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India's Queen of Beauty
| Article
# : |
18446 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
2,385 Words |
| Author
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Elizabeth Sherman
Elizabeth Sherman edits Biographical Memoirs at the National
Academy of Sciences. She formerly wrote a column on
archaeology for the Cairo Gazette. |
Shortly before leaving for India, I discovered disturbing lines radiating from my mouth and nose and began seriously to consider moisturizing cream. This seemed the time for the old collagen try, but since nothing I had ever heard of was reputed to do much good, I resigned myself to the inevitable wear and tear. Once in New Delhi, however, the endless parade of beautiful women with glossy hair, sloe eyes, and clear cinnamon complexions got to me. Tired of being upstaged, I decided to act. To find out their secret, I resolved to go right to source: Shahnaz.
After an endless ride past rows of expensive villas (the beggars get you at the stoplights), I alit before a high fence guarding Shahnaz's main salon. Walking down a path lined with large palm fronds, I came to a door that read, “Enter here and find out how beautiful you really are.”
Feeling a bit like Alice in Wonderland, I did just that, and was confronted by three women seated behind a low desk who looked more like a Ph.D. review committee than beauty salon receptionists. Beyond them everything glittered. I felt I had stumbled into a troll-princess's palace beneath the sea.
Dim lights and a black-mirrored ceiling heightened this initial impression, and polished marble floors, Greek pillars, and an elaborate central fountain confirmed it. As I sat down to wait, I noticed a mannequin on a low-backed vanity chair. A large chest of mysterious vials open before her she seemed to be gazing at the reflection of her varicolored metallic hair in the mirrored wall Potted plants blossomed about us both and I realized that what I had taken for a fountain was actually a spiral staircase whose cut-glass rails ascended to some unimaginable heaven above.
The Inner Sanctum
A pretty young girl in designer jeans led me to Shahnaz's office, where the lady herself reclined on a false zebra-skin couch. (The real thing lay beneath her feet.) With the exception of Shahnaz, everything in the room was red, black, or white. In one corner an enameled naked black girl held up a lighted globe. A shiny Pharaoh's head peered down on us from the étagère along a mirrored wall.
“Who is to say that beauty is not the most important thing in a woman's life?” Shahnaz opened our conversation. Eyeing the overweight, overpainted matron before me dubiously, I pondered this too, but it was clear she believed every word.
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