing not rot, but a hollow.
The hollow space behind the broken segment was lined with velvet so old it had turned the color of dried blood. Meher used a narrow chisel to pry the cavity open wider and uncovered what looked like the edge of a canvas—torn and rolled, hidden between the frame and the wall like a secret smuggled through time. Gently, carefully, she eased it out, revealing a small oil painting, no larger than a school notebook, wrapped in disintegrating silk. The image was haunting: Zulekha Begum, unmistakably her, seated on a low divan, her face half-shadowed, her hands adorned with anklets and rings. But her eyes—painted in striking detail—were terrified. Behind her stood the Nawab, one hand resting on her shoulder, the other clutching what could only be a ceremonial dagger. Across the canvas ran deep gashes, as though someone had tried to destroy it in rage. The top corner bore a signature Meher didn’t recognize. And in red ink across the bottom, half-faded but still legible, someone had scrawled: She was never meant to be seen. Meher stared at the words, her fingers trembling. This was no artistic rendering—it was a confession. The painting, the mirror, the diary—they weren’t simply remnants. They were testimonies. Pieces of a murder that had been carefully scrubbed from history.
She didn’t tell Zameer. Not yet. He had grown increasingly distant since the diary’s discovery, often muttering verses in Arabic under his breath, as if warding off something only he could feel. That night, Meher locked the mirror room from inside and lit a single lamp. She placed the diary, the torn painting, and her notes in a circle around her, and sat cross-legged in the center. For hours, she simply listened. To the settling of dust. To the ticking of the old grandfather clock in the corridor. To the faint creaks of a house remembering. When the mirror finally stirred, it wasn’t with movement—but with sound. A soft ringing, like the vibration of glass after a distant explosion. Meher stood slowly, drawn to the center shard again. This time, it showed not a person, but a place: a large hall with mirrored walls, its ceiling painted with peacocks and clouds. In the center, a woman knelt, her face hidden, her hands bound. A crowd of shadows loomed at the edges, murmuring indistinctly. And then came the voice—not Zulekha’s, but a man’s. Cold, calculated, reciting something in Persian. A decree. The scene flickered, then vanished. Meher was left staring at her own pale face, reflected for the first time since she’d arrived. But her eyes weren’t just her own anymore. They held something else—something ancient, grieving, and hungry for truth. She stepped back, heart pounding. She now understood: the mirror didn’t want restoration. It wanted resurrection. And it had chosen her.
Chapter 7: The Man with No Shadow
The next morning arrived without color. The air was strangely dense, as if saturated with smoke that had no origin, and every corner of Begum Manzil seemed to lean inward, as though listening. Meher moved through the halls with silent steps, alert now to things that could not be named. She hadn’t spoken to Zameer since the previous evening, though she heard him muttering somewhere beyond the kitchen, his voice punctuated with urgency and prayer. The mirror room was undisturbed, and yet Meher felt watched from the moment she entered. She resumed her cleaning ritual with slow precision, but her thoughts were elsewhere—on the man’s voice she had heard through the mirror, on Zulekha’s bound hands, on the velvet-lined hollow that had concealed not just secrets, but confessions. As she reached for a dry brush, something shifted in the mirror—not a figure this time, but a light, like the flicker of a lantern moving through a corridor. She froze. In the reflection, she saw the outline of a man standing in the courtyard beyond the mirror chamber. He was tall, dressed in white, motionless. But when she spun around, the room behind her was empty. She looked back at the mirror—he was still there, though closer now. His face was obscured, but she felt him staring. Not at the mirror. At her.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. The memory of the figure lingered in her mind like smoke in cloth. Just before dawn, she crept out into the courtyard, drawn by something she couldn’t name. The moon was high, casting long shadows over the stones, and there—beneath the withered neem tree—stood the man. His back was to her. His white kurta swayed faintly in the wind, though the air was still. “Who are you?” Meher asked, barely above a whisper. The man turned his head slightly, but not fully, revealing only the edge of his cheek, too pale for life. She stepped forward. “Are you part of the staff?” He did not move. She took another step and realized with a sudden jolt: he had no shadow. The moonlight passed through him, casting darkness where his body should have blocked it. She stopped. “Zulekha,” he said at last, his voice low and distant, like an echo trapped in stone. Then he vanished—not with drama, but like mist absorbed by the wind. Meher stood there, numb, until the call to prayer broke the silence. She stumbled back inside, her breath shallow. She had come here to restore a relic of history. She had not prepared to be haunted by it. Later, Zameer found her sitting on the floor of the mirror room, staring at nothing. “He only appears to those she chooses,” he murmured. “You should not follow her footsteps too far, madam. Some stories are not meant to be lived again.”
The rest of the day passed in fragments. Meher worked in stilted rhythm, cleaning, documenting, cross-referencing the names and phrases in Zulekha’s diary with the few surviving letters from the Nawab’s reign. She discovered mentions of a British liaison named Captain Willoughby, who had written to the East India Company about “domestic instability within the Nawab’s zenana,” but no records after that. No woman’s name. No trial. No burial. It was as if Zulekha had ceased to exist. Meher couldn’t shake the feeling that the mirror was gradually bleeding its truth through her. She wasn’t just seeing visions now—she was beginning to remember them as if they were her own. That evening, she took the diary, the torn painting, and a blank page, and began sketching from memory. The man in the mirror. The hall with mirrored walls. The dagger. The veiled woman. As she sketched, the mirror behind her grew warm. Not hot, but pulsing with low, steady heat, like breath against skin. And in one sudden moment, it happened again—her reflection flickered. Not disappeared, not distorted—but shifted. She was still Meher, but her clothes had changed. Her hands bore rings not her own. And behind her, faint but visible, stood the man in white. She turned swiftly—but there was no one. Her breath fogged the mirror. It stayed for a moment. Then cleared. And on the shard closest to her face, etched in fine condensation, were five words: He was not the first. She stepped back, the paper in her hand trembling. This wasn’t a story of one betrayal. It was a cycle. And she, now, was inside it.
Chapter 8: The Mirror Shows the Restorer
By the eighth day, Begum Manzil no longer felt like a place Meher had entered—it felt like a skin she had been wearing all along. The air was heavier, more intimate, as if the walls knew her now. The mirror, once silent and inert, had become reactive. It didn’t wait for her touch anymore; it responded to her presence. Each morning, she would step into the room and feel the change—a subtle shift in the temperature, a shimmer in the shards, an almost imperceptible hum under the floorboards. The reflections were clearer now but wrong in ways she could no longer deny. Sometimes the mirror would show the room as it was, but with altered lighting—as if it had borrowed the glow of a different century. Other times, it would show movement in the corners when no one was there. On this morning, Meher approached the frame as always, but something stopped her from putting on her gloves. She stared at her bare hands. A moment later, for the first time since she had arrived, she looked into the mirror directly and saw herself—not in modern clothes, but draped in a deep indigo angarkha, her hair braided and adorned with pearls, her face lined with a kohl that accentuated unfamiliar, regal exhaustion. She didn’t blink. She didn’t move. And yet, her reflection smiled. It was her. But not her. And she knew, with that kind of terrifying clarity that silences thought, that the mirror was no longer just showing her the past. It was offering her a place in it.
Shaken, Meher turned away and paced the length of the room. She opened the windows, hoping the morning sun would dilute whatever madness had begun fermenting in her mind. But even the sunlight seemed touched by dust, as if reluctant to intrude. She picked up Zulekha’s diary, hoping to anchor herself, but the words blurred—too familiar now, as if they’d been recited in her own voice. Flipping through to the final page, she noticed a strange symbol drawn in ink, one she hadn’t seen before: an eye pierced by a feather. Something clicked in her memory. In the sketch from the torn painting, that same symbol had been carved onto the dagger’s hilt. She rose and crossed the room, returning to the small cavity behind the mirror frame where the painting had been hidden. She examined the interior more carefully now, running her fingers along the hidden groove—and found something new: a latch. It clicked softly, and a panel gave way, revealing a shallow drawer. Inside lay an object wrapped in faded mulmul cloth. Meher unfolded it to find an old dagger—slender, curved, and ornate. Its handle was adorned with turquoise stones, and its blade etched with the same symbol from the diary. She turned it over and felt an immediate jolt, not physical, but deep in her chest, as though her pulse had aligned with something ancient. She placed the blade on the floor, sat cross-legged before it, and stared at the mirror. Her reflection was gone again. Instead, she saw a court in chaos: men shouting, women weeping, and in the center, Zulekha, hands bound, staring at someone beyond the glass. She was not pleading. She was warning.
That night, Meher stayed in the mirror room. She couldn’t bring herself to sleep in the chamber across the hall anymore—it felt too removed, too false. She lit a single candle and sat facing the mirror, the dagger in her lap, the diary beside her, and the torn painting propped against the wall. Hours passed. The candle burned lower. And slowly, the mirror awakened again. This time, the vision was not fragmented. It was vivid. A chamber she had not seen before. Velvet curtains. Marble floors. The Nawab stood at the edge of the mirror’s field, speaking to an unseen courtier. His voice was clearer now. “She knows,” he said. “If she speaks, the bloodline falls.” Then came Zulekha, pushed into frame, her eyes meeting Meher’s across centuries. She did not cry. She did not speak. But she mouthed a single phrase: You must finish it. The mirror flickered. A gasp escaped the shard closest to Meher’s knee. And in that instant, she understood: the restoration was not of glass or gold—it was of judgment. Of justice. Of a story denied light. She rose, picked up the dagger, and walked to the mirror, breath slow, body trembling. Her reflection returned—but now dressed in both time and purpose. And behind her, not shadow, but presence. Not haunting, but summoning. In the stillness of the cracked glass, the Nawab stared back at her. Waiting. The mirror had chosen her. And the reckoning was near.
Chapter 9: Glass That Bleeds
It rained that night—the kind of slow, unending rain that seems to peel the past from rooftops. Begum Manzil groaned under its weight, the old wood soaking in the sorrow like a body long used to grief. Meher sat beside the mirror in the half-light of an oil lamp, the dagger placed in front of her like a pact. Something had shifted permanently. She felt it in the walls, in her breath, in her bones. Her own reflection now came and went at will, sometimes replaced by Zulekha’s gaze, sometimes by flickers of events half-seen—pages turning, blood dripping, a scream muffled by silk. The diary’s ink had begun to bleed in places, the words becoming watery, the final lines barely legible. She tried copying them, but the moment her pen touched the paper, the lamp flickered. The air trembled. She knew she was close—close to something final. The mirror had begun revealing not just scenes but choices. Each time she touched a shard, a different image flared to life: a dagger dropped beneath a divan, a courtesan collapsing in silence, the Nawab standing alone in his chamber, trembling. But most haunting of all was the image that returned again and again: Zulekha kneeling, eyes locked with Meher’s, mouthing the same four words—It must be finished. As if she had been waiting not just for remembrance—but for retribution.
That morning, Zameer came to her door. He looked thinner, older, like the palace had drawn years from his skin. He placed a small envelope in her hand. “This came for you,” he said without emotion. Meher opened it to find a brittle letter—aged, typewritten, addressed not to her but to the Archaeological Survey of India, dated 1952. It detailed the discovery of a woman’s skeleton behind a false wall in the eastern wing of Begum Manzil, adorned with remnants of silk and silver anklets. The body had never been identified, and the matter had been hushed up under the pretext of preventing “cultural misinterpretation.” No report had ever been made public. The initials on the signature matched those of Captain Willoughby’s descendant. Meher stared at the letter, the bile rising in her throat. This was the proof—the truth long buried, literally walled into silence. She rushed to the eastern wing, ignored Zameer’s protests, and began tapping the walls, her hands guided not by knowledge, but instinct. She found it behind a tapestry—an uneven echo. She pried the plaster loose. And there, behind the crumbling facade, were scraps of fabric, a hollow cavity, and a space once large enough to hold a body. The scent of time and rot made her gag. But she didn’t stop. Instead, she reached into the cavity and found, unbelievably, a rusted chain still threaded with red beads. She recognized it instantly. It was around Zulekha’s neck in the torn painting.
That night, Meher brought the chain, the dagger, and the painting into the mirror chamber. She laid them before the glass like offerings. Then she unwrapped the final shard—the largest one, which she had left untouched until now. It was shaped like an inverted crescent, and as she cleaned it gently, the room changed. The lamp’s light bent. The air thickened. And for the first time, the mirror didn’t show a reflection or a memory. It showed Zulekha, standing, unbound, her hands empty, her voice finally audible. “I was never weak,” she whispered. “I was silenced.” Her eyes met Meher’s, steady and unwavering. “Will you show them?” Meher nodded. “Then break it,” Zulekha said. “Let them bleed.” Meher hesitated. Restoration had always meant preservation, not destruction. But this mirror—this cursed, sacred wound—didn’t want to be preserved. It wanted to be broken open. She stood, raised the dagger, and with one clean, deliberate strike, drove it into the heart of the glass. The mirror screamed. Not with sound, but with release. Light erupted from the fractures. Shards flew outward and yet struck nothing, suspended mid-air like fireflies frozen in grief. The room pulsed once, and then fell silent. Zulekha was gone. The mirror was no more. In its place was only space—and Meher, standing in its center, bathed in dust and truth. It was finished. And she had become the final reflection.
Chapter 10: What Remains Behind Glass
The morning after the mirror’s shattering, Begum Manzil was quiet in a way Meher had never known. Not empty—never truly empty—but still. The kind of stillness that comes after the storm, not before it. Light filtered gently through the broken jharokhas, catching on suspended motes of dust and glancing off the scattered remnants of the mirror now lying like cold petals around her. Meher sat amidst them, her fingers bleeding from where the shards had grazed her palms. But she didn’t feel pain. Only calm. Only clarity. Zulekha’s presence was gone—not vanished, but released, like smoke rising after fire. The mirror no longer spoke, because it had nothing left to say. All that had been buried had risen. All that had been silenced had screamed. Meher gathered the objects slowly—the dagger, the diary, the torn painting—and wrapped them in linen as though preparing them for burial. The frame remained against the wall, stripped of its power, no longer a vessel but a shell. She didn’t weep. She didn’t need to. Grief wasn’t hers to carry anymore. Only memory. Only truth.
Zameer didn’t come that morning, nor did he appear the next. When Meher finally found him sitting in the far corridor beside the ruined fountain, he looked as though he had been waiting for centuries. “She’s free now,” he said without looking at her. Meher nodded. “And you knew.” His eyes flicked toward her, ancient and exhausted. “My grandmother was the last to speak of her. She said the palace grew cold every year on the day Zulekha vanished. Said she heard music in the mirror. I was ten.” He paused. “We were told to leave it alone. To let it sleep.” Meher sat beside him, holding the wrapped diary in her lap. “Some things shouldn’t sleep forever.” Zameer gave a dry, mirthless chuckle. “And now what? Will they thank you for this? Put it in a museum?” Meher looked out across the garden, where bougainvillea clung stubbornly to the ruined walls. “No,” she said. “I’ll archive it. I’ll write it down. But some truths aren’t meant for museums. They’re meant for the ones who were never given voice.” She stood, her knees aching. “I’ll restore what’s left. But not the mirror. Not again.”
She left Begum Manzil the next day, her suitcase lighter than when she arrived, but her chest heavier with the weight of story. The council report she submitted weeks later was thorough, professional, and cautious. It described the damaged state of the mirror, the aged frame, the ceremonial dagger, the recovered diary fragments attributed to a possible royal performer of the 1790s. Nowhere did it mention visions. Nowhere did it name Zulekha. But in her private journal, Meher wrote everything—the mirror’s hunger, the voices, the reflection that wasn’t hers, and the scream that shattered centuries of silence. She stored the diary, the chain, and the painting in acid-free boxes, carefully marked and locked away. She never spoke publicly about the mirror again. But sometimes, late at night, when she passed old glass in antique homes, she paused. Just briefly. Watching not for herself—but for what stood behind her. She never saw Zulekha again. But once, in the depths of winter, she saw a single shard of gold flicker in an empty mirror. And in that flicker, she smiled. Not haunted. Not afraid. Just remembered. Just seen.
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End
