A Letter Opener, Letter Knife or a Paper Knife was a fairly common device found on almost every office table during the 1940s. It used to be a straightforward blunt blade of metal to cut-open sealed and gummed envelopes. I found this one among a punching machine, a pin cushion, a stapler, a bloating roller pad, a few glass paperweights, a pen holder and various other table items in my dad’s office after he died. This was really fancy for those times. The obverse and the inverse sides of the promotional paper knife, was probably used as a give-away for cycle buyers by Perryson Cycle & Parts company in India. It is pretty much ‘usable’ even today though the mermaid-like fluke (the tail) of the knife is missing, possibly broken, in ‘handling’. With her high cheekbones and curls, this shapely-Greek-goddess-like-sensation must have been a handful for both the secretary and the boss. I don’t think these guys were missing anything in those days. “Dad, this is going to the museum of memories.”
Father died at home, in his house looking himself in the mirror; guiding the razor upside-down on his thin face, pulling wrinkled skin over shrunken cheekbones, making faces while shaving; grinning, upsetting, teasing, and taunting the mirror, Just then a heart-attack took him in minutes; And the Mirror captured his soul.
The Mirror was fixed on the wall facing the kitchen, where mother worked. She kept her distance from the mirror, feeling sad and scared of looking in it – finally, covering it with a towel that father used.
Father owned the house where he died. ‘Krishna Kutir’, the house was named after my mother, who sold it ten years later and passed the money to his heirs.
No Father, No House. No Mirror. All gone. A lot more went with it, my innocence, my youth. We all grew up in it – a sister, two brothers, mother, father – and the house itself, which had come by chance, really. Father had no money to buy it. He would say. ‘I was lucky’. Yes, he was. Indeed, lucky for an orphan and a refugee to own a house in the capital.
For sure, those days he was lucky, and happy too, having got a raise in salary. He also won two lotteries in six months. First, a ‘lucky draw’ where his name was picked and a small flat allotted to him for small money. Second, a ‘cash prize’ for writing a slogan for a cigarette brand of the working class. He used the money to part-pay the flat. Would you believe, there was a time when one was rewarded to smoke! Very Lucky!
Like his income, the house too was low income. LIG Flat they called it. Dad was proud, ‘I made it like a bee,’ he once told me looking into the mirror. He saved for it, every paisa he could like a bee secreting to make a hive – cutting on his smokes, eats, and bus fare; cycling to work eight miles one way.
Mother sold the house as it had her name. The mirror went with the house. Outside the house, there was a name plate faded, nailed to the wall, having survived forty years of elements, envy, and evil-eye.
When Ma moved, father stayed behind in his house. He didn’t move, he couldn’t. His soul had been seized by the Mirror.
Not everything died with father, a lot survived. His dreams, his books, his letters, his diaries and the Mirror on the soiled verandah wall from which his face followed us everywhere.
Ma brought all she could, tears & trauma in tow and the fading nameplate, ‘Krishna Kutir’. I, for one, couldn’t unhook the Mirror Father held it tight.
Ankahi. Unsaid. 
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