Makeup-shakeup Beauty-sheauty – mentioning it is my duty!

Pristine beauty-sheauty hai bakwaas,
yeh sab to hai ji makeup ka kamaal!

Translation:
Pristine beauty is nothing but hogwash;
Makeup created this whole look, by God!

Use the word pristine in a thirteen word story, she said, and I started scratching my head.

Right now, my head stands at the threshold of a new hairless existence, and wifey is becoming overly possessive of my hair. She has a long list of dos and don’ts, a hand-me-down from her mom. The fact that on a full-moon night, my father-in-law’s head can confuse a moon-gazer, is beside the point. “He still had full head of hair when he had turned 50,” wifey insists.

Snipping a long yarn short, wifey doesn’t want me to leap into the deserted lands of bald pates, nor does she want to let the world see my grays. So when I sat scratching my head, she decided to broach the subject again, “You are so handsome and if you colored your hair, you’d look not a day older than 28! And stop scratching your head. You’ll make the hair fall off!”
“They are rooted in my scalp,” I retorted, “they won’t fall off! And I don’t want to color my hair. I want to keep those grays. One of my blogging friends told me that they’d make me look distinguished!”
“Distinguished?” wifey snickered, flaring her nostrils and pursing her lips. “You trust them more than you trust me? I know more about make up and looking good than you do, don’t I?”

I saw the catch. Plain and clear. I also saw the answer to Rashmi’s riddle.

Pristine beauty-sheauty hai bakwaas,
yeh sab to hai ji makeup ka kamaal!

Translation:
Pristine beauty is nothing but hogwash;
Makeup created this whole look, by God!

On hindsight, I shouldn’t have recited it aloud. But I did. Earlier, the Sunday breakfast plans included mooli ke paranthe with butter and tomato-chutney. That was before I wrote the thirteen-word story for Rashmi. Now we’ll be having bread and scrambled eggs.