Skip to main content

Two Alike Teens

I was sitting in the lobby reading a book waiting for J to finish her lesson. Across from me on the sofa sat two young girls. I find it hard to guess the age of children these days, thanks to precocious puberty. Dressed almost identically in tees and shorts out of a summer fashion catalog, chattering in an intonation so similar that it sounded like one voice rather than two - Tweedledee was Tweedledum except for one detail.

The girl on the right had remarkably long and slender legs - the kind that walk the ramp. Almost reading my thoughts a woman sitting next to me said to her "You should go to New York - that's the place for fashion models. I have a friend who has a friend who knows Bill Blass and Gloria Vanderbilt." I had intercepted an on-going conversation having just arrived at the scene. The girl talked about some of the try-outs she had been too. I saw now that her face was very pretty too and unlike her companion she was painfully aware of the fact.

I noticed the many dissimilarities that had escaped me at first glance. The other girl had the radiant freshness and innocence of early youth - unadorned by self-consciousness. She wore her hair tied back and no make-up. The wannabe fashion-model had a distinct coiffure that was very becoming of her as was her make-up. Where one sought the limelight, the other was more reticent. Not so alike after all.

I wondered where these girls would be ten years from now. One a glamour model and the other a suburban soccer mom ? That would be overly simplistic. J was done and we were ready to leave. I realized that I had not gone very far with my book. Now I would have to wait another week to get the time to catch up.

Labels:

Comments

DilettanteMoi said…
nice observations!! but for all you know.. the fashion model wannabe might learn a little ahead of the game that life is not all about looking beautiful and try to make something meaningful of her life and the other might just have too smooth a life and never know what it really means!!
11:31 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more