The Curse of Being Beautiful

It can be a threat. It can be almost impossible to find work, no matter how good your portfolio is

- Rituparna Chatterjee

THE first time I was told that I was beautiful was on a train. Barely touching 14, I was on my way back from my boarding school for the dreaded holidays, trying to stay as invisible as one could. Yet a kind lady, who looked like a beautiful goddess herself, with long flowing hair, had somehow found me and declared it out aloud, not once, but twice. My teenage body, hiding a lifetime of abuse and shame, went into what I would realise decades later, were the symptoms of a panic attack. Much to her shock, I had to race without excusing myself and run to the bathroom of the first class AC compartment to throw up. That's what acts of love can do to you. Random acts of kindness from random strangers become pivotal moments in your life. That's the power of being called beautiful. You may think it doesn't matter and you can hide in intellectual or sports pursuits, that you are holier than thou when it comes to the trillions of dollars spent worldwide to market all kinds of beauty products-from billboards to your social media feed, and so on. But it does. I was reading or hiding inside a book, The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. It was, ironically, about an abused child called Pecola Breedlove who wanted to be beautiful so that she could be loved and accepted and thought that having blue eyes would make her beautiful. Part of my abused childhood and parental neglect was that I was allowed to read and do things that I shouldn't be allowed to, until at least half a decade later.

Decades later, fragments of what I had written here and there came together and The Water Phoenix-my magical realism memoir about an abused child's lifelong search for what was love and what wasn't-was published and won the hearts of endless abused kids, now adults, who have never felt beautiful. Or wanted. A book has endless layers, as each reader reveals to me. An abused child is made to feel ugly every single day.