Heart of Steel

"Kathy likes romance," my sister informed me, as I searched for books to lend my grandmother's Filipino maid.

I brightened. Surely I would have a couple of Danielle Steel tearjerkers - a staple in my literary diet during my high school years - tucked away in the corner of my book drawer. It turned out that 'a couple' was a gross understatement. I pulled out book after book, my jaw slacking further and further, until a healthy pile of ten books lay before me. TEN BOOKS! After years of indulging in the likes of Cornwell, Grisham, Walker, Allende and other authors whose names I happily dropped over dinner with fellow book lovers, this revelation was flabbergasting and embarrassing. Had I read them to live vicariously, to learn a lesson or two or because I was a hopeless romantic? Suddenly, I was eager to relive my teenage years.

Picking up a book, I read the first chapter and the memories came rushing back. I had loved my Danielle Steel collection. So did my friends. These books were considered the Playboy-version of high school, but we smuggled them in and exchanged them anyway. The love affairs grew easier when I entered college. My housemate and I scoured the book rentals shops for them and I remember one evening when she walked into my room, tears streaming down her face, clutching a Steele book to her heart and wailing, "Oh my god, that was so sad!". Then we proceeded to dissect the plot, much to the disgust of our male housemates.

Each time I read a Steel book, I lingered over her description of the heroine. Gorgeous hair, multi-talented, procelain skin, model-like statistics, intelligent, able to carry a conversation on anything, brave...in other words, every single attribute that fell under the Perfection category. And I wanted desperately to be like that. I would stare in the mirror and complete imperfection would stare back at me. I used to wonder that it was like to be born beautiful and happy. I envied those fictituous characters. Looking back, it shocks me to realise that it never once occured to me that such women don't exist. I believed in them and I wanted to be them. And that was the beginning of my inferiority complex.

Then four years ago, out of the blue, I picked up the latest Steel book and couldn't get past the first chapter. It was like revisiting an old friend only to discover that she had undergone a personality transplant. I couldn't connect with Steel anymore. As I read the book I was about to lend Kathy, I suddenly understood why. I had grown up. I no longer equated physical beauty with inner happiness. I had learnt that our imperfections make us perfect and that happiness already exists within us, if we allow ourselves to see it. Danielle Steel's sugary characters and storyline no longer wove magic in my imagination. Her books fed my fantasies back then and I'm grateful for that, but I wish I had also discovered another writer whose words would have given me a good shake and burst my bubble of a perfect world.

In the ashram, we had an option of taking a spiritual name. However my American-air-stewardess roommate decided she didn't need one. A few days later she changed her mind. When I asked her why, she said, "Being in a career where looks are everything, I have been battling with my self-image for the past eight years. Yesterday, I suddenly realised that I am happy with the way I am. I have never felt so strongly and clearly about this before. It feels like I've just begun a new chapter of my life."

And that's the way I felt as I looked at my Steel collection. I had begun a new life once I stopped believing in the pictures she painted and created new pictures from life's lessons instead. Having said that, I still believe in one thing she taught me. That a fairytale love really does exist. I believe it because I'm living it and as corny as it sounds, it's exactly what she promised it would be.

So should I pick another one up?