``Can you believe it?'' my dad said early last April, his voice jubilant over the telephone wires. ``Your mother has so much hair she needs to use a hairbrush.''

Last Valentine's Day, while she was ravaged by the side effects of chemotherapy, my mother didn't have more than two defiant weeds of hair poking through her scalp.

``She doesn't cover her head with a scarf anymore,'' my dad said, and has a hairstyle much like the late Princess Di -- a rare look for older women in southern India who typically wear their hair long and coiled up in a bun.

My mom is rotund, slow and 73. She always wears a sari, but this seemed like a good time to encourage something different.

``Ma, how about trying on pants and a T-shirt when you visit the U.S.?'' I nudged over the phone.

``I would, but your sister says I'm too short.'' she said.

That's my mom, born in 1930 in a lush, remote village in southern India, raised on abundant coconut and rice plantations, married off at 14 to a man she had never set her eyes on until the day of her wedding, an unabashed lover of the material, a proud purveyor of the eclectic, a pooh-pooher of Givenchy, a total sucker for Chanel, the Imelda Marcos of handbags who could have become a fashion critic -- had she only been born in an haute couture cradle in Paris.

In their 60 years of marriage, my parents have learned each other's weaknesses. My father maintains my mother possesses the mind of a grasshopper, exchanges anything she buys at least five times, bathes in atrocious perfume and can't file a telephone number in a Rolodex.

Dad has his fair share of chinks, too, according to my mother. He still hasn't bought her that diamond choker. He can't walk without tripping. And he gets monthly 17-hour migraines that turn her life upside down.

Every morning, before Dad leaves for work, she eyes him up and down. And every morning, she fixes his hair, even though he doesn't have much left. She makes sure all the remnant white threads point backward and clump together so they hide the shiny brown bed below.

Over a year ago, I was always on the phone with my folks. When I wasn't talking to them, I was on the computer researching unpleasant medical terms. My mother's condition baffled the best doctors.

``This woman gets the rarest of diseases and then leads me in this frightful dance,'' my 80-year-old father ranted when I visited last summer. ``Why can't she get fever, cough and cold like you and I?''

For a woman who combed her hip-length tresses in a vain trance in front of the mirror every morning, the reappearance of a luxuriant head of hair has certainly been grand cause for celebration this Valentine's Day.

We have officially reinstated my mother's vanity.