I was thinking of Cleopatra in her tub of asses’ milk as I lay floating amidst rose petals, basking in the gentle glow of aromatic candles. She might have been the Queen of the Nile, but surely she could not have had it so good. Who needed asses’ milk anyway! It was probably as smelly as the malai the women in my family rubbed on their arms and faces every day to get glowing skin.

My kids had gifted me a day out at the spa for my birthday and so there I was queen for the day. I had been anointed in scented oil, massaged and bathed. The beauticians were waiting in the wings to pedicure, manicure and coif me.

I could soak as long as I liked and bask away to glory. It had all been paid for. Including the plastic smiles of my attendants. And I was loving it all. Because finally I had learnt to chill! “Just chill Ma,” my kids had said when they gifted me my day. “Pamper yourself. It’s the in thing now.”

But obviously pampering yourself was not new. Women have always been pampering themselves. Imagine the lifestyle of the women who lived so long, long ago and used all those exquisitely designed hand mirrors, combs, foot scrubbers, kajal sticks, perfume vials and powder boxes. Were they rich and privileged noble women? Or courtesans? Or queens? Or did these exquisite pieces of art belong to the cosmetic kits of ordinary women?

Surely ordinary women could not have had the time or space to anoint themselves and make themselves up as depicted in our temple sculptures and dance forms. So were those elaborate toilet rituals dreamt up by voyeuristic sculptors of yore?

All women know that when a society turns conservative, they become first targets of attack. It’s not just the women of Afghanistan who were Talibanised. A woman’s right to look good is always the very first right to go. On our own very democratic soil, even as I chilled in my tub, women were being pressurised to dress in a certain manner or follow some totally irrational and outdated code of behaviour. The ultimate victims of this retrograde attitude were, as always, the innocent women trapped in a society they could not afford to defy.

And there lay the irony. On the one hand our society ‘recognised’ the right of women to look good. We had a plethora of commercially savvy beauty parlours, spas and grooming institutes beckoning us to come and chill out and rediscover ourselves. And on the other hand we had our moral brigade exhorting us to dress modestly and stay rooted to our traditional values. What traditional values I wondered? Obviously they did not mean the traditional values depicted on the temple frescos across our country. Beauty, as we all know by now, is in the eye not just of the beholder, but also of the enforcer.

So even in the 2000s, we have had strange situations. An item number girl was actually forced to explain to the society at large that the ‘thongs’ showing above her low-cut jeans in the video were just pieces of tape stuck on for effect. Cheerleaders imported from the US were made to apologetically cover up the very limbs they had been groomed to expose. And an upcoming actress had to apologise for appearing at a public function wearing a skimpy dress which would have been, not just acceptable but desirable, if she had worn it on screen.