If there had ever been such a thing as a Miss Muslim contest, all but one of the women in my family would have won it.
My great-grandmother was named Sundari-which means, simply, “beautiful” in Hindi. Her daughter, my grandmother, was blessed with the moniker Abha, which translates even more vividly into “lustrous beauty.” One aunt is Gaura-“fair-skinned” and another Sohalia-“moon river”-to describe the luminescence of her face. They were the beauties of their eras, each one sought out by a man who was prominent and powerful enough to win their hearts.
All of them, except my mother.
Had a Miss Muslim contest ever existed, the beauty-pageant baton that would have been passed on from generation to generation would have stopped at her. Which is why when I was born, Parvez, the midwife who had delivered me at our home in the Mumbai suburb of Mahim, went running through the streets of our neighborhood, joyous and jubilant.
“He has listened!” Parvez yelled out to all. “Allah has visited his blessings on the Shah family once more! This child is most divine!”
They decided to name me Tanaya-which means “child of mine”-and the choice of which came as a great surprise to our relatives. After all, most of the women in my family had been graced with names that signified good looks. And here was I, signifying nothing but ownership.
“Evil eye,” my grandfather muttered when my aunt Gaura wondered out loud why I couldn’t be named something more symbolic. “Yes, she is fair and dimpled and sweet. But we have been cursed before.”
My mother, I was told, sobbed and turned her eyes away as I tried to suckle on her breast. But she instead handed me over to Gaura who had borne a son just eleven days earlier, and who would breastfeed me instead of my own mother.
As a young girl, I had no concept of being attractive. When I looked in the mirror, I saw only a girl who had few friends, a strict grandfather, a grandmother I had loved dearly but who had died when I was not quite seven, a mother who seemed sad most of the time, and a father I had never known.
It wasn’t until I was thirteen that I began to notice that I looked a little different compared to other girls my age. I was taller than everyone else in my class; and even without the benefit of braces, regular skin-whitening treatments, or eyebrow threading sessions, none of which my grandfather-my nana-would ever agree to pay for, people always stared at me, men sometimes longingly. Around then, my nana stopped putting his arm around me as we watched TV on the couch or holding my hand when we went out to buy sticky pink candy from the street vendors or helping me brush my hair at night. When I turned thirteen and my breasts started to blossom and hair appeared in the unlikeliest places, I stopped being my nana’s little girl.
It was at about this time that the first sign of my hereditary signature began to appear. All the women in my family, with the exception of my mother, were known for their “Shah streak,” a swath of silver-gray across the hairline. It looked like the stripe on a raccoon’s tail, a brush of moonlight against a dark night sky. It was, singularly, what had defined almost all of my maternal ancestors-a quirk of nature that graced us virtually without exception, leaving only my mother out. On me, it sprouted tentatively initially, then bloomed. When the first strand came, my aunt Gaura kissed me on the cheek, telling me that in our family, it was considered a mother’s blessing, and the more it grew, the more munificent the maternal goodwill. Being that as it may, I had hoped, somewhat naively, that with the appearance of the streak my mother might finally love me a little more.
As my Shah streak grew in and my breasts developed and my stature altered, I was, at fifteen, now as tall and slender as my aunts. My grandfather forbade me from using the public bus to go back and forth from school, knowing about the body-grazing and flesh-pinching that most of the women aboard had to submit to. Whenever he could, he would come by auto-rickshaw to drop and fetch me, rarely letting me out of his sight.
“You are a young woman now,” he said to me when I was sixteen. “You have nothing else to offer except the face that Allah has blessed you with. Men of poor moral standing will start to think things when they see you. I believe it is time to settle your mind on the only role you have in this world: a pretty and quiet wife and a devoted mother. Remember that, and you will always be happy.”
And I had had no reason not to believe him.
Every teenage girl has a turning point, a time when she realizes that she is more than just the sum of the expectations of her. I finally reached that point two days shy of my nineteenth birthday.
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.
“I have learned how to live, how to be in the world and of the world, and not just to stand aside and watch,” she wrote as I mouthed the words along with her over and over again. The doors behind her were open, and I could imagine a warm wind blowing against her soft white gown. I wanted to watch this part only, and nothing else in the movie, but the Rewind button on the machine would often get stuck, so I had no choice but to start at the beginning. But it was that one scene, the one where Sabrina is perfectly poised and peaceful, that lingered in my mind long after I had to return the tape. I immediately resonated with Sabrina’s pre-Paris naiveté, with the simple nature of her life, yet her desire for more. She yearned for love, and while I didn’t care about that, I still wanted to become what she had become. To be, as she wrote to her father, “in the world and of the world.”
I resolved that I must one day go to Paris too.