Kaale kale pig pe peeli peeli daant”, reads the letter somebody placed inside my desk. It takes my eight-year old mind a few seconds to process the message scribbled in pencil. To realise, that because of my plump build and dark complexion, I am the aforementioned “kaala pig with the peeli daant” to some of my classmates. A dark pig with yellow teeth.
In the years to come, that remark never really leaves my mind. When I am old enough to understand my attraction towards boys, I begin to wish for a fair complexion so that they notice me. As a result, I am swayed by products that promise a miraculous transformation of colour in fifteen days, and I pick them up on chaperoned trips to the supermarket. I start imagining future-me as someone who is popular because she is slim and pretty. I start convincing myself that a life with a fairer complexion and a slender body would have been happier, and I begin to believe that I lack something vital. And so, I start hating the way I look.
As I navigate the tricky adventure of being a teenager, it slowly dawns upon me that being dusky and overweight isn’t quite so bad. I learn to accept the way I look and to like it, to love it too. It is comforting to step outside the delusional world created by whitening creams and zero-sized actresses, and be part of a real universe that seems to value intelligence and ability more than cosmetic appearances.
A few years later, when I have entered the marriageable age bracket, my parents and well-wishers begin to search for a suitable alliance. And through a cluster of ‘popular’ matrimonial portals, I am pulled back into a world that reminds me how I don’t ‘fit the bill’, for almost every family out there has mentioned ‘Fair’ or ‘Very Fair’ in its preferences for a bride.
One day, a man calls up to ask my father about me. “What is your daughter’s complexion like? Is she dark or fair?”, he demands right at the beginning. “Um…my daughter is definitely not fair, Sir,” my father responds. “Okay, but what degree of dark would you say she is? Is she medium-dark?”, he ventures. By now, my father is irritated enough, but he still manages to patiently answer Mr. Shade Card. “I don’t know how to answer that, Sir. But I can tell you that my daughter is, at best, dusky. She cannot be called fair.”
“Oh,” Shade Card mumbles, disappointedly. Then, to justify his interrogation, he explains, “You see, my son is actually really, really dark. And my wife and I want a really, really fair daughter-in-law, because we want to ensure that we have really, really fair grandchildren.”
Unfortunately, this regressive psychology is all around us. Fairness creams are still one of the highest-selling commodities in our country. When I switch on the TV, and watch ad after ad with slim models and identical storylines (that an eligible boyfriend is equivalent to a room freshener, because his fragrance has women swooning over him and stripping for him, and that a girl who applies wonder-goo on her face somehow also brightens up the rest of her body and then zooms ahead to kiss the skies), it worries me. I wonder how many eight-year olds are being ridiculed and body-shamed. How many of them will grow up believing that stereotypical, textbook definitions of beauty are true.
Thankfully, witnessing enough of this ‘discrimination’ from an early age helped me understand how vehemently I needed to oppose it. Not just for myself, but for everyone in a similar boat. It made me more aware, more compassionate. It made me reach out to those who needed a kind word when they were feeling let down by the world, or by themselves.
Our social media news feeds were recently filled with praise for the women who made India proud at the Olympics. Their talent, their efforts despite a startling lack of facilities and the aplomb with which they brought glory to India were on your lips and mine. They even managed to make snooty columnists take back snarky comments, and label them praiseworthy.
But for how long will some people out there retain those emotions, before relapsing into being their former regressive selves? And when that does happen again, will you and I actually stand up for what is right, or will we just let it go? Will we be parents who teach our children the importance of the fairness of colour, or the value of fairness of the heart?
The world will mostly remain an unfair place. Let the right kind of fairness break through the maze of unfair attitudes, one person at a time.
Mishree is a Corporate Training consultant who resolutely refuses to let adulthood catch up with her. When stories aren’t doing a hyperactive Visarjan-ish dance in her head, Tanushree keeps herself occupied with books, food, animal welfare and the ardent desire to travel far and wide.