Never Look in the Mirror After Dark 

By Jamaluddin Aram

Nafasgul and her husband wanted a son, but had only managed five girls—with barely a year in between them. Nafasgul’s husband was from the plains of the north. His skin was permanently darkened by the relentless sun of distant summers when he worked the rice fields as a kid. She was from the mountains where nothing grew but potatoes and wild pistachio trees. She tried raising her daughters to be obedient and superstitious, the way her mother had brought her up. She reminded them of things they shouldn’t do. Especially now that she was heavily pregnant with her sixth child, which a foreteller claimed was a boy.  

One winter evening, while Nafasgul and her husband discussed a close relative’s wedding planned for the following spring, the five little girls sat around the woodstove and listened. Their eyes gleamed with excitement at the prospect of new dresses. When it was decided that there was no money and everyone should wear their old dresses to the wedding, one of the girls stomped across the room and slammed the door. 

“Madar,” Nafasgul’s youngest daughter said to her the next day, “Last night Yalda snuffed out the oil lamp in the vestibule and stood crying in front of the mirror.”

“Oh jonamarg-shuda you always cause trouble,” Nafasgul shouted at Yalda. “If anything happens to the boy then I know what to do with you.”

When Nafasgul was young, her grandmother had told her of a simultaneous world inhabited by jins: “We share homes, food, water and clothes. When we end our day, jins begin theirs. They cover their babies in piles of ash, clean their living space, fix their hair in the mirrors, and prepare food for their families. So out of respect to them we shouldn’t cut our nails, step over the ashes, burn onion and garlic peels, or look in the mirror after dark. Once, a girl married into our village who paid no heed to these things. She combed her hair before bed. One early morning she got up to make bread for breakfast, and an invisible hand slapped her across the face. The girl died three days later.” 

Nafasgul recalled that story, yelled possible punishments at Yalda, worried, and waited for something terrible to come. 

Two days passed. Nothing happened except it started to snow. On the third day, Nafasgul felt a pain in her lower left jaw. In the evening the snow stopped, the sky cleared, and a strong, chilly wind blew. Under the cigarette filter her husband gave her to bite on, the pain twisted like a small flame inside her tooth. Then it began to grow with the night. 

She stayed awake, her head in her hands, until the darkness around her became light. She could see her daughters sleeping so innocently side by side, away from the windowpane that rattled in the wind behind the thick, hand stitched quilt hanging from the wall to keep the heat in. She wished she could make them new dresses for the wedding. 

Sometime in the night, the pain became unbearable. She got up and wrapped herself in a heavy shawl and went outside. The moon shone brightly. The snow had turned into a crust of ice. She walked around the courtyard and wept. The snow crunched under her feet, the chimneys whistled, and the leafless acacia tree painfully creaked next door in Pir Dad the gambler’s house. 

At daybreak her husband came out, ready to go to work. He waited tables in an acrid smelling café in the old town where people arrived from the countryside carrying livestock, dairy products, and handicrafts that they traded for tea, sugar, matches, lamp wags, and other essentials. 

“The cigarette filter didn’t work?” he asked. 

“No,” she said. 

“Send one of the girls to get my mother in the morning. She might know a way.”  

Nafasgul never liked her mother-in-law so she didn’t send after her. But the news of Nafasgul’s toothache, and that it prevented her from eating and drinking, circulated in the neighbourhood. Soon advice and old knowledge started to arrive: she should leave ground cloves on the tooth, chew on whole cardamom, try charcoal, or bite on a cockerel’s feather. 

None of the remedies worked. 

Her husband returned in the evening and sent one of the girls to call their grandmother and aunt to decide what to do.

“God knows how old I am,” Nafasgul’s mother-in-law said. “I don’t even know what a dentist looks like.” 

Nafasgul remembered seeing a dentist from afar. Once, on a bus to a thrift market in downtown Kabul, she saw a man in a white coat inside a shop. Below a grinning set of teeth painted on a blue sign, he was watering the pots of flowers behind the window. 

“We can’t afford dentists, brother. It’s not safe for her to go to one either,” her sister-in-law said. “God is finally giving you a son. We have to be careful.”

“If it were a girl, we could have the town’s jeweler remove her tooth. He does it for charity anyway. But it’s a boy,” her mother-in-law said, reminding them of the day a week ago when she took Nafasgul to the old lady. “The drop of Nafas’s breastmilk didn’t dissolve in the water like the times she was pregnant with the girls. The daa’ia showed me how it sank to the bottom of the thimble like a pearl.”

Nafasgul’s husband listened to his mother and his sister and agreed.

That night the pain got more intense. She shook her husband awake. He got up, took the Quran from the shelf over the door, handed it to her, and went back to sleep. Nafasgul put the book on her pillow and lay with the ailing side on it. She wept silently and her muscles stiffened as though a cold steel rod was being fixed in her jaw that extended down her neck. The thought that they made a decision without asking for her opinion ate at her inside and enraged her. How could they be so heartless and tell her to tolerate the pain for four more weeks until the baby came?

The next day, at the suggestion of a neighbour, Nafasgul tried a cold compress. Her face went numb and her skin turned blue, but the pain persisted.

“What fool suggests cold therapy for toothache?” another neighbour said later, heating sunflower oil in a spoon over a gas stove. She immersed a ball of cotton in the oil when it began to smoke. She asked Nafasgul to clench her teeth on the hot cotton as she placed it on the tooth. The enamel of her tooth burned, and the pain became cruel. 

By the fourth day, the world started to whirl around her head. The pain and the lack of food and sleep were taking their toll on Nafasgul. Her vision became dim, interrupted by intense flashes of pale light. Then it occurred to her that she had suffered enough. She wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. 

At the jeweller’s house, she spoke of her tooth and the baby while watching the jeweller’s grandson put the small flat-nose pliers in a tin can half-filled with steaming water. He set the can on the stove to boil and went out. The jeweller rubbed a silver shank to the back of a soft piece of brown calfskin and listened. He was old and thin, and he had very strong hands. 

“Don’t worry. I have done this so many times,” he said, “I’m better at pulling out teeth than I am at my own craft.” 

The jeweller’s grandson returned with a bucket of fresh snow and an enameled mug. 

“What’s this for?” she asked. 

“That is to numb your jaw,” the jeweller said, holding the polished silver shank against the light that filtered through the plastic-insulated window. 

“I’m in so much pain already,” she said. “Nothing can add to it.” 

The jeweller’s grandson put away the snow-filled mug and put a pillow in the center of the room for Nafasgul to sit on. 

“Which tooth is it?” the jeweller asked, cleaning his hands in the snow bucket. 

“It was this one,” she opened her mouth and pointed to the third tooth from the back. “But I don’t know anymore. I hurt from head to toe.” 

“We’ll pull out that one,” the jeweller said as he tested his grip on the pliers fixed around the tooth. “If your pain doesn’t go away, come back, we'll remove them one by one until we find the troublemaker. Now, sit tight.” 

Nafasgul clutched the pillow and prayed, promising to smash the mirror in the vestibule into pieces if she and the child survived. Then the jeweller began to pull at the tooth in a steady upward motion, and she heard the cracking of her bones in her jaw. She was sure if the baby was still alive he could hear it too. 

Jamaluddin Aram is a documentary filmmaker, producer, and short story writer from Kabul, Afghanistan. His stories have appeared in Numero Cinq, Blood and Bourbon, The Write Launch, and Cagibi. Aram’s short story “This Hard Easy Life” was a finalist for RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 2020. He is the associate producer of the Academy Award-nominated film Buzkashi Boys. Aram has a bachelor’s degree in English and history from Union College in Schenectady, New York. He lives in Toronto.