The Mole

In a short span of eight years, the little mole on the right side of my cheek had begun to speak German with a flawless accent. Three years back it had begun to sprout dense hair around it, sing Frank Sinatra songs to delighted family gatherings at Christmas and expound in great detail the pitfalls of communism. But I thought it was surely pushing it a bit when it fell in love with my earlobe. When it called my grandmother an octogenarian camel, I held my tongue and suffered the gaze of her watery eyes brimming with hurt. When it demanded to convert to Buddhism, I patiently waited for the phase to pass. When it fell in love with my earlobe, I zipped my conscience up in an airtight plastic bag and picked up the flame thrower.

Well, I can’t remember for sure, doctor, but I think it started with a little bit of flesh that made one half of my face look like Marlon Brando. There was a chap who once took me out to a Chinese restaurant. He was a student of film studies and he liked to talk only to the Brando side of my face. The restaurant was dimly lit with red lanterns and shadows loomed large. The waiter placed two bowls of fried noodles at our table. My date was a moustached refrigerator of a man who would talk of Bergman and the damnable Canadians as he sucked in noodles with echoing slurps. Then, from the corner of my right eye, I noticed the noodle strand hanging from his lips moving of its own accord. My frigid film student was gazing at the painting on the wall of a fat cigarette in a kimono, the noodle hanging down from the corner of his mouth slowly undulating like a long blade of grass in the breeze. The noodle raised its free end to look at me and then gave the room a cursory once-over, peeking around at the cheap décor and the tired underpaid Asians. What happened next was the most defining few minutes of my life. The noodle strand raised itself to be on eyeball level with my date’s contact lens clad eye, and glared long enough into it for the chopsticks to fall with a clatter from his fingers. “It’s an octopus!” he screamed.

The noodle strand fell onto the table from his gaping horrified mouth, and it slithered away swiftly through the condiment shakers and the napkin holder into a Chinese immigrant darkness, leaving me to grapple with my Bergman-loving film student who believed he had just swallowed a mild sea monster. At that moment, when he raised his hand to choke himself, my Brando cheek contorted itself to pull a half smile and let out a malicious yowl. The restaurant froze, their chopsticks in mid air, all those noodles hanging loose, dancing without music. My cheek began to screech sinisterly, in the tones of burning flesh and dying children. And all the good people of the restaurant felt their noodles looking back at them from their chopsticks, wriggling slowly but surely towards a greater idiom of freedom and liberty. I don’t remember when the fire started, or who started it. But all the incriminating noodles got away, and by then, my cheek had congealed into a hard mass of whinnying flesh that would croak and giggle to add variety to the noises it produced. My film student was charred bones after the fire. And in that pandemonium, I felt gravity tug at my cheek, and I said one very important word to what was growing on a patch of my face like a malignant mushroom. I said, “hello”.

Then for the rest of the years after the noodle eyeballed a Bergman student, I carried the voice of a facial fungus in my head like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. I nurtured my exceptional mole like a cherished wayward sibling and lived with it the way most people live with dandruff. And suddenly it was clear why I was never smart in life. Three years into its growth, my mole could conjugate French verbs and even knew the subtle nuances of string theory. My mother said I spoke my first word at the age of four. It seems I said “bo”, looking at a bus. I corrected my mother saying “bo” wasn’t a word. She replied, “Well, honey, you were always so stupid, you see. So papa and I went ahead and agreed that might as well be a word.”

We were friends for a long time. My friends were mostly the friends of my mole. I received invitations to cocktail parties after my mole was invited. And then one summer, the summer when the tongues hanging down from the jaws of panting dogs roasted under the sun and the trees caught fire and people had no tears left in their eyes to cry; in that fetid month of May, my mole developed a fondness for earrings. It wanted me to wear chandelier earrings at seven in the morning and big chunky stones in the night. “Look better.” it said. “You’re such a homely cow.” Then it began to compare me with everything and everyone; even the fire hydrant. Soon, a bit of mutant flesh dictated terms to the rest of me. True, I was loved for the mole, but that was no reason to let it fester on me. So when it said it had a thing for my earlobe, I calmly reached for the flame thrower.

I begged for a better life, doctor. I put up with everything! I thought it could provide the blueprints for a better life!

The other doctor, the one who operated on me, yes, well, he said something that made me think that living with half a face might not be such a bad thing after all.
He couldn’t look at me after the surgery because I was so hideous. But he said in this weary voice, “That was just a mole, wasn’t it? On your cheek, outside you? And now it’s gone, hasn’t it? Darling…..for most of us, these moles are inside the head. Now where do we go with those?”

I think I’ll have my pills now, doctor.