Kusum Kumari was a good girl with a capital G. To Kusum being good was no effort at all. In fact, she could not help being good. Although she was only eighteen she looked twenty—eight, and her manner was that ofa middle-aged woman, in her forties. She was short and somewhat fat. Her dark, oval face was spotted with darker small pox marks. On her stubby nose was a pair of gold-rimmed glasses whose thick lenses magnified her eyes to bovine proportions. The hair on her head was short and sparse. This she oiled till it looked as if it was glued to her scalp. It was tightly plaited at the back, stretching up her forehead and arching her eyebrows. As for Kusum’s figure, it was, euphemistically put, filled up. One could not tell her bust or belly or behind distinctly. They were all contained in one squatty frame which Kusum draped in a simple white sari.

But Kusum made up for all that by being good and clever. She worked hard and had a string of first classes to her credit. Her glasses and her figure bore testimony to the many hours spent over books. Kusum was no trouble to her parents. She got up early and cycled to her college. She came back from college. She had no engagements. She had no distractions and she did not distract anybody.

Kusum had no use for modern fashions, nor did she have any interest in boys. She shunned sex. She had no use for make-up and cosmetics. She believed that people should be content with the skins God gave them, even if they were pock-marked. She believed in virtue and kindness. She believed in work and propriety. She believed that a woman’s place was in the kitchen. She believed that girls should never be seen with their heads uncovered. Kusum was popular with old men and women, but young men took no notice of her. So she came to believe in the values nature had unkindly forced upon her.

On Kusum’s nineteenth birthday some college girls sent her a lipstick and some rouge as a present. Kusum took this as a personal insult. She hid the things in a corner of her drawer and coldly announced that she had thrown them out of the window. She turned the face of her mirror towards the wall and decided to squash the desire to see herself.

Kusum hardly ever laughed. After her nineteenth birthday, she seldom smiled. She became more earnest, grimly earnest. She knew it made her uglier, but she could not help it. In any case, since no man ever took notice of her, there was no point in trying to look attractive. And since she looked unattractive, no man took notice of her.

Kusum’s university life came to an end in April when she took her degree examination. Other girls came out of the examination hall and went on a binge with their friends and relations. Nobody came to meet Kusum and she collected her bicycle with the usual matter-of—factnes. Other girls could look forward to matrimony. Kusum had nothing to look forward to—nothing but her sparsely furnished room with her mirror facing the wall and a few textbooks.

Kusum cycled home with her mind a complete void. She was alone on the road and could afford to lose herself in thinking of nothing. She took the turning home on the wrong side of the road, and before she could collect her thoughts she ran into a young hawker with a basket of oranges on his head. She fell on him and then rolled over on the road. Her glasses were smashed. The bicycle was on the pavement. The hawker was just a bit shaken—not hurt. His basket of oranges was all right too. He smiled pleasantly.

‘Miss Sahib, you should keep to your side of the road.’

Kusum was angry and the hawker’s tone made her angrier.

‘Are you blind? Can’t you see where you are going?’ she shrieked hoarsely.

The hawker looked around. The road was deserted. His smile became roguish.

‘No, Miss Sahib, I am not blind, but I am one-eyed.’

He shut one of his eyes in a long, lecherous wink and made the sound of a loud kiss.

Kusum’s face coloured. She was furious. She picked up the bicycle and got on hurriedly. In a hoarse voice she swore at the hawker.

‘Pig. . . ass.’

The hawker was not offended. He seemed to be enjoying the situation.

‘Ass?’ he questioned, lustfully winking with the other eye. ‘Have you seen one?’

He held his right arm at the elbow with his left and moved it vigorously to demonstrate. Kusum was flustered—she had never been accosted before. She rushed home—rushed to her room and buried her face in a pillow.

Kusum lay buried in her pillow and her thoughts for several hours. The wrath disappeared but the picture of the rascally hawker winking and making lewd suggestions stuck in her mind. Nobody had ever done that to her before. Did the hawker find her attractive?

The sun went down and the pale moonlight crept into the room and lit the bed she lay on. Kusum was thinking of the hawker—now with tenderness and regret. ‘Maybe’, she said to herself, ‘maybe’. She got up and opened the drawer where her lipstick and rouge lay hidden. She patted her cheeks with the rouge. She turned the face of the mirror towards her and pouted her lips to put on the lipstick. She undid her hair and shook her head to loosen it. The hair fell in profusion about her shoulders. She picked a rose bud from a vase and stuck it in her hair. She stepped back and tilted her head sideways to admire herself.

‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who is the fairest one of all?’

An attractive dark-eyed girl with a mass of tumbled black hair adorned by a rose bud smiled back at her—‘I should say so!’