“Did you shave off your moustache?”
Personal Essay by Diyaa Jyothilal: ‘For the first time in my life, I would feel beautiful. I felt like a girl. I felt like I was worthy of becoming a woman one day. I spent hours staring into my bathroom mirror, gaping at my reflection, and imagining myself on the cover of Vogue.’
I sat perched on the marbled verandah stairs, in the yard that once belonged to my grandmother. Coconut trees, nellikka trees, and curry leaf plants grew haphazardly. Pulpy hibiscuses—smashed by footsteps—stuck to the tiled ground. A black cat sat on the ledge of the dilapidated and ailing boundary wall. Amma sat behind me, pressing her kurti against my back, as she rubbed coconut oil between her palms. Her garment was slightly wet from washing the dishes. She ran her fingers through my flaky scalp as her stacked gold rings clanked against each other. Slowly the stubborn knots in my hair would fall out, and so would the knots in my mouth.
It was only with Amma who I felt like sharing the secrets which I had crammed up inside me, like the clothes stuffed in my messy wardrobe. Covered in the sweet but sticky warmth of sweat and coconut oil, I would tell her about my new boyfriend: the Irish actor Paul Mecal. She vehemently argued that he didn’t count as one. I would tell her that J is dating R, and that S broke up with A. I told her of how I secretly loved a certain professor’s classes, even though the rest of my friends hated them.
But there were still a few things that I kept from Amma. A few clothes that I’d purposely kept stuffed in the back of my closet. Some of these garments were of lesser consequence, like how I never told Amma that a teacher had slapped my face when I was in second grade. Or about the day in first grade when I peed in front of the entire class, because my English teacher wouldn’t let me go to the loo and I simply couldn’t hold it in.
These secrets remained in my back pocket. And even though the pockets in women’s garments are Lilliputian in nature, I managed to keep them stuffed, hoping that Amma would never come looking.
*
A favourite secret was the suppression of my biggest insecurity.
I hated my facial hair. It made me feel so ugly and monkeyish. I thought that being hairless was the epitome and ultimate goal of womanhood, that beautiful women looked like glazed doughnuts stepping out of a Krispy Kreme store. The unkempt undergrowth of body hair made me feel like a boy. To add to the paranoia, puberty gifted me more places filled with hair to worry about: imagine my horror when, later on in life, hair sprouted out from my underarms and bush, too.
In fourth grade, I tried to cut my bushy eyebrows with craft scissors. Amma found out, and she sat me down. “You are beautiful as you are,” she told me. I didn’t believe her, but I kept my disbelief a secret from her, too.
These secrets remained in my back pocket. And even though the pockets in women’s garments are Lilliputian in nature, I managed to keep them stuffed stuffed, hoping that Amma would never come looking.
I grew up hating my bushy eyebrows, my furry forehead, and my upper lip hair. Boys would make fun of me and even sing songs about it. My friends didn’t really know what to say about my insecurities. They would stay silent, acting like their ears never heard the childish slander. I don’t blame them, but the downside was that I didn’t have anyone to go talk about it—including Amma—nor did I know what to say if someone would lend me an ear.
I wanted to be a perfect girl in a perfect world with no dilemmas and no faults. I felt that telling someone of my fears aloud would make them real. Like dust turning into stone. And once people saw my insecurities, they would only come to see them as shortcomings.
I considered vulnerability as a weakness.
So, the secret continued. I acted like the taunts never bothered me. I acted like I never cared.
But Amma knew. Maybe she used her Amma superpowers to sniff my secrets out. In ninth grade, she took me to a salon: I was finally going to get my eyebrows done. There I sat on the cushioned salon chair, clutching the secret in my chubby little finger, being careful to not let it out with my feet dangling in the air. The yellow salon lights shone into my eyes while a pregnant lady, wearing red lipstick and a floral smock, plucked out individual hairs with a string of thread. I could feel her breath hovering over me as her fingers deftly did her work. Amma stood in the corner silently watching over. I held back tears and clenched my jaw as she harvested hair from my forehead and upper-lip.
“It’s done now,” the pregnant lady said, lifting her face away from mine. I could breathe again.
I looked up into the mirror to see my skin barren and red. I looked like a warrior. A beautiful one, who had just conquered a battlefield. Dozens of plucked hairs lay strewn across my face like fallen soldiers. I had no remorse or pity for them. I simply brushed them off.
These visits to the salon became a routine habit. Soon, I graduated from threading to waxing. I dreaded the sticky, green wax, but the excruciating pain was followed by infinite joy and pleasure.
I knew this was only a temporary solution, and that those little menaces would grow back after a month or so. At least, I knew now that it was possible to be temporarily hairless. For the first time in my life, I would feel beautiful. I felt like a girl. I felt like I was worthy of becoming a woman one day. I spent hours staring into my bathroom mirror, gaping at my reflection, and imagining myself on the cover of Vogue. I was awestruck by my own beauty.
The boys at school, however still didn’t see me as beautiful.
Did you shave off your moustache? No, I waxed it.
Meesha vadichu kalanjale? No, I didn’t.
Why do you thread at such a young age? Because of you.
It became clear to me that with or without hair, I could never win. It didn’t make sense: I had become beautiful. I was a waxed and hairless sculpture of femininity, so why was I still hearing this? Was happiness and respect too much to ask for?
This is precisely when I realized that it was never about how I looked in the first place, but always about how I was made to feel. I was so busy embossing the idea of my beauty and self-respect in people’s validation and perception of me, that I forgot to give my true self the basic courtesy of simple, personal happiness.
Up until a certain point in my life, I was so fixated on how I looked that I would dream of finding a genie in a bottle who’d grant me three wishes, from which I’d choose: i) to permanently remove all my facial and body hair, ii) turn a shade fairer, and iii) turn my black hair into brown—although the last one was more of a want than a need. Looking back now, I realize I grew up carrying so much emotional baggage which I had packed and strapped onto myself. And I carried it all alone—secretly—without any help. I was embarrassed of my brown, hairy, and curvy identity. The Indian society around me hardly endorsed its own authentic self. It constantly pushed for a more Western and plastic one. I tried to trim, thread, and tear myself to meet those dry, scrapy standards—instead of rejoicing and celebrating the things that made me different.
I only wish I had believed Amma when she held my hands and told me I was beautiful eleven years ago. Strangely it seemed easier for me to trust the most insignificant people in my life over my own mother. I wonder why it is so difficult for many of us to open up to the people we love and find comfort in their affirmations; why we often choose to hate ourselves despite being surrounded by so much love.
*
Once time in the seventh grade, I wanted to go to school with my hair done up in a French braid. And so, on a Sunday afternoon in our apartment in Cochin, I asked Amma to braid my hair just to see how it looked. We stood in front of a spotty mirror in my parents’ bedroom; my feet pressed firmly on the cold, freshly cleaned tiles with the smell of Lizol tingling my nose. I vividly remember her fingers scuttling through my chakiri-like hair.
Today, she has realized that there is immense strength in being vulnerable, and that her imperfections will only add to her womanhood—rather than diminish it.
Once she was done, I didn’t particularly like what I saw. My thick Indian hair was poofy in the front and lumpy at the bottom, unlike the Pinterest-y thin, haired braids that dwindled down into nothingness.
“I don’t like it,” I wailed.
“But you look so beautiful,” Amma said.
I hesitated to believe her.
On the days that I wished to appear pretty, Amma would appear in my room with her stained apron still on, to do my hair while my breakfast and school lunch toiled away in the kitchen, eagerly waiting for her return. It would confuse me why my mother would see beauty, when all I saw was my chakiri hair and those bushy eyebrows.
I thought Amma found me beautiful because I was her daughter. Because she loved me. And I rejected this form of love: I believed that our archaic notions of beauty stem solely from physical appearance and desirability. Love was never part of that equation.
Despite being surrounded by beautiful and strong women with facial and body hair, I could never find comfort through them. I could never see Amma, my aunts, teachers, and my friends the way I saw myself. This was because no one had told them they were not beautiful, but someone had told me; which is why I ceased becoming beautiful. But with time, however, I learned that this was not so. People we love will always shine brighter in our eyes. Just like how the people I love are perfect to me, I too am perfect to the people who love me. And so now I find no difficulty in trusting my mother when she tells me that I am beautiful as I am. Through her, I have discovered that love enhances beauty.
I don’t thread and wax as often now. I learned how to groom my eyebrows painlessly for myself. I have realized that my beauty doesn’t come from the sheen of hairless skin. The concomitant trauma which seeped into me over the years has convinced me that disguising my facial hair couldn’t be a shortcut to beauty. It may still take decades for me to unlearn these entrenched benchmarks I had set for myself—and that is completely okay.
For years, I lived under the weight of this enormous secret, guarding it with my life and fearing the consequences of its eventual escape. A nine-year old girl with her hair in pigtails and a pink Aurora bag on her shoulders, scared of seeming delicate and frail, of seeming vulnerable, so, she built a wall and threw all her secrets over it.
But today, she has realized that there is immense strength in being vulnerable, that her imperfections will only add to her womanhood, rather than diminish it. Brick by brick, she will tear down that wall for now she knows that the biggest secret she kept from herself was about her own beauty. She was always beautiful and will continue to be so.
I’ve done everything humanly possible for this favourite secret of mine. I’ve fed her, guarded her and even dressed her up, hoping she’d turn into someone I like. But I also know that she never will. So, I’m going to pull her out of the prison I built for her eleven years ago. I will hold her hand as she walks towards her freedom.
***
Diyaa Jyothilal is a second-year journalism student. She loves baking for her loved ones and wishes to be a fancy magazine writer one day. You can find her on Instagram: @finishingyoursentences.
