Beauty

I had gone out for lunch with a few office colleagues at Barbeque Nation (Bandra/Khar (West), Mumbai) a few day ago. As usual, there were a few good looking girls in the restaurant. Out of the blue, a female colleague popped a question - "What is BEAUTY?" to the  three males in the group (including myself). I was busy savouring the desserts and did not really want to participate in this abstract conversation but it was difficult to escape the continuous badgering. I recollected the short story which I had written a few years ago, showcasing how beauty is not what you see but what you feel and what you believe. Here it goes:

“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”- an idiomatic phrase which you might have heard, read and even spoken a thousand times before, but what follows is a tale that you might be reading for the first time. Let me take you to Tiny Tots, a kindergarten school in South Kolkata. One early morning, soon after the classes for the children had begun, a worried mother rushed to the entrance of the school with a bottle of milk in her solicitous hands. On being questioned by the school-maid the reason for her anxiety, she reasoned that her daughter had forgotten to have the milk in the morning breakfast and so she has brought the same for her to have it now. The maid offered to help her by asking her daughter’s name so that she would give the bottle of milk to her. To this, the mother, peeping through the fence which barricaded the garden where the children were all playing, replied, with a smile on her face, that she wanted the bottle of milk to be given to the “most beautiful child” in the school. Yes, her daughter was a true cherub - curly blonde hair, rosy lips, chubby cheeks, and blue eyes!

But the phrase “most beautiful child” somehow struck the maid in a divergent overtone which instigated her to restate in an appalling tone– “most beautiful child!” The mother, with the smile still on her face, replied in the affirmative – “Yes, please give this bottle to the ‘most beautiful child’ and let her have it as I watch through the fence”. The maid passed through the fence to enter the garden, went near a group of children and handed the bottle to a clumsy, dark complexioned little girl and let her have the milk. The mother, watching through the fence, got this blow out of the water and her smiling face deformed into a tragic face. Barely, had her wide-opened eyes blinked when she felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. It was the hand of the principal of the school. She smiled at the mother and said, “The girl drinking milk from the bottle is the maid’s daughter. To every mother, her child is the ‘most beautiful child’ of all”.

Beauty, after all, is not just what you see but what you feel and what you believe!