And yes, Nilgiri won the cup.
As the autumn wore on, I tried to motivate myself academically by concentrating on a new goal: going to Australia to study. Of the career paths that were normal for my family to consider—doctor, engineer, businessperson—with my affinity for numbers and my love of math and physics (well, my love of them until returning to India), engineering appealed to me most. I’d always been fascinated by the physics of modern technology—ships, trains, computers, televisions, and planes. Planes, perhaps, especially, since the time I’d flown alone on a military transport to Leh when I was nine and my father was transferred there. It was my first time flying and I don’t think I ever quite got over my disbelief that something so huge and so heavy could actually stay in the air, and eventually I began to refine the idea of “engineering” into “aeronautical engineering.”
It was an aeronautical engineering program at a college in Melbourne, Australia, that had piqued my interest, and in order to complete the scholarship application for it, I needed to include a passport-type photo. There happened to be a small photo studio at Butler Plaza, an outdoor mall near our house, the sort of place where a beauty salon was next to a fast-food shop that was next to a music store. Everyone in Bareilly hung out at Butler Plaza in the evenings: the cool kids would be by the music store; newlyweds and couples would be near the restaurants. My parents would go almost every night after dinner to get paan, a preparation combining betel leaf, areca nut, and optional other ingredients that’s a bit like chewing tobacco without the tobacco.
The photographer at Suri Photo Studio took a batch of photos of me, and after reviewing the proofs, he asked if he could take some modeling shots. “Of course!” I said, offering to go home and get more clothes immediately. When I called Mom, super-excited about the opportunity, her cooler head prevailed. Like any good parent, she injected a dose of reality into the situation, warning me that it could be a shady situation. We compromised: I could get the additional shots on a later date as long as she accompanied me. And those additional photos were the ones that Sid had Mom send off to the Miss India contest not long afterward. Those shots still adorn the Suri Photo Studio walls in Bareilly.
Even though Sid was the one pushing for it, I think one of the reasons Mom agreed to send my pictures to Miss India was because she could see how anxious I was about my boards and felt that some kind of break in the action and pressure was needed. At this point, I was certain I would fail the boards. I took extra classes and worked really hard. My cousin Kunal, who we call Sunny, even flew down and stayed with us for two months to help me with science and math. But still I was struggling. I told my parents that I might want to take a gap year so that I could devote more time to catching up academically.
In November of twelfth grade, about a month and a half after Mom and Sid submitted the photos, I was sitting at home eating lunch on a quick break between school and tutoring when I received the call that would change my life. Engrossed in the old Bollywood movie Mera Naam Joker, I picked up the ringing phone, eyes still glued to the television screen.
“Hi, this is Ela from Femina magazine,” I heard the businesslike voice on the other end of the line say. “You’ve qualified on the short list for the Miss India pageant representing North India, and the preliminary round is the day after tomorrow in Delhi. This is the address.” I scribbled down what she said. “Be there at eight a.m. sharp, and make sure you bring a swimsuit and heels.” She hung up. Clearly she had about a million of these phone calls to make.
I was stunned. Having no idea that Mom and Sid had submitted an application, in my ridiculously innocent mind I thought that the pageant people had somehow heard about my local May Queen win. “Oh my God, Mom! I’m so popular in Bareilly that even the Miss India pageant knows who I am!”
Once Mom explained the situation, I realized what an opportunity I had been given. The question was: Who was going to tell Dad that I would be participating in a beauty pageant in New Delhi right before my pre-board exams? The pre-boards were in January and the actual boards were in March. I needed to do well at them to get a good job and secure my future, because people in my family were respected professionals with conventional, sensible careers. They did not parade around in swimsuits and high heels.
Ever the brilliant strategist, Mom came up with a plan. “When he comes home today, just be really nice,” she said. “No attitude. I’ll put some music on, we’ll all have dinner together, and then you’ll go up to your room and I’ll deal with it. I’ll talk to him over champagne.” Champagne was always involved whenever Mom had to convince Dad to agree to something, and this night was no exception. Dad’s only stipulation was that I not go alone. Which meant that Mom would go with me to the preliminary competition. But first we needed to pack and get ourselves to New Delhi, India’s capital, which was fortunately reachable by train in about five hours.
Oddly, what I felt first and foremost was not excitement but relief: relief from the pressure of studying and the pressure of the looming exams. While I was happy, of course, about making the preliminaries, I didn’t take my chances for advancement seriously; there was simply no world in which I would make it beyond this preliminary round to the next round of the Miss India pageant. There was no real reason to be nervous, nor did the opportunity spark my inherent sense of competitiveness—yet.
While beauty pageants are often viewed as superficial in the U.S., in a lot of other countries they are generally more highly respected. From what I’ve observed, pageants around the world tend to emphasize not only looks, as some American pageants seem to do, but also personality and eloquence. You need to be able to be confident and command attention when you speak, to know what you’re talking about and be well versed in the subjects you’re addressing. For sure, you have to be a certain height and a certain weight (their standards), but if you impress the judges with intelligence, confidence, and compassion, that’s what they’ll focus on.
When I was growing up, women who became Miss India were honored and respected. I remember how much I admired the first Indian to be crowned Miss Universe—Sushmita Sen—who won in 1994 when she was eighteen and I was twelve. She was a self-made girl who ended up winning the Miss India and Miss Universe pageants in no small part because of her incredible ability to form thoughts in commanding English, which wasn’t even her first language. The year she won, I made a collage for my room of her newspaper clippings because it was such a big deal that an Indian girl had won the Miss Universe crown. The icing on the cake for my country that year was that Aishwarya Rai, another Indian, was crowned Miss World. A harbinger of things to come, perhaps?
Mom and I reached Delhi the day before the preliminary rounds, and Mom took me to a salon to get me zhuzhed. It was like a makeover montage in a romantic comedy: I got my unruly hair blown out, my thick eyebrows threaded, and a rare and luxurious mani-pedi. After more than a year of largely being an academic cockroach, I could feel the weight of my stress lifting to the point where I was almost lighthearted.
On the Big Day, I woke up at the crack of dawn, did my makeup—which at that point consisted only of mascara, lots of eyeliner, lipstick, and a dab of powder—put on an outfit that Mom and I had spent hours of deliberation on (can’t remember what it was now), and walked into the lobby of the Ashoka Hotel with Mom at my side. I felt super-relaxed and confident about my new look. But that feeling lasted only until the hotel doors flew open and a bevy of impossibly tall, gorgeous girls entered the lobby and floated toward the elevators, leaving me in a cloud of their perfume and my own insecurity.
I turned to Mom. “Let’s go home.”
“Let’s go shopping,” my mom responded, addressing a fixable problem we’d both just become acutely aware of upon seeing those fashionably attired beauties I’d be competing against. We made a quick dash to a nearby store, upgraded my outfit to something more appropriately sophisticated and glamorous, and returned to the hote
l lobby to wait for my name to be called. When it was, I went upstairs to a hotel suite where the preliminary session was taking place. There was a large living room that had been cleared out to hold the panel of judges. Pradeep Guha, who at that time was the national director of the Femina Miss India pageant and the president of Bennett, Coleman and Company, publisher of The Times of India and Femina magazine, which runs the Miss India pageant, was there. So was Sathya Saran, the editor of Femina; two other people from The Times of India—the biggest newspaper in the country and the main sponsor and owner of the Miss India franchise; and a popular Delhi model. They sat behind a long table chatting to one another as I was shown into a bedroom.
The room was overflowing with beautiful girls. They were lounging on the bed, perched on the windowsill, busy in the bathroom shaving their legs and jockeying for position in front of one single mirror. Ela and another woman from the pageant were calmly taking height and weight measurements. I could make out snippets of conversation in the cacophony. Savvy was talking about her new Parachute hair commercial, Mona described her latest Gujarati magazine cover, Lakshmi gave the details of her new sari campaign. Many of the girls seemed to know one another. I knew no one, and at seventeen, I was the youngest of the candidates. The last thing I’d done was go to chemistry class. My only real qualification was having won the May Queen Ball, where there were roughly sixty people in the audience. Millions would be watching the television broadcast of the Miss India contest.
After our measurements were taken, we were walked out, one by one, in front of the judges in the clothes we’d arrived in. First we stated our names, then our aspirations. When I answered, I was quickly asked if I was American; since I’d just come back from the U.S., I still had a full-blown American accent. I was certain that I’d be voted out after that round because everybody else was speaking Indian English, which is British sounding and in my mind far more chic than American English.
When another group of girls was brought up to the hotel suite, my group was dismissed. We all took the elevator to the lobby and went looking for our respective families as soon as the doors opened. As Mom listened to every detail that spilled forth from my mouth about the preceding hour or so, I could practically hear the gears in her brain turning.
Preparation. Logical thought. Strategy. This was always the Chopra Family Plan. Whenever I had a decision to make or was worried about something, we would talk about every possible scenario and outcome and then strategize a plan around it. That day was no different. Mom and I sat for a few hours talking through every possibility as if we were solving a math equation with multiple variables and unknowns. “What’s the worst that can happen?” she asked me. “That you don’t make it to the next round? If so, we get some ice cream, take a train, and go home. At least you got your eyebrows done and your hair will still look great. But if you do make it to the next round, then we need to think about what makes you better than everyone else in the room.”
I thought about the incredibly gorgeous girls upstairs, girls who were far more beautiful and sophisticated and experienced than I was. “Nothing about me is better than these girls.”
“You can articulate your thoughts in English better than most people, and that could be a strength,” she said. I thought about that a moment. For the most part, the pageant was being conducted in English, so maybe I did have an advantage there, since I’d grown up speaking Hindi and English in equal measure. (If a girl wasn’t comfortable speaking English, she could speak in Hindi, though that was an option few contestants chose.) “And you probably know more about current events and what’s going on in the world.” I was suddenly grateful for the rule in our family that every night around the dinner table we’d talk not only about my parents’ work and Sid’s and my school but, as we got older, about global events, too. It was my parents’ way of giving us a broader sense of the world.
A few minutes later, I learned I’d made it into the second round. Once I was back upstairs with the girls who had also made the cut, the boost I’d experienced from advancing to round two dissolved instantly. No matter how good my English was or how well versed I was in world events, it wouldn’t help me now: we were told to put on our swimsuits and heels.
This made no sense to me. Who does this? Who struts around in a swimsuit and heels in a hotel room? It’s not natural! I’d seen girls do it onstage in pageants before, but man, it did not feel good. I’d always been a tomboy and so I had scars on my legs from tree climbing and falls and bike crashes. I had stretch marks and dry skin. I was self-conscious about my behind and my back. (Naturally, if I couldn’t see a particular part of my body, I didn’t want anyone else seeing it, either.) I was so nervous during this round that instead of sticking my butt out and sucking my stomach in the way I would now, my butt was clenched tight, like a dog with its tail tucked in. Somehow I managed to walk in front of the judges without betraying my discomfort, and even managed to have a semi-normal conversation with them about my life’s aspirations.
Judge: “So, Priyanka Chopra: What do you want to be?”
Me: “I want to be an aeronautical engineer.”
Judge: “That’s great! Now turn around and walk back toward the door.”
I did as requested, thinking, I hate this! Smile!
That short walk felt like it would never end. I made it back to my starting point, then spun around as quickly as possible so I could untuck my tail and end my torture. Convinced I wouldn’t make it to the third round, I relaxed enough to be a little more myself.
“I hope I get the opportunity to compete further!” I blurted. At least that’s what I think I said. There were smiles, maybe even some laughter. Whatever I lacked in the perfect skin and perfect butt department may have been salvaged by my burst of spontaneous enthusiasm.
When I was back downstairs again with Mom, I told her about the swimsuit and the heels and my clenched butt and how much I’d hated that round. It hadn’t seemed to be an issue for the models among us (almost everyone else); they were comfortable in their own skins, not just in bathing suits, but in anything they wore. They made gliding across a room in a slightly unreal situation look so natural, but clearly it wasn’t natural to me at that point.
Mom was confused. “What are you talking about? You wear a bathing suit all the time on the beach, in the pool, at the club,” she pointed out. “You were on your swim team at school. It didn’t matter then, so why does it matter now?”
That made me think. She was right, sort of. Not completely, but sort of. I decided to let my discomfort go, at least for the time being.
I looked around the hotel lobby at the girls sitting with their families and friends and saw Miss Chandigarh, who was from a city in the northern state of Punjab. She was a beautiful, light-skinned girl, so that was another thing that was playing in my head: I’m dark, I’m dusky, and that’s not beautiful. When I was growing up, my father’s brother used to call me Kaali, which means “black.” “Kaali’s here!” he’d say when the whole family got together. (With the exception of my father, my brother, and me, most of my family is lighter-skinned.) It was intended as a joke, but given the premium put on light skin in Indian society and in many others around the world, it didn’t feel like one to me. At thirteen, I started making homemade “fairness” concoctions, mixing talcum powder with various creams to try to change my skin tone. In fact, I continued to use skin-lightening products, whether homemade or store-bought, until a realization I had some years into the future. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Finally, someone from The Times of India came down with a list of the ten girls who had made it to the next and final round of the day. I was shocked when Miss Chandigarh’s name did not get called. Let me repeat: Miss Chandigarh’s name did not get called. But my name did.
At nine o’clock that night, the ten finalists of the day went back upstairs to wait for the last Q&A session. We were all exhausted, having
been there for thirteen hours at that point. One by one we were called in. I was one of the last to go before the judges, and when it was all over and I was packing up to leave for good, I asked one of them, with what I now recognize as astounding naïveté, if I could have his number. Just in case I needed to get in touch.
“I have my board exams coming up, and if this is not going to happen, I’d just like to know,” I said. “I don’t think I can wait for the official letter. I’d rather you just text me.”
I know, exceptionally millennial. (Which, by the way, I am. By the skin of my teeth.)
It turns out that I’d asked Pradeep Guha himself, the publisher of Femina and the director of the pageant, for his number. He laughed at my audacity. Apparently, he found my confidence so amusing that he wrote his actual name and number down on a card and gave it to me. “Text me if you need anything.”
When I met up with Mom downstairs and showed her the card, she looked at the name, picked up a copy of Femina, and pointed to the masthead. Oops.
* * *
BACK IN BAREILLY, I returned to my normal life, or tried to, anyway. None of my friends and no one at school knew that I had entered this pageant. Life appeared to go on as usual. I continued prepping for my exams—this was November and my pre-boards were in two months; my board exams were two months after that—but I was on pins and needles, dying to know what was going to happen, how the rest of my life (or at least the next few weeks and months) would unfold. If I didn’t make it to the pageant, I’d have to take the boards and I was terrified, knowing I would fail. So after four or five unbearable days without any word, I took matters into my own hands and I texted Pradeep Guha. After all, he’d given me his number and told me to text him if I needed anything.
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