I was long in front of the glass, and I could see my face flushed by the rays of the autumn sun. My mother had at last wearied of my patience when she saw me like that.
What has wrong, she asked her, nearly painfully, with almost a cry. You are as busy as thieves spying upon your own image since you were away at Bangalore. What vexes you, then, so much?
I replied meekly and with concern, Mother, half my face was burnt under the eyes of this November sun.
To this, she replied, Such November sun, how savagely it racks the beautiful velvet leaves off their trees, leaving them half-burned, ashes scattered about on the ground, which is one day to be their grave. Before such power, what value will a face of clay have?
I looked to the window, as I heard her words. The world itself, out there, appeared to be resonant with her truth, every inch of the season, created a cruel image, as my mother had said.
A puff of cold came through the opening and cut through my body piece by piece as though it were determined to tear me in two. My mother, I said, I had heard that autumn was the favourite season with poets.
Yes, Ruh!, that is the reason all right, because poets are the only ones real seduced by the agony of parting. She continued, Do you not know that excepting there is distance, the pain, the impatience, the sort of hurt that makes out of the body a sieve, never quits our hearts and flows down on these pages? This isolation is fatal as well, child.
And Ammi, is that the same sun that burns all to ashes which also has a tale? I think that this same sun is a fairy-story, penned upon the most solemn and the most desperate occasions of life.
Just as much as we may attempt it, child, we can never really lose this world we live in, or the individuals who are opposed to us, or the ones who appear to be our ally, but are actually more toxic and venomous than an adversary. It is making this world a much uglier place where people are less passionate and much greedier.
The words of my mother were floating in the air as the morning mist that stayed on the Chinar trees before our home. It was a November sun, and was lower in the sky, and the shadows it cast were long, sweeping the worn wooden floor, like the fingers of a person who can never fully reach any object. My hand was lying on chilly glass of the window, and the warmth of the November sun was on my face in spite of the cold which prevailed in the room.
So, tell me about Bangalore, my mother said, and her voice was much kinder now, as though she thought that there were things that could be said in hushed tones. "Something the city taught you about burning?
I glued my eyes and the memories started pouring like monsoon rain through a leaking dam. The fluorescent lamps that made my skin paper white, the acid attack, which had not befallen me but a stranger, the manner the liquid had splashed on my left cheek when I was trying to protect my her against the wrath of her enemy. The physicians said it was just a miracle that I had lost pigment, and not flesh. It was referred to by the dermatologist as the partial-thickness damage. My mother referred to it as the signature of the November sun.
And then it was not the sun, I said. It was a misunderstanding between both of them. However, at that moment when the acid came to my skin, I felt that the sun itself grabbed down and marked me. The universe was writing on my face like the universe was.
My mother drew near and her rough hand reached out. Her hands were rough with years of dough kneading, her roses; her fingers were evidence of the hardships of living. November sun does not make a difference, my love. It burns the guilty and the innocent as well. It changes grapes and green leaves to gold. It is the great equalizer."
"But why?" The question came out of me like a bird out of the cage. Why should beauty always have to be destroyed?
She was so long silent I began to wonder whether she would answer. Outside, one of the leaves, which fell off the chinar tree, whirled itself about in lethargic gyrations and dropped upon the frost-bitten grass. You know the silk worms, she said at length. How we had seen them spin their cocoons, wrap themselves in their own saliva till they were all covered. Then came the waiting. The long, dark waiting."
I nodded, going back to those days of childhood when we were checking the cocoons every day and the small fingers of mine were running along the golden threads that were glowing with their inner light.
The metamorphosis, as she went on, must be dissolved by all means. The butterfly does not turn into a caterpillar and continue to act like a caterpillar. The caterpillar, first must die. It must become soup. Liquid potential. Then only will something new come about.
But I did not decide this, I said in a mew of my fingers following the fringes of the white patch that was now spoiling my otherwise perfect skin. "I didn't choose to be burned."
Nor did the leaf fall to fall, she said. Nor did the silk worm desire to be boiled to his precious thread. November sun demands no permission. It simply is."
I wheeled about and faced her full, the first time I saw that interweaving of fine lines which riveted her features like antique rivers. Did you, Ammi, ever feel beautiful? Before the world told you otherwise?
Her laughter was the wind chimes in a soft breeze. Beauty is not a thing an individual owns, my child. One can observe it. I have witnessed it in the manner with which your father would stare at me in the middle of a large room, in the manner with which you could dance in the rain, and not feel embarrassed about it, in the manner in which this November sun changes all it touches.
"Even scars?"
In particular, scars, said she. A scar is just a tale that would not be forgotten. The sun of November writes these stories on all things, on leaves, and on skin, on hearts. It is not whether we will be marked or not but what stories we will tell ourselves using our markings.
I went again to the mirror but now I could see the entire face I had not only the white patch, but the entire face with the dark eyes, the cheekbones, which seemed to mirror the mountains at sunset, and the lips, which had been trained to say such things as "survive" and "transform. The November sun was shining through the window, and under its cruel light I beheld something I had not noticed in my months of monomaniac study: the scar was not a mark of powerlessness in beauty but another beautiful thing altogether.
Now it was the setting of the November sun in copper and bronze on the western sky. The shadows in the room increased in length, intensity. I went on to say, we formed an organization. And not to victims, but to survivors. We learn vocational skills, we offer legal assistance, however, we are above all teaching that beauty is not the counterpart of damage but it is the outcome of what we actually decide to do with our damage.
And then you have to go, she said. You have to learn what the November sun has taught you and give it to others. You have to demonstrate to them that a half-scalded face is yet a face that can love and laugh and lead. That scars are merely testament to the fact that we have been touched by the story of the sun and lived to tell the story of it as we remember it.
When the November sun went down the mountains, I realized finally what my mother had always known. The blazing sun is the same sun that gives life. The very November which deprives the trees is the same November that is setting them up to the spring. My scar that is on my face is the scar that makes me one who has seen the awful beauty of the sun and has not turned away to avoid the teaching of it.
I said, Ammi, I am about to talk of dropping the mirror-gazing, which I now believe I have always been doing.
She smiled and, in that smile, I read the years of wisdom of all the mothers who had ever seen their children through the unsurvivable. "Good," she said. Since the world is more in need of people who have discovered to see beauty in what the November sun kissed. The world should have more individuals who realize that to be burnt is not to be broken, but changed.
The November sun had set outside, but its tale was still going on in the frost which stained the windows, in the bare branches which drew the design of calligraphy in the fading sky, and in the cut which stamped my face with the marks of a signature on a masterpiece. I would start on raising people to know what the November sun had taught me, that beauty is not the antonym of damage but the greatest change it has wrought.
The November sun would be coming up again tomorrow like every day, like it always did, blind and necessary, destructive and creative, making its stories on every surface upon which it came. and I would there read those stories, and translate them to others, and make them see that to be branded by the sun is not to be cursed, but to be chosen, chosen to be there to bring the story on how something beautiful may be wrought out of something burnt, how a thing whole may be made out of what was once broken, how the most vital truths are often to be found in the sternest lessons of the November sun.
I felt my scar the last time once in the darkness, but not revulsion but reverence. It was a mere signing-on of the name of suns of November, to my story, however, which was by no means completed, and which would still be repeated in many other forms, as I had not yet experienced them, and whose teachings I had not yet acquired how to translate. But I would learn. The burned, the marked, the transformed, we would all learn how to read the handwriting of the November sun, to know in its strokes the promise of the spring returning one day.

Email:--------------------------------kamranbhatt029@gmail.com