It was a painting and a symphony all at once. An array of sounds and a palette of hues danced across her cheeks and that was why she was beautiful.
She was more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen.
That’s the funny thing about faces; the more people try to hide the flaws the more they flaunt them. It’s almost as if every new blush stroke manifests itself somewhere else, the prettier the cheek the less bright the eye, the glossier the lip the less dazzling the smile. I have always marvelled at how women poke their way into perfection. Seldom realising that it is the flaws – the crevices, the laugh lines, the dimples, the freckles that make the face. The layers of cover up do only that, cover up.
Every face tells a story. At least if one is willing to hear it. The simplest ones tell the simplest stories – hard, honest, bitter... real. These are the faces with deep caverns cut into the cheek bones, canyons of time withered away in skin. These are eyes that are so bare they tell all, there is no mystery in these eyes because there is no hiding hunger and pain. There is no mystery in pain. These are the skins that, though seldom washed, are somehow touched by the sun more potently. They glow and shimmer as they bake. These are the lines that tell the stories that need to be told. We were wrong to assume that life lines were embedded in the scabs of our palms, they are emblazoned in the folds of our face.
Our life is what we find mapped in the bags under our eyes, in the depth of the curves that corner our mouth as we flash our teeth wide, in the crinkles on our forehead when we mark it with an expression. Any expression.
It makes sense for those of us who have the means, to cover it all up. Who wants to wear their stories for the world to see?
Who has such courage?
But she did and she was only nineteen. As I took her flowers - Narcissus (ironically, my favourite) and rather inappropriate now that I think about it – I made it a point not to look at her directly. I thought it might make her self conscious. Being burnt alive cannot be an easy story to wear, but she did it with spunk. She told me to look at her, said that it wasn’t that bad. In fact her exact words were that she had found the only way to become fair overnight, she had only missed a few patches, but extra strength liquid bleach would take care of that. As she said this, her smile was slightly lopsided, the kind of smile that begs you to take the joke from the tail and roll with it so that the teller can laugh a little more at their predicament. I am not slow, I rolled and she laughed. Her stunning desi ‘sheen’ had been burnt away in rosy splotches and as I looked closely at each and every one of them I found that each accented her smile. Honestly, they did. Since everyone was embarrassed to look at her skin, they finally looked into her eyes. She had beautiful eyes, shy and sassy at the same time. She kept laughing at herself and I think that was the moment I fell in love with her. If it is possible for a woman to fall in love with another woman without wanting to jump her bones. I knew this game and I knew it well. I knew how to save face when the face was bashed in, I knew how to laugh at myself just so there was something to laugh about. She said that her mother had finally jinxed it all, she always told Nadia that she was gorgeous and if she were only fairer she’d land a Gora from Bora Bora. I told her that dudes from Bora Bora were hardly ‘gora’, which we both found rather disappointing because a gora from England just didn’t elicit the same enthusiasm. I told her that my mother had said the same thing, only in my case it was the weight. Perhaps I should try and get run over for default liposuction. We both laughed.
Then she asked me if her life was over. I looked at her for a minute and right before I opened my mouth she told me that if I was the friend she thought I was, I would say it as I saw it. I told her to read ‘Taming of the Shrew’ again. This time we cried.
As I was leaving she told me, that if I could survive my life she could survive hers. Then she got out of the creaky hospital bed stood in front of me and we both did the Carrey Bradshaw Head toss followed by a “We’re single and Fabulous!”.
She really was more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen.
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