After a very long time, I looked at a full-length mirror. A surface that could reflect the length and the breadth, the quirk and cookie, the flaw and full. I stood before a familiar face – a wall of mirrors in a theatre workshop. I saw myself there. A newly acquired scar broke the right brow and weighed down the lid over the eye. There never had been a very rich head of hair, but it looked especially sparse now – the fluorescent lamp on the far side of the workshop filtered through as an impoverished halo. The face had aged – there was a laugh line. Just the one. Down the right cheek ran an unmistakable crease, without its mirror on the other side of the nose, which was also losing its symmetry. The edges of the bridge of the nose – the sides of the triangle that makes a skull seem as if it didn’t come from any source human – had crumbled away, punched into form by policemen. Now, the calcite form gives to any inquisitive pressure: a curious crunch reaches the ear from the wrong side of the world. By now the left slope of the nose had grown a slight but perceptively bulbous mass. The shoulders have left their natural alignment: the right is ever so raised, the left slumped. This is surely the result of a persistent, dull heaviness in the chest. Because of the imbalance, and because I am right-handed, the right chest is less pendulous – less udder-like, at least – than the left, which has a joyful, nearly nubile perkiness to it. The man-tits cast a shadow over a sloping pouch of leather that, on good days, sits flat but flabby, and on bad days, stretches taut, gathering lint in the navel. The chest isn’t generously hirsute. If a drunk man were to throw seeds down a cliff to raise corn, the harvest would be as poor and scattershot as the hair on my chest. I am lucky – chest hair, at least half a dozen, always peeps out from the shirt, where these days a cheap turquoise bead hangs from a black thread. But, below it, hair has favoured the left bank, and not the right. A mole on the right gives fertile ground for a lone, angry hair to spring up, to rebel against the inequality of distribution. I don’t have hair on my back or the shoulders. Perhaps hair will appear at some point, if life is long. There was an errant hair flourishing from the little nub of cartilage above the left lobe, which I pulled out. The length it had already reached by the time I saw it clearly meant  it had grown without being noticed for months. The other ear doesn’t have the nub of cartilage because it had to be removed to prop up a perforated ear drum. My arms had strength in my now distant youth, but no longer carry me up a tree, or lower me gently from a roof. A friend branded the right arm in a contest – to see how long our impressions would survive with each other. About half an inch of flesh and flab always overhangs the belt that I stole from a Wal-Mart store seven years ago. Below it is another poor harvest of hair. The piss-pipe now pisses erratically. Most of the days, the testicles un-descend and go into hiding. Some days they hang like ripe fruits and I am forced to milk them. They forget me sometimes for days on end; and I forget them sometimes for hours. I enjoy cupping them in the folds of my lungi sarong, soaking away from their sac its cool sweat. The thighs are no trunks – they are soft like a woman’s, blue veins prominent along the inner pale. A chicken-wire fence ringed a playground outside my boarding school hostel. I tried and successfully walked atop the length of it, but when I tried to turn around, I broke the fence, a length of rusted wire entered the thigh, leaving an inch-long scar that has grown longer with age. There are multiple scars on both knees, from scrapes and falls. I have been told the calves look like those of a mountain porter – but without the strength to carry. I have a pair of feet that is in no way masculine: I inherited them from my mother, who has smaller, beautifully arched and graceful feet. Mine have no grace. Multiple burn-marks scar the ankles. On one occasion, it was a burning tyre that threatened to spread along a slum under the Sankhamul bridge: I tried to stamp it out, and walked away with sizzling liquid blobs of rubber on my ankles. On another occasion, I tried to put out a campfire with bare feet, somewhere in Oregon. Because I don’t wear shoes, my feet are cracked. Open to injury and assault. Same can be said about the dumbass fucking heart, but let us keep that for another occasion. An old woman once shouted with disgust to see me walk around in shorts – “If I had legs this ugly,” she said. I looked her in the eyes and walked away. If only she knew my heart, I told myself, and laughed.

What constitute the particulars of Self? How am I made, so that I may ask to be unmade? What do I know of what is in me, and what do I know of what is on the surface, written on the skin, scored or scarred? Perhaps soon I will rip through the fabric to peer inside. But, for now, I will take satisfaction in counting what is imperfect on the outside. From the shadow of my imperfections I will perhaps soon find a door to the perfect, the hidden and suggested.