The face

The ground is slightly depressed under the nose and then slants down to the upper lip, which sits on the lower lip like two layers of subcrustal rocks. Then further down, the surface sinks and narrows into the delicate chin like a promontory where the high point of a rock projects into the water. The earlobes peek through the hairs on two sides of the face like shifting rears of two rabbits hiding in the bush.

But the sign of life doesn't come until you look in the eyes. The eyeballs dance behind the sockets like two amusing faces lurching behind the windows. The eyes speak before the mouth opens, joy and sorrow, hope and despondency, fear and courage, all thoughts and emotions are captured in the motion of the eyes before they reverberate through other parts of the face, in the twitch of muscles, crinkles on the forehead, swollen cheeks or smacking lips.

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This face seldom smiles, but when it does it sprinkles laughter like a spray gun, filling the air with colours of happiness that can leave lasting stains on others. This face often resounds with harsh words, sizing up people, as if canons, roaring through spasmodic lips, are firing to cut down the enemy lines. This face rarely shows pain or sorrow, but bears the hardened composure of the façade of a house, which has withstood demolitions in the back.

Yet this face has a certain beauty, a fatal attraction that draws derring-do people to their adventures. It beams with a kind of glow that pulls the flies to the fire, the heat of passion radiating from every grin, every nod, every smile, every turn and every glance. But this face is mostly stolid, its muscles taut with the expressions of a life soaked in fear and fury.

Behind the lips the cavity of mouth sits like the centre of universe, a terrible bitterness filling its space as if dark clouds spreading in the sky. Resentments rise from the heart like vapours from subterranean streams. This face is poised like an ice-capped crater on a volcano that is waiting to erupt. Yet it brings comfort to those who behold, like sweat in the summer and fire in the winter. This face is decorated with filigrees of emotions, dimming and shining like the shifting lights in a magic lantern show.

It is said that beauty is when the face is arranged in a number of golden sections. When Leonardo da Vinci painted Mona Lisa's face, he is said to have fit it perfectly into a golden rectangle, and structured the rest of the painting around similar rectangles. Greeks invented these golden sections and the Parthenon is full of them. Pythagoras and his followers believed that these golden sections or ratios were divine proportions.

In a beautiful face, the head forms a golden rectangle with the eyes at its midpoint. The mouth and nose are each placed at golden sections of the distance between the eyes and the bottom of the chin. The pupils of the eyes and the outside corners of the mouth must form a perfect square. The golden section of this square defines the nose, the tip of the nose, the inside of the nostrils, the two rises of the upper lip and the inner points of the ear. The square also defines the distance from the upper lip to the bottom of the chin.

This particular face does not configure many of these golden sections. The width of the nose, the distance between the eyes and the eye brows and the distance from the pupils to the tip of the nose, nothing forms the rectangles or are arranged in divine proportions. Likewise, the width of the eye, the distance of pupil from eyelash to eyebrow and distance between the nostrils are not aligned. The required distance from the upper lip to the bottom of the nose and several dimensions of the eye are not sadly there.

Even if you look at this face from the side, its profiles are also not symmetric. The front of the head is awkwardly close to ear opening. The relative positions of the neck, the back of the eye, the front of the eye, back of the nose and mouth are in chaos. The dimensions of the face from top to bottom, the positions of the eyebrow, nose, and mouth are a riot. Even the teeth are no exception. The front two incisor teeth are disoriented like the loose keys of an old typewriter. The golden ratio of the width of the smile to the third tooth from the centre is grievously inadequate.

Still this face has something about it that turns your head. Still this face has something that catches your eyes, when it bounces its hairs and the rises of its upper lip are pulled like the string of a bow in a comely smile that glints through the corner of its eyes. This face, this sculptured block of light brown granite, comes alive only when its eyes move like the feeble pulse running in a listless body. This face looks stiff in the concentrated expression of anguish, a face of the face that hides underneath festering wounds of a deplorable life.

This face sits on the shoulder like a watchtower where two eyes slowly scan everything around it like searchlights. It tells you nothing at the first sight. But if you observe it for a while, the face unfolds the irony of a depleted life, a life that, like an opinion, has been shaped by experience instead of hope. It is a beautiful face without the golden sections, but hangs from a body that stoops when it walks, arms inwardly bent like two dangling triangles.

The face wears the strains of carrying the burden of life and much of that strain shows in the stream of fatigue flowing inside the dark brown eyes. A pair of glasses protects these eyes, oval shaped frame clasped on a pentagonal face like contrasting geometric forms in a single artwork.

This is the face that struck me as unusual when I first saw it. It looked attractive to me, but I couldn't tell why. It laughed with the echo of shattering glasses, glanced with the calm of a spent storm, breathed with the grace of summer breeze, and spoke with the notes of dulcet music. The lips quivered like the string of a bow that had just shot an arrow. The hairs looked smooth as a manicured lawn. The skin was soft like velvet.

If the eyes are the windows to the heart, then the face is the doorway to the human body and the mirror of life that lives within it. Beauty is the glow of fire that burns in the heart, not the heat of flame which rises from the flesh. In so much as it lies in the eye of the beholder, this face has taught me one thing. What is beholden does not come from the surface. You have to go deeper to know what makes it.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.