My mother started her career as a librarian in my school. I therefore had the privilege to spend time with her after my school hours and keep disturbing her neatly stacked books categorized by authors & titles while she catalogued each intricate detail in her beautiful handwriting. My love for books and reading started here. What also happened is the creation of my alter ego who lived the lives of the people in the book. And while her circumstances kept changing with the books – at one time she was Jo March from Little Women, at another time she was Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights, then she was Bathsheba Everdene from Far from the Madding Crowd, or Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind – one particular character stayed with me and stays with me to this day. And that is Alice who had built her very own beautiful little wonderland around her and at one point in time was blissfully ignorant of the real world that her alter ego – me – was living in. She used to take me into her fantasy world through the looking glass and thus my childhood was made so magical by her that the boundaries between the fantasy world and the real world started becoming blurred in my head. Of course, things started changing as I grew up and so did, she – maturing into the most beautiful and kind-hearted person I ever came across.

My alter ego is everything that I am not. She is tall, beautiful, has long black hair, everyone loves her, she manages to keep everyone happy, and most importantly she is a very good cook; in fact, she is a Michelin-starred Master Chef. But apart from all of this, she gives me good advice – whether I take it or not is an entirely different argument. She is like a parent sometimes; I can’t wait to see her when I have done something good and I can’t bear to face her when I have messed up; because probably she was screaming in my head to stop but I did not pay heed to her. And as luck would have it, she is always right and in retrospect, I regret not listening to her. One day I asked her why when she had the answers for everything, she couldn’t give me the correct ones when I was taking an examination or when I was fumbling with a presentation, or when I was missing a deadline because I didn’t know what to do. She said that she had asked me to study for the examination or prepare well in advance for the presentation and had warned me that the deadline was looming large and I needed to learn how to tackle my problems or ask for help. And apparently, I was not paying attention when she asked me to turn off the TV or get up from my bed. She was not going to give me readymade answers, I had to find them myself and she was there only to guide me.

And while I never failed to disappoint her, she never failed me. She is always there to comfort me when I am going through tough times, she is there to calm me when I am panicking, and she is the one asking me to think rationally and find a way out. She is the one who encourages me to be good and she is the one who reprimands me when I am bad. She is my guardian angel who I know will forever be on my side. And although she does lose her patience and shout at me when I am being extremely stubborn, she still sticks by me through thick and thin. She knows that I cannot be as perfect as her because things are different on the other side of the mirror. Your reflection is not entirely what the world perceives you as.

On the flip side, she is highly tolerant of my shortcomings and has often advised me to come to terms with them. So, what if I can’t cook, or I am not able to keep everyone around me happy? I can always do what I am good at and keep myself happy – that’s what matters. In many ways, we balance each other like yin and yang always maintaining the harmony inside. So, no matter how the external forces are acting on me and how I am projecting myself as reacting to them, over the years, I have learned how to maintain my peace and balance inside my head. I just call upon her and we go through whatever it is, together.