Mask

"Blip!" A notification for an email slid into her title bar as Reneé wiped another rivulet of perspiration off her forehead. Before proceeding to check her inbox, she stole a glance at herself in the mirror. Her bleached white shirt was dotted with sweat patches, like bleak little archipelagos in an ocean, her tartan grey skirt was crumpled into a thousand little creases, and her face was the same, irreversibly ruined, misshapen lump of tissue that she still couldn't reconcile herself with. Exhaling noisily, she stared unblinkingly at the first line of the e-mail: 

Dear Ms. Lemarchant, 

While it was a pleasure to have interacted with you, regrettably, as of this moment, we cannot.... 

Renee didn't need to read any further. She knew exactly how the rest would go; she'd recieved dozens of these emails over the past two months, as she met one interviewer after another, without any success in her job hunting spree. She'd almost begun to wish the HR departments would vary the wordings of their rejection mails a little; that'd spare her the monotony, if not the despair. Even as she turned these unsavoury thoughts over in her head, she could hear her eight year old Ernie maintaining a steady patter of conversation in the background - "Mummy, so we were mask-making in school today, and after we'd finished, Mrs. Linnet asked us to switch our masks with our benchmates. I made such a nice Mufasa mask, but Harold(the kid who got me that Mechano set for my birthday,you remember, don't you?)made this really scary-looking mask that he called the mask of the Eptian fro, and I had to come home with it. We've been asked to click pictures of any of our family members wearing the mask, and then stick the picture on our scrapbook. You'll wear it, won't you,Mummy?"

"It's called the mask of the Egyptian pharoah, Ern. And of course, I'll wear it. Off to bed now. You can take your picture from me before school tomorrow morning." Even as she tucked him into bed, she wondered with a pang how long she'd been able to keep paying the fees for the high-end prep school he attended, let alone be finally able to fund his cleft-lip operation. The only way her husband could contribute to his upbringing was to stay sober on the days his supervised visits with Ernie was scheduled, so turning to him for help was out of the question. As Ernie's gentle snores and the ticking of clock over the mantelpiece set up a curious little rhythm, Reneé ambled into her washroom, and positioning herself in front of the cracked-and-cellotaped mirror above the sink, she stared down at the assortment of oiintments and anti-scabbing creams that stared right back unblinkingly. It was quite a chore every night to remove the layers of makeup that she painstakingly, though ineffectively, applied every morning and then apply the ointments to ease the pain and the irritation that was somehow exaggerated by the makeup products. When you're an acid attack victim, you're lucky to be alive.

Expecting multinationals to launch sensitive products compatible to your condition was too unaffordable a dream. Somehow, the contouring and the concealer seemed to accentuate the ridges and bumps on her face.When you've written for a fashion magazine all your life, how do you convince your editor that your acid attack ravaged face wouldn't deter you from writing about "The Major Fashion Faux-pas by the Kardashians" or "Why Shoulder Pads Continue to Remain An Unpardonable Fashion Abomination". She could still hear her desk editor,the impeccably dressed Jacqueline Vincent mouth in her posh public-school accent,"Reneé, m'dear, I'm sure Disrupt magazine will miss you, so will all offrom but we can't really include a photo of your current face as your faceshot with each article, can we? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but a writer who writes on fashion, wellness and beauty is expected to be, well, beautiful!" 

Her face, by now, was more or less clear of any makeup, even as lines of ointment glistened across her cheeks. Gritting her teeth to push down the searing pain, she trudged back into the living room and grabbing a beer from the freezer, she settled into one of the rickety wooden chairs by the dining table, when suddenly a gleam of metal on the table caught her eye. 

"Darn it. I've to put on that wretched mask for Ernie's picture, she grumbled, her fingers tracing the patterns in the mask. She'd expected the mask to be an amateurish, gaudy affair of glitter and cardboard. But this was a 1.5 foot long,considerably heavy mask of metal, possibly gold and obsidian,with inlay work of ivory, each stroke and line chiselled immaculately onto the metal gleaming with semi previous stones.

 " That's no child's handicraft," Reneé chuckled. "The little bugger probably picked up some family heirloom and brought it to school to show off. What's beyond me is how the teacher never noticed, is this negligence costing us three thousand bucks quarterly?!" 

Pulling the mask over her face, Reneé gulped down another mouthful of her beer. At that point, she'd rather be anybody but herself,even if that anybody was some Pharoah who'd been dead for a few millennia, she thought, as her thoughts trailed off and she drifted away into oblivion... 

* * * * * *

Sand! There was way too much of it, swirling in colossal plumes all around her,assuming sinister forms, on her lips, in her ears, even her nostrils. Instinctively, she put up an arm to shield her bare eyes. All around, cries of 'Khamaseen, khamaseen' resonated around her. Eerily enough, she knew what it meant- the dusty wind blowing in from the south that left the land even more scorching that it had been, to begin with. Parting her fingers a little, she risked a glance through them. Around her, everyone seemed to be running helter skelter.Women with gorgeous bronzed complexions, dressed in billowy dressed hurried away with narrow mouthed jars balanced at their waists. An elderly man in a loincloth pushed a wheel barrow stocked with little knickknacks, little flutes,dancing puppets and miniature animals whittled out of wood. But what attracted her attention the most was the resplendent palace rising before her. Its walls were covered with etchings of scarab beetles, cats, jackals, pitchers, serpents, spheres that vaguely resembled eyeballs and a million other hieroglyphs. Here and there, towering obelisks rose into the forget-me-not blue desert sky.

The arch of the gateway, formed by two towers tapering at the tops and surmounted by a flat slab, festooned by multicoloured flags bearing a cross shaped with a tear drop shaped loop as an emblem, was guarded by two sentries, their javelin tips glinting in the sunshine.

 "That gateway's called a pylon," she muttered as distant nuggets of information seemed to bob up on the surface of her mind. Even as she spoke, she could feel herself drifting closer to the palace entrance. The ram-headed stone sphinxes flanking the gates seemed to grow ominously large. As she drew closer she noticed a few hieroglyphs etched in vibrant green(malachite, she thought) over the archway. To her astonishment she had no difficulty in deciphering the millennia-old pictogram, and in a minute, she knew: She was at the Malkata Palace in Thebes, the capital of the enigmatic adolescent who'd woken up one day to find himself the Pharoah - Tutankhaten, or as he'd rechristened himself, Tutankhamen. 

* * * * * *

The sentinels at the gate seemed to look through her, as though she was some formless apparition, their glassy eyes staring straight ahead below their elaborate leather headdresses. She drifted right past them,passing gardens with neatly pruned hedges bearing jujubes, olives, pomegranates and pears. Here and then, alabaster sculptures of jackal-headed men, crocodiles, severed cat heads dotted the yellowish green grass of the lawns. Seeing them, Reneé was instantly reminded of the topiary she'd seen in Jacqueline Vincent's villa during team dinners at her place. Apparently, it'd been a fancy of her Republican Senator husband, Carl Vincent. Why do megalomaniacs across millennia have such similar tastes, she wondered, stifling a hysterical giggle.

She passed a courtyard, skirting around a tall granite obelisk, as a man in a grey robe stood nearby, squinting at its shadow, and scribbling on a scroll of papyrus, his nose splattered with black ink from his reed pain from the speed of his writing. It'll be another two millennia, before they learn to use clocks, smiled Reneé. Looking ahead, she saw an ornate archway leading into a wide corridor, lined by blazing torches and inexplicably,mirrors on both walls. She stepped in, momentarily blinded as her eyes adjusted to the semi darkness, when the nearest mirror on the wall caught her eye. The amber frame enclosing the glass was engraved with minuscule pictograms, gleaming in the light from the torches like iridescent micelles. But what surprised her was what she saw in the glass, or rather, what she didn't see. The reflection in the glass showed the torch on the opposite wall, its embers glowing. "I'm a phantom," Reneé thought with a mixture of wonder and repulsion. She proceeded down the corridor, her rising curiosity echoing off the walls of the bare corridor even as her feet moved soundlessly. She'd walked a mere five feet when the corridor widened into a cavernous chamber.Perhaps the widening of the corridor had been gradual, but she'd been too distracted to notice.

Now, she looked before her in awed incredulity. It wasn't a very large room, the ceiling was a mere seven feet from the ground. The floor was covered with tiles of clay,onto which intricate little patterns had been pressed. Both sides of the room were lined by an assortment of weapons -axes,javelin, maces, bows, quivers of arrows and what was possibly a chariot wheel. Against the farthest wall of the room, a bronze statue of a man presided over the room. Elaborate plumes adorned his head, his left hand wielded a sceptre while the right held a three pronged cross topped by a circular loop. Reneé muttered in a stage-whisper, "Amun-Ra,the sun god. Wow, I'm never drinking beer again."

As she lowered her vision from the bronze sculpture, her jaw dropped. Seated on a throne below the bronze bust, flanked by two smaller thrones, adorned by ornaments that gleamed like incandescent little beacons in the dimly lit cavern was Tutankhamen,the seventeen-year-old ruler of the one of the world's most prosperous ancient civilizations. 

* * * * * * 

Tutankhamen was nothing like she'd expected. Wait, she hadn't expected to see Tutankhamen, ever. Her life had recently hit such a low, she'd be lucky if the accounts department at Disrupt agreed to meet her and clear her dues. Tutankhamen was short,shorter than she was, a fact that even his upright posture couldn't quite camouflage.His sallow skin was in sharp contrast to the ornaments and multitude of semi precious stones that adorned his arms, neck, fingers, toes and ears. The royal blue linen robe draped over his shoulders exposed large parts of his skinny torso. Irregular facial hair bore telltale signs of a pubescent moustache. Reneé seemed to remember that the inbreeding practiced within the Egyptian royal family had led Tut to be a fragile, sickly, delicate child riddled with genetic disorders, with some scholars going as far as to claim he suffered from hemophilia or sickle cell anaemia. Reneé was taken aback at the extent of her own astonishment. Perhaps, subconsciously, she too had internalised the idea of alpha-masculinity associated with power, a notion she'd always found noxious and toxic. 

Interrupting your chain of thought, he spoke, in a voice that had barely begun to break,"You have my mask." It wasn't in a language Reneé remotely understood, it sounded like gobbledygook to her, but telepathically, she knew exactly what he'd said.

"Your mask?"

To her own surprise, Reneé managed to squeak. "Wait, I thought I was putting on a child's handicraft. Atleast that's what my son told me. No offence intended, I'll take it right off." Before she could pull off her mask, the Pharoah raised a forefinger. 

"You needn't. I know how you look, and I have seen how you used to be. I understand your craving for a mask. How did this catastrophe befall you, child?" 

If Reneé didn't know better, she'd have declared herself a schizophrenic by now. The last few weeks had seen her adopt many desperate measure to cling on to her sanity, but being catharcized by a teenaged Pharoah who was probably a conjecture of her alcohol-riddled mind and senses was a new peak of absurdity. But somehow,confessing her woes to this boy who comforted, yet did not patronise, who seemed more eager to listen to her than any therapist she'd ever been to seemed too alluring a temptation. 

"I...suffered an acid attack," she said, her voice threatening to break on every syllable."There isn't any major dramatic backstory behind it, I'd just woken up one night for a sip of water, and since nights get really humid in Arizona, I reached out to switch on the fan. Mere seconds after the fan purred to life, I felt a burning liquid fall right onto my face, as my features dissolved with a sick bubbling sound. Someone had the whole arrangement rigged. The police investigation revealed that the liquid was aqua regia,and the goldsmith next door had reported a few barrels of that stuff t be missing. But th-they never found out who did it. After it happened, my health insurance wouldn't cover my grafting surgeries. Initially, tons of publications and journalists pestered me for interviews, asking me how it'd happened, how I was fighting the stigma against survivors such as myself, and whether I preferred to call myself an activist. But once I told them that the perpetrator hadn't yet been nabbed, and all I was doing was trying to find myself a job to be able to make ends meet, they left. Apparently, I wasn't sensational enough. Well, I'd never signed up to be a paragon of virtue, had I? I wrote articles about converting old clothes into athleisure for a living, and it paid well. I do no tneed to be exemplified, but I could do without being discriminated and otherized. I keep trying to get back on my feet,but each time I do, it seems like a tidal wave is determined to rip me right off the ground."

By the time she'd finished, Reneé was overwhelmed by tears streaming down her cheeks. Blowing her nose noisily on her sleeve, she made a valiant effort to compose herself, when the Pharoah spoke again. 

"The world is cruel, child. More often than not, those who surround us cannot be won over by benevolence and good will. They must be subdued into compliance, frightened into subservience, which is why we must find ourselves masks of our choice. Like I have."

"You mean this one?" Reneé held out the gold face mask that she'd now taken off. "

Not just that. You see this statue above me, child? This is Amun-Ra, one of Egypt's most sacred deities. It is believed far and wide that I am the living incarnation of Amun,that he's my patron, a notion that I have meticulously cultivated among my subjects.The throne was my birthright, and while power is often a javelin which when wielded right can lead one to invincibility, it is also a heavy armor, one that wears you down, and hides your battle scars from the world as you bleed inside it.

A nine year old as Pharoah didn't make for a very impressive image and since I couldn't inspire respect, I decided to induce fear, as long as it won me the obedience of the people of this land. Amun has always been my mask, my impenetrable Aegis. You too must find yours. You are from the future, you would know this better than I do. What could make for a more effective shield than bravery and confidence? Your talent and skill are like luminous celestial bodies, child, no amount of sullying shall ever tarnish their radiance. Had we not been meant to endure similar fates, we wouldn't have been granted this tryst by our destinies.You are meant for greatness, as I am. In our land, there's an age-old saying : Suffering in search of the truth gives true meaning to the truth. You are special, child. Do not let your pain convince you otherwise." 

A day ago, Reneé wouldn't have had much regard for a seventeen year old posing as a philosopher. But Tutankhamen's eyes, piercing right into hers, spoke of wisdom and experiences far greater, deeper than his seventeen years. Her head bowing involuntarily,she replied, "Yes, my lord." 

Tut spoke again. 

"You say they never found out who attacked you. And you? Did you find out?"

"Of course not. I'd have informed the police first thing had I known."

"But you do know, child, don't you? You refuse to see it, but you know." 

The blood had drained from Reneé's face. "I don't know what you're talking about.There's no reason for me to shield my attacker." 

"If you choose wilful ignorance, so be it. I hope you find all that you seek, child."

"Thank you, my lord. This audience with you has been highly enlightening. With youre permission, I shall now take your leave."

"One last question. What's athleisure?"

Some of the colour returned to Reneé's face as she giggled, "Trust me, you're better offnL not knowing." 

* * * * * 

"Mummy! Mummy! I'm late, wake up please! Mrs. Brady shall make me write lines if I get to school late again," shrieked a panic-stricken Ernie Lemarchant. His mother lay face down on the bed, the mask still on. An empty beer bottle was precariously balanced on the arm of a nearby chair. He'd been trying to wake her up for the last quarter of an hour, with no success.

With a groan, Reneé stirred, much to Ernie's relief. Ernie was already in his school uniform, his little satchel on his back. 

"I seriously need to cut down on drinking," grumbled Reneé as she jumped out of bed,and pulling on an apron, dashed into the kitchen, leaving Ernie to wait at the dining table. Ernie stared down at his hands. The blisters had gradually begun to fade, though initially, the pain had been excruciating. Now they'd healed enough for him to hold a pencil without wincing. Reneé walked in with a plate of frid bacon and eggs and a bowl of milk and cereal. 

"Sorry I'm so late, honey. Mummy's so tired, she ends up oversleeping. Don't worry, I'lldL drive fast and you'll get to school in - Gosh, are those blisters on your palms?"

Reneé grabbed his wrists even as Ernie tried to pull away. 

"How'd you get these?"She asked a sheepish Ernie."Matt and I sneaked into the Chemistry lab during recess. There was a bubbly blue liquid in a test tube, and it looked so pretty I wanted to touch it, but it burnt my palms." He looked up apprehensively at his evidently livid mother, who had pursed her lips into a thin line.They walked down the stairwell and clambered into Reneé's little blue Prius. Reneé was still furiously muttering under her breath ("What is this school thinking letting little children near corrosive chemicals without supervision- I'm going to have to speak to the headmistress"), so Ernie dared not nag her about riding shotgun and instead settled into the backseat, feeling a surge of affection for his overprotective mother. His mother was extraordinary, really. Kind, funny, considerate, affectionate - she was everything a boy his age could want in a parent. She'd even promised that she'd make his lip alright, so the other kids wouldn't make fun of it anymore. If only she hadn't, she hadn't... Even thinking about the incident made him choke up. He still vividly remembered poring over his Math homework during recess, they'd just started multiplying three digit numbers and his brow was furrowed with concentration, when a boy from a senior class had walked in, clutching a copy of a magazine. He recognised the name across it, it was the magazine his mother wrote for. She sometimes let him look at the glossy pictures inside. Opening the magazine to a particular page, he slammed it down on his desk. 

"See this, ugly? You keep telling us how you're unique and different and beautiful when we point out how absolutely grotesque your lip looks, and how sore it is on the eyes? Well, look what your own mother has to say about cleft lips here. Can't say she's wrong, though, I mean, look at that lip. It's so ugly, it'd put Medusa to shame. Looking at your face should officially be a way to punish people for petty crimes." 

With a rapidly palpitating heart and trembling fingers, Ernie held the page still to read. The boy had highlighted a few lines in neon green for him to read. It was chock full of big, unpronouncable words, and Ernie stuttered on the first line itself. Sniggering, the boy pulled the magazine back towards himself. 

"Aw. Ugly here with two brain cells can't read. Well, let me do the honours. Enjoy the recital, kid." Ernie winced as the contemptuous tones reciting those venomous words came back to him. Words that he'd barely been able to pronounce earlier, but now were engraved now in his memory like some Satanic verse set in rock. ".........Of course,misogyny is an attitude we've all internalised subconsciously without realising it ourselves. Stop a million people on the streets, ask them about actress Ashley Browne's rosacea and they'll sneer and tell you how awful it makes her look. Ask the same people about actor David Nottingham's cleft lip, and they'll tell you how it doesn't matter because he's a three time Academy award winner. Personally speaking, I feel cleft lips do no favours to one's screen presence, quite frankly, it's such a repulsive sight, and Nottingham should seriously consider cosmetic surgery...." The words rang in Ernie's ears. 

The senior boy was guffawing,"Look at the bugger's dumbstruck face. Bet his mother would exchange him for a decent-looking child if that were an option." 

Ernie's eyes had been pooling with tears for long, but now he could take it no more.Standing up to his full, not-so-impressive height, he summoned all his strength and landed a blow on the boy's nose.The last Ernie remembered before blacking out was hearing an outraged cry and the dull 'smack' of the boy's fist hitting his left eye , as the world went dark.

 Ernie had returned home that day covered in bruises and scratches and an enormous puffy black eye. Mummy had barely paid any attention, she'd just snapped at him to finish his dinner and run off to bed, as she hunched over her laptop, jabbing away at the keys, racing to meet what grown-ups called a deadline. 

The next morning, as he woke up, clenching his teeth to fight the throbbing in his bruised elbow, he saw Mummy getting dressed before the mirror, applying mascara to her long lashes, smacking her lips together to perfect her lipstick. Mummy was beautiful, he thought, almost as beautiful as the women in the pages of the magazine she wrote for. No one made fun of Mamma, no one called her ugly or grotesque or any of the million things he dreaded hearing each day he went to school. Mummy would have to be taught a lesson. She would have to be made to realise how the world looked at people who weren't as attractive, as appealing as her. 

On one of his visits to the goldsmith next door, when Mummy had to have the clasp of a pendant repaired, Ernie had seen him work with an orange-coloured liquid that fumed with a surprising vengeance for an inanimate object. Aqua regia, he'd called it. Not even the strongest of metals could withstand dissolving in it. On the pretext of running an errand for his mother, he'd sneaked out a couple of barrels of the liquid. His palms had smoked whenever some of it spiller on to them, but he hadn't minded the sores. The night it happened after Mummy's gentle snores had begun emanating from the bed, he'd tiptoed into the room with the step ladder from the basement. Climbing onto the top rung, he'd balanced a bucket of the liquid on one of the blades, securely enough not to fall on its own, but it would invariably topple over if the fan was switched on. After setting up his crude little booby trap, he'd replaced the step ladder and crept back into his bed. He'd almost fallen asleep from waiting when he was shaken away by the most piercing scream he'd ever heard. Walking into the next room, he'd seen his mother clutching her face with both hands, her legs flailing as though she were in mortal agony, her sharp exquisite features dissolving, melting into a mass of reddening flesh.

Epilogue

_________

1324 BC. 

Tut paced up and down his throne room, the very picture of agitation and restlessness. His red-and-white crown with the serpent's emblem lay discarded on a nearby charpoy.

It'd been three months since he'd that ethereal vision of the fair woman in strange clothes, the one with the deformed face who spoke in a strange tongue he'd never heard before. Yes, he called it a vision, since he staunchly refused to believe that it'd been a mere daydream. No, it'd been a sign, a message from Amun, his patron God, perhaps an indication of what was to come. Ever since, he'd summoned scores of astrologers and soothsayers to the palace, quizzed them on what the dream meant.Some dismissed it as a dream bearing little to no significance, others elucidated itspL probable meaning in such complicated terms that they left the Pharoah even more puzzled than he had been, to begin with. Meanwhile his subjects had begun to suspect that their king's mind might've been addled by the copious quantities of Bouza he consumed in his leisure, with his jealous courtiers enthusiastically fuelling this particular fire in hopes of overthrowing him with a coup.

Needless to say, people who were already sceptical of having a mere adolescent rule them wouldn't respond kindly to an alcoholic, mentally unsound, prone-to-hallucination head of state.

It wouldn't be long before they rebelled and he was browbeaten into abdication. Just the previous day,Tut had paraded the kingdom on the festival of Opet, right from Karnak to the shrine of Amun in Ipet Resyt, and he'd noticed signs of an impending apocalypse - the half-hearted bows, the low, barely audible yet ever-prevalent whispers, the furtive glances that shifted away the instant he attempted to look back. Penalizing them, beheading them for such malicious gossip would've backfired, that would only be confirming their suspicions. Tut felt as though he were duelling a venom-spewing Hydra; the more tentacles he sliced off, the faster they seemed to grow back.

Tut stopped abruptly in his tracks. No, he must steady himself. It wouldn't do to be overwhelmed with paranoia when there was so much at stake. The dream's true significance would come to him when it was meant to, when Amun-Ra willed it. Till then, he would live in the present and discharge his duties, instead of allowing the fear of the unknown blackmail and terrorise him into self-pity. It was imperative that he immediately oversee the empire's tax collection for that year. It'd been a good harvest,and the granaries and warehouses were stocked with surplus grain. He would summon his treasurer today itself, but before he did, he'd first make a beeline to the armory, and spend some time honing hid expertise with the javelin. It'd clear his mind of any and all unfounded apprehensions and give him some perspective, he was certain of it.

Grabbing a bunch of long keys from a nearby hook, he marched towards the door. Tut had barely opened the door when it happened. With an ear splitting crash that reverberated all around through the palace, a huge obsidian ball, weighing atleast a ton, came crashing down on the Pharoah, followed by a sickening crunch, as Tut felt an agonizing sensation emanate from his left shoulder blade. As the youngest Pharoah of the Egyptian empire breathed his last, all Tut could think of was the strange woman from the future who wouldn't tell him what athleisure meant.