When I heard the song, “I am too Sexy” by Right Said Fred, my reaction (and fascination) at the lyrics caused a classmate to present me with the single. Extremely catchy and irreverent, the song made me laugh; it also normalized the word for me. So when my five-year-old daughter came upon the word in a racy Karishma Kapoor number and asked me what it meant, I knew exactly what to tell her. I told her that it referred to someone physically attractive. How smug I felt at having handled the situation oh-so-well!

To be honest, I had a precedent to learn from. A close friend living in the US had been asked by her elementary school-going daughter as to what ‘sex’ meant. She had heard the word on the school bus. My savvy friend explained to her that it referred to gender and she felt thrilled with herself at having demystified a potentially dangerous word. All was well until, armed with her new knowledge, the child joined in a conversation on the bus and came home quite mad at her mother because others had laughed at her. Forewarned is forearmed. To ensure that I was prepared for any such eventuality, I had worked my way through the potentially difficult words.

While I was basking in the glory of defusing a difficult situation for myself, God had other ideas. Two evenings later, my daughter started speculating on the ‘sexiness’ of the women and girls we know. I discovered the truth of ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’ as she picked people she was fond of, regardless of their physical attributes. I waited for the inevitable, “Am I sexy?” question and hastened to explain to her that she was oh-so-pretty.

Before a pride comes a fall. The next question was: “Were you ever sexy, Mamma?”