Cinderella’s Feet

 

A Fairy-Tale Mystery Nobody Thought to Investigate

“Bhaiya, did Cinderella have some serious problem with her feet?”

I looked at Othoi in surprise.

Of all the questions that generations of readers have asked about Cinderella, this was certainly a new one.

For centuries, children have grown up with the story of the poor girl, the wicked stepmother, the fairy godmother, the pumpkin carriage, the midnight deadline and, of course, the famous glass slipper. We inherited Cinderella through Bengali translations; Othoi’s generation, thanks to English-medium schooling, reads the story directly in English. And what magnificent books children have now—glossy pages, dazzling illustrations, princesses glowing on every cover.

Cinderella has probably been retold thousands of times. There are books, cartoons, ballets, stage plays and films in almost every major language. Children love it. Adults continue to remake it.

And like all respectable fairy tales, it asks us to accept a generous amount of nonsense without complaint.

A pumpkin becomes a carriage?

Fine.

Mice become horses?

Perfectly reasonable.

A fairy godmother appears from nowhere and performs instant haute couture?

Why not?

A dress disappears at midnight while one glass slipper somehow survives the magic?

No questions, please. It is a fairy tale.

But my ten-year-old granddaughter had spotted a problem that generations of literary critics, filmmakers and fairy-tale enthusiasts had apparently overlooked.

Cinderella’s feet.

“Why do you think there was something wrong with her feet?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

Othoi looked at me as though the answer were embarrassingly obvious.

“Because her shoe didn’t fit anybody else. Don’t shoe shops have different sizes for different people?”

I had no immediate defence.

It was an excellent question.

Think about it.

How many shoe sizes do we actually need to accommodate humanity? Twenty? Twenty-five? Perhaps a few more if we stretch the range from very small children to exceptionally large adult feet.

Yet billions of people somehow manage to buy shoes.

Walk into a shoe shop and nobody says:

“Sorry, madam. Your feet are unique in the entire kingdom. We must alert the Royal Palace immediately.”

Human feet vary, certainly. Some are narrow, some broad, some long, some short. But millions of people share approximately the same shoe size.

Apparently not in Cinderella’s kingdom.

The prince travelled across the land carrying one glass slipper, trying it on every eligible young woman he could find.

Too big.

Too small.

Wrong foot.

Next!

One woman after another failed the Great Royal Foot Examination.

And then Cinderella appeared.

Perfect fit.

Now statistically, this should make us suspicious.

Was Cinderella really the only woman in the entire kingdom with that foot size?

Not one other girl?

Not one cousin?

Not one unusually petite duchess?

Not even somebody whose foot could be squeezed into the slipper with a determined royal assistant and a little soap?

The traditional interpretation, of course, is romantic: the slipper belonged only to Cinderella because Cinderella was the prince’s one true love.

Othoi’s interpretation was considerably more scientific.

If the shoe fits nobody else, perhaps the problem is not with everybody else.

Perhaps the problem is with Cinderella.

Or, more precisely:

Cinderella’s feet.

Maybe one foot was unusually narrow.

Maybe her toes had some exotic geometry.

Perhaps she possessed a foot shape unknown to podiatry.

There may have been an undiagnosed congenital anomaly.

Who knows?

Fairy-tale medicine was not particularly advanced.

Suddenly, Cinderella stops looking like merely a romantic fantasy and begins to resemble an intriguing case report:

“A Rare Anatomical Variation of the Female Foot Associated with Sudden Royal Marriage: A Case Study.”

The abstract practically writes itself.

Background: A young woman presented with bilateral feet apparently incompatible with the footwear dimensions of all other women in the kingdom.

Intervention: Nationwide glass-slipper fitting.

Outcome: Identification of patient followed by immediate elevation in socioeconomic and royal status.

Conclusion: Unusual foot morphology may have unexpected benefits.

And that is where Othoi’s question becomes wonderfully dangerous.

Children have a habit of doing this.

Adults learn to accept stories.

Children interrogate them.

We hear that Sleeping Beauty slept for a hundred years and think, “How romantic.”

A child may ask, “Didn’t she need food?”

We accept Rapunzel lowering several metres of hair from a tower.

A child might reasonably ask about the tensile strength of the human scalp.

We admire Superman flying through the atmosphere.

Someone eventually asks what happens to his clothes.

Fairy tales survive because we agree not to inspect them too closely.

Then along comes a ten-year-old with one perfectly logical question, and the entire kingdom collapses.

I had known Cinderella’s story for decades.

Never once had I wondered about her shoe size.

Othoi needed only a few seconds.

And perhaps she was right.

Maybe Cinderella did have a serious problem with her feet.

But then again, fairy tales are generous places.

In ordinary life, an unusual foot might mean a visit to a podiatrist and difficulty finding comfortable shoes.

In Cinderella’s world, it produced a prince, a palace and a crown.

So perhaps we should revise the moral of the story.

Cinderella did not become a queen despite her strange feet.

She may have become a queen because of them.

Sometimes, it seems, even a “serious problem” has its advantages.