The Snake and the Mirror

1. About the author — Vaikom Muhammad Basheer

Vaikom Muhammad Basheer (1908–1994) is one of the most beloved and widely-read authors in the history of Malayalam literature. He was born in Vaikom, Kerala, and lived a rich, adventurous life — at different times he worked as a freedom fighter, a wanderer, a Sufi disciple, and a soldier. He was largely self-taught, having left formal education early, and this gave his writing an authenticity and directness that formal schooling rarely produces.

Basheer wrote short stories, novellas and novels. His work is celebrated for its humour, warmth, compassion and simplicity of language. He wrote with great sympathy about the poor, the eccentric, the overlooked — ordinary people placed in extraordinary or comic situations. He received several major literary awards including the Sahitya Akademi Award (1970) and the Padma Bhushan (1982). Some of his famous works include Balyakalasakhi (Childhood Friends), Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu (My Grandfather Had an Elephant), and Pathummayude Aadu (Pathumma’s Goat).

“The Snake and the Mirror” is a humorous first-person narrative told in Basheer’s characteristic style — self-deprecating, lively and gently ironic. The original story is in Malayalam; this is a translated version. The narrator is a young, newly-qualified homoeopathic doctor who is a little too proud of his own looks — and whose vanity receives a sharp and comic correction from a cobra on a hot summer night.

2. Summary — Part 1: The setting and the doctor’s evening

The story is told in the first person by an unnamed doctor who narrates an incident from his younger days to a group that includes a writer. This creates a ‘frame narrative’ — a story within a story. The doctor begins: “It happened a long time ago…”

At that time he was a poor, bachelor homoeopathic doctor living in a small rented room in a large building. His room opened on to a veranda; on the other side lived the landlord — a large man with a booming voice who also had a fat wife and a thin, timid daughter. The room was bare and humble: a deal table (a table made of cheap softwood), a chair, a small cot, a few books on a shelf, a medicine chest, a mirror on the wall and, on the table, a stethoscope. The doctor had very little money and very little furniture — but he had a mirror.

It was a hot summer night. The air was heavy and warm; the doctor could not sleep. He sat at the table reading a medical book by the light of a kerosene lamp. The room had no electric light. After a while he put the book aside and began to think — about himself.

3. Summary — Part 2: The doctor’s vain thoughts

The doctor’s thoughts, as he sat alone in the hot night, reveal his extraordinary vanity. He made a series of self-admiring decisions about his future:

• He decided he should marry a woman doctor — a woman who had plenty of money and a good medical practice, so that she could bear the expenses of his household.
• He decided his wife must be fat — so that she could not run fast and chase him if they ever quarrelled. (This detail is instantly comic: he is already planning escape routes from quarrels in a marriage that has not yet taken place.)
• He got up, went to the mirror and combed his hair. Looking at his reflection, he admired his handsome face and felt quite charming. He made two more decisions: “I should keep a mirror on the table.” And: “I shall always remain handsome.”

The doctor was completely absorbed in his own appearance and imagined future importance, utterly unaware of the danger that was about to arrive from the roof above him. This section is the comic foundation of the story — the greater the pride, the harder the fall that follows.

4. Summary — Part 3: The snake arrives

While the doctor was lost in his vain musings, something happened. He suddenly heard a faint noise from the roof. He looked up — and a snake landed on him from above. It slithered smoothly along his body. The doctor sat absolutely still, frozen with terror.

The snake was a cobra — a very fat cobra. It coiled itself around his right arm just above the elbow. Then it raised its head and spread its hood. Its face was just a few inches from the doctor’s own face. The cobra’s hood and the doctor’s face were almost touching.

The doctor was paralysed with fear. He described his condition vividly: “I sat there holding my breath. The slightest movement on my part would have been suicidal. The fangs of a cobra can kill a man in minutes.”

He thought God was angry with him for his vanity and had sent this punishment. He turned to God — his thoughts became ‘Godward’. He prayed with his whole being, not with words. And in a moment of dark, involuntary comedy, he also thought: “Will the doctor who comes to treat me be a young, handsome man?” — even at the threshold of death, his vanity sparked one last absurd flicker.

5. Summary — Part 4: The snake looks in the mirror — the escape

Then something quite remarkable happened. The cobra slowly turned its head and looked into the mirror that hung on the wall. It seemed to be attracted by its own reflection. In the glass, it perhaps saw another cobra — and it gazed at the image, motionless.

Very slowly, the snake unwound itself from the doctor’s arm. It slithered along the table toward the mirror, drawn by the image in the glass. It moved off the doctor’s body entirely.

The doctor seized the moment. He jumped up and ran. He ran out of the room, out along the veranda, out of the building and did not stop until he reached his friend Parameswaran’s house, where he spent the rest of the night.

The great irony of the moment is unmistakable: the mirror that the doctor had placed out of vanity ended up saving his life. The cobra was drawn away by its own reflection — its vanity (or at least its fascination with its image) matched and cancelled out the doctor’s vanity. The symbol of the doctor’s pride became his rescuer. Two acts of self-admiration — the man’s and the snake’s — produced, together, the comic miracle of his survival.

6. Summary — Part 5: The morning scene and the final irony

The next morning the doctor returned to his room with Parameswaran. They opened the door very carefully. The room was in some disorder — the doctor had fled in such panic that things had been knocked about. They looked around cautiously.

On the mirror they found the snake. The cobra was coiled on the top of the mirror, still apparently gazing at its own reflection. It had stayed there the entire night — enchanted, or perhaps simply calm. The animal had not moved.

The narrator then adds, with characteristic Basheer humour, that he had one regret that morning: his shirt — which he had left in the room when he fled — was nowhere to be found. He never discovered what became of it. This is the story’s famous moment of bathos: after the most terrifying night of his life, the doctor’s greatest sorrow is a missing shirt.

The story ends with the closing frame: the writer who has been listening to this account now observes the doctor’s wife. She is plump — the doctor did marry a fat woman, exactly as he had planned. But she is not a doctor, and she has no money. Life gave him one condition of three. His elaborate plan for an ideal wife produced something far less ideal — a final, gentle irony to end the story.

7. Humour and irony in the story

This story is famous for its gentle, self-deprecating humour. The comedy works on several levels:

• The vain bachelor’s absurd plans: The doctor’s decision to marry a fat woman doctor so she cannot chase him is hilarious in its self-centred logic. He selects his future wife’s profession and body weight for his own financial and physical convenience — love is not mentioned once.
• Vanity in the face of death: Even as a cobra sits coiled around his arm, he wonders if the doctor treating him will be young and handsome. Terror has not entirely killed his vanity — this is both funny and humanly true.
• The mirror as ironic saviour: The mirror, placed out of vanity, saves the vain man’s life. This is textbook situational irony — the outcome is the opposite of what any sensible expectation would suggest.
• The cobra’s vanity mirrors the doctor’s: Both man and snake are enchanted by their own reflections — the parallel is comic and gently philosophical. Even in the animal kingdom, self-admiration exists.
• The missing shirt — bathos: The doctor’s greatest regret the next morning is not the terror he endured but his lost shirt. The sudden drop from the grand (near-death experience) to the trivial (a shirt) is a classic literary device called bathos, and Basheer uses it with perfect timing.
• The wife at the end — plans vs reality: The narrator’s wife turns out to be fat (as planned) but without the money or medical degree. Life outsmarted the plan while following its most comic detail. The gap between careful planning and actual outcomes is a universally funny observation about human nature.

8. Character sketch — the doctor

The doctor is the narrator and the only fully developed character. His portrait is drawn with warm, gentle irony:

• Vain and self-admiring: He admires his own face in the mirror, plans to stay handsome forever and, in his moment of terror, thinks about who will attend to him. His vanity is extreme but comic, not cruel or malicious.
• Calculating but in an absurd way: His conditions for an ideal wife (fat, so she runs slowly; rich, so she pays the bills) reveal a mind that is oddly practical about entirely the wrong things.
• Cowardly but disarmingly honest: He admits openly that he was utterly terrified and ran away. He makes no attempt to appear brave or heroic. This frank self-mockery is what makes him genuinely likeable despite his vanity.
• A gifted storyteller: He tells the tale with great relish, fully aware of its comedy, and delivers the details of his own absurdity with perfect timing. The story would not work half as well if a different narrator told it about him.
• Ordinary and relatable: Beneath the vanity, he is simply a young man who was poor, alone and scared on a hot night. His ordinariness is part of Basheer’s great art — the story is about us as much as about him.

9. Themes of the story

• Vanity and its absurdity: The doctor’s excessive self-admiration is gently mocked by events. The cobra arrives just as he is congratulating himself on his looks; the mirror he placed out of vanity is what saves him. Vanity is shown to be simultaneously ridiculous and, in this instance, accidentally life-saving.
• Fear as an equaliser: No matter how proud a person is, genuine mortal fear strips away all pretence. The doctor — reduced to a statue of terror with a cobra on his arm — is no longer the confident young man who was planning his perfect life just moments before.
• Fate and chance: The doctor’s life is saved not by his own cleverness or courage but by pure chance — the cobra happened to notice the mirror and be drawn by its reflection. The message is humbling: we are not always the masters of our fate.
• Humour as a way of coping: The narrator looks back at a genuinely terrifying experience and transforms it into a funny story. This is a deeply human capacity — to laugh at past fear, to find comedy in what was once deadly serious. Basheer celebrates this capacity.
• The gap between plan and reality: The doctor’s carefully planned ideal wife never materialises in full — his actual wife is fat but not a doctor and not wealthy. Life does not follow our blueprints, however carefully we draw them.

10. Literary devices

• First-person narrative: The story is told by the doctor himself, making it intimate, comic and self-aware. We hear his thoughts directly and feel the comedy of his vanity from the inside.
• Frame narrative (story within a story): The story is set inside a frame — a writer listens to the doctor narrate. This gives the narrative a layered structure and allows the final irony (the doctor’s wife) to be delivered as an outside observation.
• Situational irony: The most prominent device. A mirror placed out of vanity saves a vain man’s life. A cobra’s fascination with its reflection removes it from a man obsessed with his own reflection. The parallel between man and snake is the heart of the story.
• Self-deprecating humour and bathos: The doctor continuously mocks himself — admitting his cowardice, his absurd plans, his concern about his shirt. Bathos appears when, after a life-threatening night, his biggest regret is a missing shirt.
• Suspense: The description of the snake coiling around his arm and raising its hood builds genuine tension before the comic resolution. The reader is drawn in before the humour arrives.
• Imagery: “The night was hot and sultry” creates an oppressive atmosphere that explains why the doctor was awake and restless. The fat cobra with its spread hood just inches from the doctor’s face is a vivid, menacing image.
• Dramatic irony: The reader (and the listening writer) already know the doctor survived since he is telling the story. The real suspense is how he survived — which creates anticipation rather than fear.
• Humorous repetition: The doctor’s list of conditions for his ideal wife is built up step by step, each addition more comic than the last, creating a rhythm of escalating absurdity.
• Parallelism (thematic): Doctor admires himself in mirror — cobra admires itself in mirror. Both are enchanted; one by habit, one by instinct. The parallel gives the story its philosophical twist.

11. Word meanings & difficult vocabulary

• Sultry — hot, humid and oppressive (said of weather on a summer night).
• Veranda — a roofed platform running along the outside of a house.
• Deal table — a table made of fir or pine wood; cheap, plain and functional.
• Stethoscope — a medical instrument used to listen to the sounds of a patient’s heart and lungs.
• Hood (of a cobra) — the flat, wide spread of skin behind the cobra’s head that it opens when alert or threatened.
• Coil — to wind in loops around something; the cobra coiled (wound itself) around the doctor’s arm.
• Suicidal — likely to cause one’s own death; here, any movement would have been fatal.
• Fangs — the long, hollow, pointed teeth of a snake through which venom (poison) is injected into a victim.
• Uncoil — to unwind from a coiled position.
• Homoeopathy — a system of medicine based on the principle that substances causing symptoms in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in small, diluted doses.
• Enchanted — as if under a spell; fascinated and unable to look away.
• Slithered — moved smoothly and quietly along a surface, as a snake does.
• Booming — deep, loud and resonant (said of a voice).
• Timid — shy and easily frightened.
• Bathos — a sudden and anticlimactic drop from something serious or grand to something trivial; used here for comic effect (the missing shirt after a near-death experience).
• Self-deprecating — making fun of oneself; highlighting one’s own faults or failures with humour.
• Vanity — excessive pride in or admiration of one’s own appearance or achievements.
• Frame narrative — a story that contains another story within it; the outer story is the ‘frame’ and the inner story is the main tale.