The snake and the mirror 

In this story"The Snake and the Mirror" is a brief tale composed by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, a famous Indian essayist. The story is about a man who finds a snake in his room and the strange things that happen after.

SNAKE AND THE MIRROR 

The story centers on a young man who lives by himself in a small room. He becomes terrified when he finds a snake in his room one night. He tries to escape, but the snake prevents him from doing so. He eventually gets away and hides out in the bathroom. He cowers in fear as he sees himself in the mirror there and realizes how foolish he looks.

After some time, the snake leaves the room, and the man feels better. However, he attacks himself out of fear that the snake will come back again. He starts taking a stick everywhere, even to the bathroom. He uses the mirror's broken shards as a metaphor for his own shattered image when he accidentally breaks it while trying to hit a mosquito one day.

In the end, the man thinks about how his fear consumed him and caused him to act irrationally. He realizes that the snake wasn't dangerous to him and that he didn't have to worry about it. The story is a parody on fear and how it can distort our perception of the world, causing us to take extreme measures to defend ourselves from imagined dangers.