The widow who lived in the mirror

 


The Widow Who Lived in the Mirror

By Faraz Parvez
Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal
Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA

In the narrow lanes of Lahore’s Mochi Gate, where the houses leaned toward each other like old gossips whispering over steaming cups of chai, there stood a crumbling haveli that everyone avoided after sunset.

The windows were always shut. The courtyard always damp. And behind a rusted iron gate covered in jasmine vines, there lived Bibi Rukhsana, a widow who no one had seen in daylight for decades.

Children said she was a ghost. Adults said she was cursed. But the truth was stranger — Bibi Rukhsana lived in a mirror.

The Mirror in the Haveli

The tale began long before most of the city was born. Rukhsana was once a celebrated beauty, married into wealth, her husband a silk trader with ships sailing to Muscat and Zanzibar.

One evening, on a trip to Delhi, he returned with a gift — a full-length, Venetian mirror framed in silver, with carvings of snakes and peacocks.

It was said that the mirror was not for reflection, but for keeping things.

No one knew what that meant. Not then.

The Night Everything Changed

One night, Rukhsana’s husband vanished. No note. No signs of robbery. The police searched every caravan route, every riverbank. Nothing.

Weeks later, a neighbor swore she saw his reflection moving inside the mirror… even though the man was nowhere in the room.

Rukhsana dismissed it. Until one evening, while combing her hair, she noticed something odd — her reflection smiled after she had stopped.

The reflection tilted its head, lips curling, and whispered, though her real self made no sound:
“Come inside.”

Life Behind the Glass

They found her maid dead the next morning, eyes wide, mouth frozen in a silent scream. The mirror stood in the corner, but now it was black, like still water at midnight.

From that day on, Rukhsana was seen less and less. Her neighbors said they only caught glimpses of her through the mirror — not walking in the courtyard, not opening her front door. Always in the silver frame, like a painting that had learned to breathe.

Some claimed she could travel through other mirrors — appearing in the washroom of a mosque, in the bridal suite of a new marriage, in the rear-view mirror of a passing rickshaw.

The Collector of Faces

By the 1990s, the haveli was abandoned. But those who dared enter said the silver mirror still stood in the main hall, its frame warm to the touch, as if it had a pulse.

If you looked into it for too long, your reflection would start aging rapidly — wrinkles folding in, hair turning grey — until you saw yourself as a corpse.

It was said that Rukhsana had become a collector of faces, taking the reflections of anyone who stared too long and locking them inside with her.

They would join her husband… and the maid… and dozens of others who now pressed their palms against the glass from the other side, screaming silently.

The Last Sightings

In 2018, a group of urban explorers filmed the haveli at night. The footage was shaky, the audio distorted. But for a few seconds, the camera caught a figure in the mirror — a woman in a bridal dupatta, her face hidden, her fingers scratching at the inside of the glass.

The video ended when the cameraman’s own reflection walked out of the mirror without him.

His body was never found.

Some say the mirror was taken to a private collection in Karachi. Others believe it’s still in the haveli, waiting.

And if you ever feel, late at night, that your reflection lingers a moment too long… you’ll know Bibi Rukhsana has found another door.

Read more haunting tales like this at:
farazparvez1.blogspot.com


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