05/08/2025
🌿🌿🌿 Short Story: Standing in Front of the Mirror 🌿🌿🌿
(A true story wrapped in the mirror of the heart, where the tears of broken souls remain hidden.)
💙 Character Introduction:
🧔♂️ Muhib — A middle-aged migrant. Father of three. Once a government-employed software analyst. Now, a silent warrior struggling day and night to keep his family afloat through hard labor.
👱♀️ Rina — His wife. Outwardly ideal, inwardly shattered. Suffers from NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), OCD, and Hoarding Disorder, yet considers herself "perfect."
👩🦰 Sabina — Rina’s friend, whose husband is Tanvir — once a friend, now a name associated with betrayal.
🩵 Warning!
👉 Today, let’s learn how a soft-spoken girl from a devout Muslim family in Ramkant village falls into the trap of infidelity after arriving in Sydney. This piece is not just for reading—it teaches us:
Never allow your spouse to have private conversations or meet-ups with the opposite gender—even if it's your friend's spouse. Islam does not permit this. This is often how emotional affairs and later, physical infidelity, begin.
🔹 This story is not meant to break anyone’s marriage, but to encourage vigilance.
🔹 It is not religious or legal advice, but a story based on real-life experience.
🔹 For those whose partners suffer from NPD, OCD, or Hoarding Disorder—awareness and medical intervention are necessary.
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🩵 The Story Begins:
Muhib came to Australia with the dream of a better life. He lives in a small house with Rina and their three children. He returns home every evening after a day of hard work, yet Rina complains, “You don’t give me time.”
Rina's home is filled with unnecessary things—things she refuses to throw away. “This cup was from my mother,” “Throwing away this old paper makes me anxious.” This is Hoarding OCD.
🩵
The morning light comes slowly in this city—as if someone silently pulls a curtain across the windowpane.
Muhib stands in front of the mirror. The man inside stares quietly into his eyes.
His eyes are red. He hasn’t slept. His beard is greying. Yet there’s a strange dignity in his tired face. He doesn’t know if he’s just exhausted—or lost.
No sound of the children’s laughter from outside the room. No smell of frying vegetables from the kitchen.
This house is no longer a home—just walls on every side.
🩵
When Rina first entered Muhib’s life, she was like a burst of light.
Muhib thought—There is light in her eyes, dreams in her gaze.
He worked day and night—Uber, Uber Eats, warehouse jobs, school runs, and even battled false partner-filed legal cases. Once, he had come to Sydney as a highly skilled permanent resident with his one-year-old son and Rina, working as a government software analyst.
Rina wanted a house in Sydney. Muhib couldn’t make ends meet with one income supporting five people. Still, he tried.
One day he said, “Just give me a little more time. It will all happen.”
Rina turned her face and said, “If you can’t do it, maybe someone else could.”
🩵
Rina’s OCD made her intolerant of anything touching indoor surfaces if it had been outside. To her, none of them were clean. She didn’t let anyone touch laundry. She personally washed everyone’s clothes and dried them inside the bedroom with a room heater. She still sent their 7-year-old daughter Nafisa to school in a diaper. Nafisa had never used a toilet—everything was done in her nappy.
There was no room to walk in the small bedroom. Piles of things everywhere. Tables, bookshelves, closet drawers—covered in dust and cockroaches.
And her narcissism? Muhib didn’t realize it at first.
Rina would say in front of others, “Muhib is no good. I manage the three kids all by myself.” But she bought takeout seven days a week—never had an interest in cooking.
At night, she cried. “No one understands me like you do.”
Muhib forgave her—again and again.
🩵
One day, Muhib learned that Rina had befriended a Bengali mother named Sabina from their daughter’s school. Eventually, Rina got close to Sabina’s husband, Tanvir.
One day, Sabina told her husband, “Tanvir, can you please bring Rina and her little daughter from her Minto house?”
Tanvir agreed instantly. “Alright, no problem.”
He had seen Rina before—at a Bengali spring fair. That day, Rina wore a beautiful green saree and came with her daughter—no man with her. She had been separated from her husband at that time and lived alone with her three children.
Tanvir took full advantage of this. He befriended Rina during her loneliness and coerced her into a physical relationship at a motel. Rina, too, forgot she still had a husband, that she wasn’t divorced, that she was a 45-year-old Muslim woman and mother of three.
Rina began spending time with Tanvir, her friend’s husband.
“Were you at the motel last Friday with Tanvir?” Muhib asked.
Rina stayed silent. Then said, “No.”
“Then why did Seema Bhabi tell me she saw you both entering the Ibis Hotel? She even sent me the proof,” Muhib replied calmly.
Rina said, “Even if I went to the motel with a male friend, I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Muhib cried. But he didn’t break. He tried to fix what was broken.
But later, Rina said, “You’re making this up. Tanvir is just a friend. You’re going crazy.”
Muhib was stunned. The person who once admitted the truth—now calls him insane.
🩵
One day, Rina called the police.
“He’s threatening me,” she said.
The police arrived. Told Muhib, “You need to leave.”
The children stood at the door. The little girl asked, “Where will Baba go?”
Rina calmly replied, “Your father is a bad man.”
🩵
Now, Rina’s phone has a lock. She has changed her name after marriage and now presents herself on Facebook and to society as a single woman.
The children go by different surnames. Rumors spread that Muhib had married again.
One day, Muhib stands in front of the mirror.
He wonders—Am I really that bad? Am I truly a failure?
Suddenly, the man in the mirror speaks: — “No. You tried. You knew how to love. But the one you loved only saw her reflection in the mirror—not you.”
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🌿💙💜 Conclusion:
This story isn’t just Muhib’s.
It belongs to all those who are repeatedly blamed by narcissistic behavior.
Those who wonder, “Did I love too much?”
Those who don’t know—someone with NPD always shifts blame by painting others as the villain.
But the lesson is simple—
Stand in front of the mirror. Look into your own eyes.
Stop blaming yourself.
If you know you didn’t lie,
Then no one can break your truth with their tears.
💙💜🩵
✍️ Parvez Masum | 4 August 2025 @ Newcastle © BDDude
