My friend Nilu, who always read copies of Teen Cosmo that her brother in London would send her and that she would keep hidden beneath her mattress, would often invite me over to flick through the pages of her latest arrival, to laugh as we scratched and sniffed the fragrant folds of paper with their free perfume samples. On that day, we both stared at the cover of the June issue, on which was a photo of a strikingly skinny girl with long brown hair that seemed to have been partly painted gold. A wind from somewhere blew open her white shirt, revealing a bright pink bra, a tiny diamond sparkling in her belly button. She had her thumbs in her jeans pockets, a glossy pout on her lips, eyes painted silvery purple. She was beautiful, and, from what Nilu and I read of her inside the pages, she was rich and famous, too-a young actress in Hollywood, the words on the page calling her “the next Julia Roberts.”
“Why? Where did the old one go?” Nilu asked, looking up at me as I shrugged.
“You know, Tanaya, you are as pretty as this girl,” Nilu said, sitting up on her bed and crossing her legs. “In fact, prettier I think. There is nothing she has that you don’t-except maybe a jewel in your stomach.” She laughed and pushed her glasses, which were sliding down her nose, back up to her eyes. “I don’t see why you can’t do this,” she said, pointing to the pouting girl again.
“Stop being silly, Nilu,” I said, getting off the bed.
I finished the last of my cola and headed home. But from that day on, I will have to admit, I started looking at myself in the mirror quite differently: as an image of my aunts and all the other attractive women in my family who had gone before me.
Even when I started to realize my own beauty, I never saw my mother as anything less than perfect. She was forlorn, yes, but how could she not be, with a husband who had left her two months after their wedding and seven months before I was born? For most of my childhood, she had been placid, as if nothing vibrant or wild had ever lived behind those deadened eyes, as if in taking away his love, the father I had never known also took away my mother’s very life. It seemed that nothing ever aroused her, excited her, or even saddened her. She was a nebulous character, always in the background of my life, serving no greater purpose than making sure that I ate what was on my plate and that I read the books I brought home from school.
She was this way for every night of my childhood except for one. It had been a grim and rainy day at the height of monsoon season in hot and humid July, and the afternoon had been given over to magazines and television and napping. She was agitated, displaying more emotion than usual, but none of it any use to a bored eight-year-old. At nine o’clock at night, she told me to put on my pajamas and get into bed. I changed into a blue velour pair with a white eyelet lace collar. I lay next to my mother on the bed I shared with her and proceeded to continue reading an Indian comic book-an illustrated tale about a magic monkey that lived in the mountains. She asked me again and again to turn off the light and go to sleep, and again and again I told her that I had just a few more pages to get through. Then, without warning, she reached over to my side of the bed, swiped up the comic book, and flung it across the room onto the speckled pink tile floor. I looked over at her astonished and scared, and saw her hand, its fingers short and thick, coming straight for my face. I felt the sting of the slap, the blood rushing to my right cheek, shocked at the biting sensation in my face. Then she ordered me not to cry, then slapped me again, on the other side. The more I cried and begged her to stop, the more she hit me, until I was crouching in a corner, staring at the black flecks on the rose-colored tiles, my head in my hands. She towered above me, hitting me on both arms, bombarding me with slow punches for what seemed like an eternity. And then, as suddenly as she had started, she stopped, stepping back, wisps of frizzy hair loosened from her braid, her face flush, her mouth agape. She stared for a minute at her two hands, back and front. Then she bent down till she was at my level and put her hand to my cheek again, but this time to stroke it gently.
“Nahin rohna,” she said, asking me not to cry. “Mujhe maaf karo.” She was asking me for forgiveness. I reached over and collapsed on her arm, my drool from crying spilling out onto her printed polyester top. I was suddenly unsure about whether I knew who this woman was. She led me to bed then, laying me down onto starched cotton sheets, her hand on the top of my head. We both lay in the dark, not a sound in the room except for the whirring of a fan standing in the corner. But somewhere in my sobbing and shuddering body, I knew that her accumulated fury at a lost and wasted life was, if nothing else, finally spent.
By the next morning, it was all forgotten-and never mentioned again. After that, I continued, as I had always done, to pay no heed to the hecklers who teased her about her pockmarked skin and pudgy features, instead always rising to defend her. She had been born with a small dark mark that stretched across her right eyebrow, which family superstition had put down to the fact that my grandmother had gazed too long at a funeral procession when she was carrying my mother, and that the sight of so much woe and suffering had shocked the pregnant woman to such an extent that her unborn daughter ended up paying the price for it. I was certain none of this was true-that my mother’s “black thing,” as everyone called it, was nothing but a birthmark, and that it made her unique. Where I come from, people could be cruel about such things-about the size of one’s waist or the closeness of one’s eyes. They routinely made up names to describe the neighbors and friends who perhaps had not been blessed by Allah with loveliness. The hefty woman next door was haathi-“elephant”-and the local electrician bakri-“goat,” because of his prominent jaw and the whiskers he chose to adorn it with.
When long-lost relatives from America came to visit one summer when I was nine, looking down at me and then at my mother, the uncle chuckled, saying: “No resemblance. Are you sure you didn’t find her somewhere and just bring her home?” He laughed.
My mother went into our room and shut the door. Later, after the uncle had left and my mother emerged once again, she told me that every night for the first five years of her life, my grandmother would massage her nose with a pinch of oil to shape it better. When she was six months old, her chubby little body was waxed. Every day, they slathered a paste made from chickpea flour and lemon on her face to bring out the whiteness they were convinced lay hidden somewhere in her genes.
“All this they did, and for what?” my mother said that evening, still smarting from the hurt of the relative’s remarks. “My own husband left me. But you see, my beautiful beti, none of this will happen to you. Because of how you look, you will have everything I never did-a man who will stay with you, and a big and boisterous family. If I have given you nothing else in your life, at least I have given you that.”
But in truth, a decade later, it was actually Audrey Hepburn who gave me my life.
I had ventured down to Book Nook one day, a book-cum-video library on the street adjacent to ours, and I had decided to rent Sabrina, mesmerized by the pixielike black-and-white face on the front of the video box.
I had certainly gotten my pocket money’s worth, having watched the movie seven times in six days. Unlike Sabrina, I had no fantasies about the blond beauty of David Larrabee, nor the fantastic wealth of his family. Instead, I was entranced by just one scene in the entire film, the one where Sabrina is at the end of her two years in Paris and is seated at a desk illuminated by a tasseled lamp, writing a letter to her father.