The assessment begins in the maternity ward. Before anyone counts the fingers, someone observes the color. Rang gora hai (she’s fair), uttered with relief. Or, spoken with a sigh, rang saaf nahi hai (her complexion isn’t fair). From that moment, a girl’s face stops belonging to her. It belongs to the family, and one day they’ll trade it for a good match.
We usually blame advertising for the obnoxious beauty standards in India: fairness creams, filters, matrimonial ads asking for a girl who’s fair, slim, homely. The ads are only evidence of the deals made at home.
In many Indian homes, a pretty daughter isn’t admired. She’s appraised.
The Family Asset
Watch a pretty girl grow up in a joint family. She’s told to stay out of the sun. Besan and haldi go on her face before every wedding season. Aunts discuss her as if she isn’t in the room: with that face, she’ll get a very good husband. Her report card gets a nod while her complexion gets a conversation.
Her plainer sister learns the rules early. She’ll need to cook well, study hard and be “homely,” because her face won’t be negotiating on her behalf. Both sisters are being tagged with a price. One just carries a higher figure.
Beauty Is a Loan
The pretty daughter is never told that her beauty isn’t a gift. It’s a loan, and the family expects it repaid with interest: a richer groom, a bigger house, a grander social standing. Beauty standards in India don’t end at the wedding. They’re how the repayment is tracked.
A loan can be reclaimed. A girl who gains weight hears about it at every family function. The woman whose skin darkens one hot summer is offered a cream before she’s offered a glass of water. Then an illness, an accident, or simply a woman steps into her forties, and the people who praised her face the loudest are the first to stop looking at it.
Every compliment she ever received came with a due date.
The Woman Behind the Face
Women who were valued for their faces often spend middle age grieving something no one admits was taken. The attention moves on to a younger cousin. The mirror turns into an account book. And the same relatives who taught her that her face was all she had now advise her to age gracefully.
The plainer sister, meanwhile, was never praised and nor did she stop being examined.
Neither sister was seen for who they truly were. Both were constantly assessed.
A Compliment in Cobra Orchard
In the beginning of my novel Cobra Orchard, a girl is praised for her looks by an older woman who, in the same breath, asks why the girl’s mother is always so worried about her. The compliment and the threat arrive together, the way they so often do in Indian homes. In the book, beauty is never neutral. It’s something other people want to own, and the women who carry it pay for that wanting.
If you were ever told your face would decide your future, explore Cobra Orchard and meet the women whose beauty never belonged to them.
“The pretty one” is a label like any other, handed out early and rarely revised. Childhood labels stay with us for life.
Who in your family was praised for their looks, and did anyone ever ask what it cost them? Tell me in the comments.
Three women. Two timelines. One curse that refuses to die. Set in the shadow-drenched villages of Uttar Pradesh, India — across the 1970s and the early 2000s.
Cobra Orchard is a psychological thriller about secrets buried so deep, even the earth forgot them. Read Cobra Orchard on Amazon Kindle and Amazon Prime Paperback.
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Terveen Gill is a writer who has always been drawn to the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath ordinary lives. A Times of India and Chandigarh Literary Society award-winning short story writer, she is also a graphic novel script writer, indie filmmaker, and a former engineer.
Her debut psychological thriller Cobra Orchard is the culmination of that instinct: a dark, immersive novel about three women, a sinister guru, and secrets buried so deep they have begun to rot.
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