The Snake and the Mirror

The Snake and the Mirror was written by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who wrote in Malayalam; the version in your textbook is an English translation. That is worth knowing before you begin, because it explains the voice of the piece. The sentences are short, plain and close to spoken speech. Nobody makes a grand statement, nobody decorates a description. A man simply tells his friends about a night that frightened him, and the fright and the fun arrive in the same easy tone.

The second thing to notice is the shape of the story: it is a story inside a story. A group of people are sitting together talking about snakes when one of them, a homeopathic doctor, asks the others whether a snake has ever coiled itself round any part of their body, and he sharpens the question by naming a cobra. The group falls silent. From that moment the doctor takes over the telling, and everything that follows — the hot night, the mirror, the snake on his arm, the morning after — is his own memory, spoken aloud to people sitting right in front of him.

This structure has a name you can use in answers: a frame narrative, or a story within a story. Keep the two voices separate in your mind:

• the outer voice, one of the listeners, who sets the scene in the opening lines and tells us who asked the question;
• the doctor, who narrates the main events in the first person and is also the main character inside them.

Getting this right keeps your answer accurate. When the doctor confesses his vanity, or jokes about the wife he hoped to marry, those words belong to the doctor as a character. Write the doctor says or the narrator of the inner story says, not the writer says, whenever you are dealing with the events in the rented room.

The frame also explains the tone. The events are being remembered from a safe distance by a man who lived through them. Because he survived, he is free to laugh at his younger self; because he is speaking to friends, he can pause, tease and keep the ending back until it will do the most damage. Fear is being retold as entertainment, and that double feeling — real danger, light telling — is the heart of the story. If your answer catches only the fear, or only the comedy, it has caught half the chapter.

Read the story as a chain of small steps. Each one sets up the next, and the ending only works because of everything that came before it.

1. A young doctor with very little. The events belong to his early days: newly qualified, unmarried, with a practice far too small to make him comfortable. He lives in a rented room in a small house, and the room describes his position better than any figure could — bare, hot, lit by a lamp, and shared with rats that run about as they please.
2. The mirror and two big decisions. On a hot night he sits in front of the mirror and likes what he sees. In that pleased mood he takes two decisions that he himself calls important and earth-shaking, though both are only about his looks. The first is to shave every day and grow a thin moustache. The second, after he tries out his smile in the glass, is to keep that attractive smile on his face always. Both have the same purpose: to look more handsome.
3. A daydream about marriage. In the same pleased mood, though not as one of his two decisions, he lets his mind run on to the woman he would like to marry: a woman doctor with plenty of money and a good practice, since he has neither. She should also be fat, because he is thin, so that if he made some silly mistake and she came after him he could get away without being caught.
4. A familiar sound. He hears a noise and thinks nothing of it. He knows that sound, or believes he does: rats. The room is full of them and he has long stopped paying attention.
5. Something heavier. Then something drops on him from above. A snake lands on his shoulder, slides down and coils round his arm. Its hood opens and its head comes to rest only a few inches from his face.
6. The frozen minutes. He does not move. He cannot. He is a doctor, but there is nothing for snakebite in that room, and even if there had been, a man who dare not lift a finger cannot reach for a bottle. His training, his degree and his plans are all useless at once. The only treatment available is stillness, and he manages it.
7. The snake changes its mind. After minutes that must have felt like hours, the snake loosens its hold, leaves his arm and moves off — towards the mirror, where it settles in front of its own reflection.
8. Escape. The instant he is free he is out of the room. He runs to a friend's house and spends the rest of the night there, alive, shaken and with nothing but himself.
9. The last blow. He goes back in the morning with his friend and finds that a thief has been through the room and cleaned out almost all his belongings. Only his dirty vest was thought not worth taking. He escaped with his life and lost nearly everything else.

Then the frame closes, and we are back with the doctor and his listeners. They ask him about the snake, and he says he never saw it again. They also ask about his wife, and his answer is the story's final joke: the woman he actually married is nothing like the fat, wealthy lady doctor of his daydream. She is thin and quick on her feet — exactly the sort of wife he had planned to avoid. Do not stop your reading before this exchange; it is the last turn of the humour.

One detail to keep in your notes: the snake never bites him, and nobody kills the snake. The story is not about a fight. It is about a few minutes in which a confident young man could do absolutely nothing, and about what those minutes showed him.

The doctor is the most likeable kind of narrator, because he reports his own weaknesses without excuses. Four qualities are worth building an answer around, and each of them can be tied to a moment in the story.

He is vain, and comically so. Before the snake arrives, the only thing holding his attention is his own face. He studies it, approves of it, and plans to improve it further with a daily shave, a thin moustache and a smile he intends to wear permanently. There is nothing cruel or greedy in this vanity. It is the small, private pride of a young man who has almost nothing else to enjoy, and the story treats it gently.

He is poor, but his plans are enormous. He owns very little and earns less, yet in the same sitting he designs a marriage to a woman with money and a flourishing practice. The distance between the room he is actually in and the future he is arranging is where much of the comedy lives. He even builds a joke into the plan: she should be fat, so that a thin man could always stay out of reach. Life answers that plan too, as we learn in the closing lines: the woman he really married is thin and light on her feet.

He has presence of mind. When the snake settles on his arm he does the only sensible thing, which is nothing at all. Staying still is not glamorous and he does not dress it up as bravery; he describes himself as turned to stone, frozen by fear even while his mind kept racing. But the result is that he neither startles the snake nor gets bitten. A shout, a jerk of the arm, one panicked grab for the lamp, and the story would have had a different ending.

He is honest and can laugh at himself. The whole chapter is a joke told against its teller. He hides nothing — not the vanity, not the useless medicines, not the plain fact that he ran. A narrator who mocks himself wins his listeners at once, and this is what keeps a frightening episode warm instead of grim.

What the night changes is not his character but his estimate of himself. The man who sat before the mirror deciding to wear an attractive smile for ever is, a little later, smiling feebly at himself with a cobra resting on his arm; and by morning he has lost almost everything he owned. He is not being punished for being vain; the story is kinder than that. He is simply shown, for a few very long minutes, how little his looks, his plans and his degree weigh when an animal decides otherwise.

The mirror is the busiest object in the story, and a good answer treats it as far more than furniture.

It creates the doctor's self-image. Everything he believes about himself at the start of the night comes from what the mirror shows him. He looks, he approves, and out of that approval come the two decisions. The mirror is where he builds a version of himself that the rest of the room flatly contradicts — a fine young man with a great future, sitting in a bare rented space that the rats have made their own.

It saves his life. The same object then pulls the snake away. When the snake leaves his arm and goes to the mirror, the doctor is suddenly free. Nothing he did rescued him: no medicine, no cleverness, no courage. An accident of glass and light did it. That is a quiet and humbling point. The thing that had served his pride becomes the thing that saves him, and he can take credit for neither.

It links the man and the snake. The title sets the two nouns side by side, and by the end both of them have stopped in front of the same mirror. The doctor sees the snake apparently taken up with its own reflection, and the comparison makes itself: what he had been doing minutes earlier now looks like exactly what a snake does. Vanity, the story suggests with a completely straight face, is not some special human quality to be proud or ashamed of. It is common, and it is slightly ridiculous, wherever it turns up.

It tells the truth twice. A mirror only returns what is put in front of it. Early in the night it returns a confident young face. Later, when that same man has been reduced to a still, sweating body who dare not blink, whatever it returns is a good deal smaller. The glass does not change. The man in front of it does.

The snake itself is handled without any drama. It is not evil, not a punishment, not a symbol carrying a message. It arrives, it stays, and it leaves on its own business, and it never bites. That matter-of-fact treatment is what makes the danger feel real instead of literary: in an ordinary room, on an ordinary hot night, something dangerous can come down from above, and there is nothing personal about it at all.

The events of this story are genuinely frightening, and yet almost every reader finishes it smiling. That is a craft question, and it is one of the most useful things to be able to explain in an answer. Here is how it is done, technique by technique.

Contrast between dream and reality. The story keeps setting a plan beside a fact, and lets you see the gap:

• He plans a face that will impress the world; he is sitting in a room where rats run about freely.
• He plans a wife with money and a busy practice; his own practice barely feeds him.
• He wants a wife who could never run after him and catch him; a snake catches him within minutes, and the woman he really marries turns out to be thin and quick on her feet.
• He is a doctor; when an emergency finally reaches him, there is not a single medicine in the room and he cannot treat it.

Understatement. The most frightening moments are told in the flattest sentences. There is no shrieking on the page and no long paragraph of horror. Saying less than a situation deserves is a classic comic method, and here it does a second job as well: it makes the fear believable, because that flat, careful voice is exactly how a person sounds when they are trying not to move.

Self-mockery. The teller is the target of every joke. Because he is laughing at his younger self, we are allowed to laugh too, and nobody is hurt by it. Had the story mocked anyone else, it would have turned unpleasant at once.

Irony of situation. Almost every element turns round and faces the other way. The mirror that fed his pride is the mirror that rescues him. The doctor becomes the helpless patient. The man who survives a cobra is finished off, in a smaller way, by an ordinary thief.

Comic timing and anticlimax. The theft is held back till the end of the doctor's own account. After minutes of life-and-death stillness the inner story finishes on a routine misfortune, and that drop from the enormous to the small is the shape of a joke. It is also a comment on his grand plans: the man who was arranging a rich marriage could not hold on to the little he already had. The very last laugh, though, belongs to the frame, when the listeners ask about his wife and he has to admit that she is the opposite of the woman he had designed for himself.

Notice, finally, that the humour never turns cruel. It is aimed inward, at pride, which is why the story feels affectionate rather than bitter.

Themes are only useful in an answer if you can attach each one to something that actually happens. Here are the main ones with their evidence.

Vanity is harmless until life measures it. The doctor's pride in his own face is small and forgivable, and the story never scolds him for it. But it does place that pride next to a cobra, and in that company it simply disappears. Pride is not shown as a sin here; it is shown as something light that the first real wind carries off.

Human beings are small before nature. A trained doctor, sitting in his own room, is reduced to a still, silent figure by an animal that has wandered in. Nothing he has learnt applies, and there is not even a medicine in the room to reach for. His safety depends entirely on the snake's mood. That is the most serious idea in a very light story, and it is why the fear is not wasted.

Courage sometimes looks like doing nothing. We usually imagine bravery as action. Here the correct and brave thing is to stay absolutely still, breathe carefully and wait. Presence of mind, not strength, is what saves a life in this room.

Possessions weigh less than we think. The theft ought to be a disaster, and in the middle of the story it would have been. Coming where it does, immediately after a night in which the doctor expected to die, it lands as a small thing. Losing almost all you own, the story hints, is a lighter loss than you would have guessed if you have just been given your life back.

Humour is a way of carrying fear. The doctor tells this as a funny story, and that is itself the message. Turning a terrifying memory into something you can share and laugh about is how people survive their worst nights.

If you need the message in one sentence: an accident, an animal or a single dark minute can strip away everything a person prides himself on, and the wisest response is to see the joke and stay humble.

Once you know the story, the rest is a matter of how clearly you set an answer out. These habits help.

Name the right speaker. The main events are narrated by the doctor. Say the doctor recalls, the doctor admits, the doctor tells his listeners. Save the author's name for statements about the writing itself, such as how the humour is built or how the story is structured.

Do not retell everything. A summary is not an answer. If the question asks about vanity, give one line of context and then go straight to the two decisions in front of the mirror. Retelling the plot from the beginning wastes the space you needed for analysis.

Use incidents as proof. Every claim should be followed by a fact from the story. He is vain — he plans a permanent smile. He is poor — he shares his room with rats. He has presence of mind — he does not move a finger for several minutes.

Paraphrase rather than quote. You are safer describing what happens in your own words than half remembering a line and putting it inside quotation marks. A wrong quotation is worse than no quotation.

Finish the story. Do not let your answer stop when the snake leaves. The theft, and then the closing exchange in which the doctor admits what his wife is really like, both belong to the meaning; an answer on humour, irony or theme is incomplete without them.

Structure long answers. For a long answer, use a plan: one sentence of context, three developed points with evidence, one sentence of conclusion. For humour questions, write in contrast pairs. For character questions, use one paragraph per quality.

Useful words to have ready: vanity, self-image, humility, frame narrative, first-person narration, understatement, irony of situation, anticlimax, presence of mind, self-mockery. Used accurately, two or three of these make an answer much clearer; scattered without meaning, they add nothing.

One caution: do not turn the story into a lesson about snakes being wicked. The snake is not a villain, and an answer that treats it as one has misread the tone completely.