I spent a quiet New Year in Goa — the land of my ancestors. Even as the Year of the Snake ended, I found myself still shedding – Skin.Hair…and Stories.
For sixteen years, I have lived by a ritual: choosing one word to guide the year ahead.
For 2025, the word that came to me — or perhaps chose me — was Ancestors. I did not know then how deeply that word would ask me to descend.
This past year has been a journey of unearthing, the scars my ancestors carried, the silences they survived, the stories they buried – just to keep living.
I did not try to fix them. I learned to witness them. To hold them up in the sun. To let them breathe and do the hard work al this required.
This is the closing of one such story.
The Stage I Never Imagined
On 22nd December 2025, on a cold winter night in Jaipur, I was crowned 2nd Runner-Up, Mrs India 2025, with the title Ms Finesse.
This was a feat I could never have imagined attempting — let alone achieving. Those who know me will understand why.
Beauty. Makeup, Dressing up. Being seen on a stage, evaluated alongside others? An absolute no. By me for me.
Or so I thought.
The Quiet Rebellion
About five years ago, during a group relations conference (GRC), someone reflected something simple back to me, “You only introduce yourself as Rhea. Many people don’t even know you’re Dsouza.”
I stopped in my tracks..because something about was uncomfortable and true. As I do with all feedback, I took it in — and sat with it.
They were right.
I had been quietly rebelling against my own surname.
My maternal grandparents were missionaries. I grew up with a deep dissonance around the idea that people were persuaded — sometimes pressured — to change their religion under the guise of good intentions like food or education.
To me, help could be offered without conversion. Humanitarianism did not require belief.
And so, somewhere along the way, I rebelled. I follow many others religions, became a teetotaller a vegetarian etc. I tried to “right a wrong” I believed my forefathers had committed. Needless to say..I didn’t do it in a conscious way.. But doing the deeper inner work has been revealing my patterns to me.
Until one day, it struck me – I had only inherited one version of what being a Christian meant.
And I had never truly asked where my story began.
Lucy
My search took me through conversations, archives, family lore — and eventually, to Portugal, where my ancestors had once fled.
And there, I found her.
My great-great-great-grandmother. I will call her Lucy, because I never learned her real name.
Lucy was said to be extraordinarily beautiful. Beauty, in my family, has always been a revered benchmark. One that never seemed to include me.
Lucy fell in love and married my great-great-great-grandfather. For a while, life was peaceful — until a powerful king of the time saw her and desired her.
He proposed to her. Lucy was horrified. She told him she was married. The king was undeterred. In those times, multiple marriages were allowed. Religion bent easily to power and convenience.
Lucy said NO. yeah she was strong also.
Again. And again.
Her refusal bruised the king’s ego. What began as desire became pursuit. Lucy and her husband fled from place to place, trying to protect their marriage, their lives, their love.
Finally, in desperation, they escaped India by ship. The ship carried them to Portugal. There, they encountered Christianity — and with it, the radical idea that marriage was singular, sacred, protected.
And so…they converted…willingly, choice fully.
Not for power. Not for education or food or a better life. Not for privilege.
But for love.
The Story That Changed Everything
When I learned this, something in my head and body.. finally settled, I could breathe deeply , again. The story I had carried — that Christianity was forced upon my lineage — cracked open.
The genesis of the story changed everything.
I could finally say it aloud, without rebellion or disgust: I am Rhea Dsouza. And I am proud.
Lucy, her husband and their children eventually returned to Goa, where they settled. And the rest, as they say, became history.
The Curse That Travelled Through Blood
But Lucy’s story carried another imprint. An unconscious message passed through generations of women:
Beauty is not safe.
To be beautiful is to be hunted.
To be seen is to be at risk.
That message lived dormant in my DNA.
I grew up a tomboy. I rejected pink, jewellery, makeup. I declared I would rather be strong and smart than beautiful.
Beauty felt dangerous. Exposure felt unsafe.
I didn’t know why. I didn’t know I was running.
The Return
As I travelled to Jaipur as a finalist for Mrs India 2025, during the long two-hour drive, to the palace where the event was to happen…something dawned on me with breath-taking clarity.
Lucy and her husband had once lived in Rajasthan.
They had fled this land to protect their love — and her beauty.
And now,500 years later, I was returning. To this land .and on my way t a Place. The Irony that I did not need a king to go to a palace, was not lost to me.
And here is the funny detail.. throughout this journey of 5 days….I kept getting referred to as “The Goan Girl” 🙂 . The universe has a sense of humour
Not running. Returning.Reclaiming.
To reclaim ground on behalf of Lucy. On behalf of every woman in my lineage who learned to hide. On behalf of all those who believed beauty required escape.
I had run a long, very long race. Four hundred and fifty years long.
And I had arrived.
Being Seen
On finale night, as I stepped through the curtain into the lights — into full visibility — time seemed to pause.
I could feel them. Hands on my back. Presence behind my breath.
All the women who had learned to disappear were standing with me.
That stage was not just mine.
It was a reclamation.
The old story — that beauty is unsafe,
that being seen is dangerous —
ended there.
With me.
This is not a pageant story.
It is a lineage story. A body story. A remembering.
Some endings are quiet. Some are public.
This one needed a Stage.
I am very grateful to Deepali and her team and the Mrs. India Pageant for being the container in which stories like mine had a chance to be seen, to be witnessed to be changed and reclaimed…
Some forever.
I stand where women once fled,
rooted where fear once ruled.
What was hidden has learned to breathe in the open,
and what survived me will never have to run again.
~ Rhea Dsouza
