IN THE WINK OF AN EYE

I was eleven years old, and studying in Class VI, when I took a daring decision.

I decided that it was time I grew from a girl to a woman, with all the accompanying wiles and guiles that went with womanhood. And one of the indispensable weapons in a woman's formidable armoury, was her undisputed skill in attracting men with the mesmeric power of her eyes.

To cut a long story short, I decided to pick up the art of winking.

Because to wink successfully, delicately, without scrunching up your eyes, or squeezing your eyelids tortuously, or hamming up the whole thing like a lascivious Johnny Walker (the comedian, not the whiskey), seemed to my 11-year-old mind the epitome of the femme fatale.

But the mirror was not enough, I needed a guinea pig to practise upon.

Being essentially timid by nature, I chose a safe venue. The top deck of the red double-decker bus - L20 - that took us from safe, suburban Barrackpore to big-city Calcutta and all its dangerous fascinations. A window-seat gave me a good view of the people down below.

I chose a safe victim. I decided to bestow my virgin wink at any old man who would look up at my window, but would not be strong enough or fast enough to follow it up with any other action.

So, in one of the innumerable bus-stops on the way to Esplanade, I winked at a doddery old man who was gazing bemusedly up at the bus. Most probably he had cataract, or short-sight, but I fondly imagined him to be gazing straight at me when I WINKED - not a sly, barely-there wink, BUT A BOLD, LASTING-FOR-QUITE-SOME-TIME, EYE-PROPERLY-SHUT, MAKE-NO-MISTAKE-ABOUT-IT WINK.

The poor man hardly noticed a thing.

Now that was a wink gone with the wind.

TELL ME, WHEN DID YOU FIRST WINK A WINSOME WINK?

THE CASE OF THE MISSING EYEBROWS

Growing up in the 1970s and early 80s meant that I regarded women with impossibly thin, plucked and arched eyebrows to be the epitome of style and glamour. I would often spend hours looking at myself in the mirror, turning this way and that, dissatisfied with the thick, dark pair of eyebrows nature had given me. I would frown fiercely at my reflection, and wish I could change myself here, or there, and this included my beetle-brows.

Being eleven years or thereabouts, a visit to the beauty parlour was absolutely out of the question. And if there were any tweezers in the house, I was not able to put my hands on them. But determination and ingenuity led me to a solution. Not really a happy one, though.

One day, I filched a jar of hair-removing cream (one of those foul-smelling Anne French depilatory-concoctions), carelessly left on the bathroom shelf by Didia (my elder cousin). I had seen enough ads on television to know how to use it. Or so I thought.

Taking a bit on the spatula, I carefully applied it in a line to the lower portion of my eyebrows. Then, after waiting impatiently for the requisite ten minutes (as stipulated on the label of the jar), I used a rather grubby hanky to wipe off the nasty-smelling goop.

Only thing was, the cream had spread somewhat from its intended destination, and I ended up wiping off a large part of my eyebrows. I stared in horror at the mirror, and a pair of uneven, thin-to-the-point-of-disappearing eyebrows reflected accusingly back at me.

But the damage was done. While no roving talent-scouting photographer spotted me (or ‘discovered’ me as the next super-model, much to my secret dispappointment), my cousins and friends mercilessly ragged and quizzed me about my emaciated eyebrows. But being stubborn (and miserably shell-shocked at my new alien-from-Star-Trek-look), I never revealed how exactly I managed to uproot my bountiful harvest of brows.

To her credit, my immensely wise and reasonable Ma (mother) did not force me to confess, merely raising her own (plentiful) brows and consoling me, “Don’t worry, they’ll soon grow back.”

And so they did, of course. But after I had to spend ten days looking like a perpetually-astonished plucked chicken. And enduring utter ‘alien’-ation and secret guilt. All of which gave me a lifelong determination not to tamper too much with nature.

DO YOU HAVE ANY SUCH COSMETIC MIS-ADVENTURES TO SHARE?

A STITCH IN TIME…

In school, we had a subject called SUPW (Socially Useful Productive Work). It involved a lot of craft-related activities, and, later in senior school, some social project work. Being lazy and self-absorbed children, we dismissed the subject as Some Useful Periods Wasted.

I did not really mind wasting the period by making pencil-holders by wrapping colourful paper around old talcum powder tins, and other fanciful and useless things like making prints with cut slices of ladies’ fingers (the vegetable) and onion-halves.

What irked and bothered me was the compulsory sewing projects we girls had to undertake. I remember we had a lady teacher teaching us the subject for a few years, who would insist on all the girls sitting and learning various kinds of stitches. The boys, lucky idiots, were spirited away to some unspecified location, where they made unrecognizable clay models and wood-carvings.

We were stuck in the classroom with the needle often stuck in our fingers (especially in my hands, which seemed to be all thumbs). The simple run stitch seemed deceptively easy and my fingers would run away merrily with the needle, till the stern teacher would look over my shoulder and point out the unnecessary necessity of each stitch being of the same size and equidistant from one another.

The stem stitch and chain stitch were all right, I suppose, if you overlooked the variously sized links of the chain, or bits of the stem. The criss-cross herringbone always made me cross, although I enjoyed the neatly laid-out patterns of the cross stitch where I had only to follow the design laid out on the graph and where the stitches would automatically be of the same size, because the cloth itself was woven like a grid.

But I was completely flummoxed by the really intricate stuff like the neat hem stitches, buttonhole-stitches (my holes looked as if they had been forced by a particularly belligerent big button), French knots and the tiny satin stitches. I was really really bad at the fine art of needle craft, which was fairly surprising because both Maa (mother) and Didia (my cousin) spent long hours discussing patterns and colours and creating delicate gossamer embroidery on many of our dresses. Unfortunately, my admiration did not progress to emulation, and I remained handicapped at handicraft.

And so, I breathed a huge sigh of relief when the stern sewing mistress left our school and was replaced by the affable Maity Sir, who taught both Bengali and SUPW. I put away the handkerchiefs with the uneven half-finished hems, and the round wooden embroidery frame and VIBGYOR silk threads. And happily spent the rest of my SUPW periods making unproductive and silly stuff like soap-gardens (where you had to stick paper flowers and leaves on wires into the soap and make a fancy fence-border with pins and garish plastic ribbons). Horribly tacky stuff, but easier to tackle than sewing.

DO SEW A MEMORY TO THIS POST.