This was aeons ago. As part of the school theatre group, we were rehearsing Macbeth. My friend Ipsita, who was dressed as one of the three witches, was a tad miffed, she spoke aloud her lines to me, the nasal tone was dripping with dejection, “Fair is foul and foul is fair … symbolic words from the bard aren’t they?
For the dark skinned like me who are apt only for witchy roles!” Ipsita was dusky, with beautiful, large eyes, with dimples that added to her attractive countenance. However, the dark skin relegated her to roles that were not of prime importance.
From the time she was little, her mother would try all kinds of home remedies to lighten her skin. Barbed comments from relatives further aggravated the situation, “She’s so dark, will she get a decent groom?
It came as a great relief to learn that the skin-lightening face cream, Fair & Lovely, is going to be renamed, swapping ‘fair’ and ‘light’ in its advertising for ‘radiance’ and ‘glow’. I have often wished for a whitening and cleansing potion for the inner being, for the heart and soul
Unless you pay a huge dowry for her …” These nasty retorts left indelible scars on her soul that no amount of consolation from us could wipe off. Then there were holy men and the beauty industry that milked this sense of insecurity created by our society. The holy man gave her weird concoctions of ingredients to drink, saying, “The ‘whitening miracle’ is guaranteed.”
As we grew, the biology teacher told us that it was melanin, a pigment that gave human skin, hair, and eyes their colour. Dark-skinned people have more melanin in their skin than light-skinned ones. So, it was just a pigment that was responsible for all the hatred and discrimination?
During our farewell in grade 12, Ipsita applied almost an inch-thick layer of whitening foundation to look fair and beautiful! Later I told her that she looked ravishing even without the make-up.
Idea of perfection
A brilliant student, she went about studying medicine. One night she called me, sounding utterly upset, her voice choking with tears. “I think melanin the pigment has become this ugly figment of slime that clouds everybody’s idea of perfection here. The patients too prefer to be treated by fair doctors. They identify ‘dark’ as belonging to a lower caste or as dirty!”
With time we realised that love was also skin-deep. Most men adored fair girls, lesser the melanin the better, the quantity of grey matter was of little consequence! Ipsita confessed to her parents that she had taken a fancy for a boy, Avinash and that she wouldn’t mind marrying him.
However, when Avinash and his parents came home to meet Ipsita’s family, he fell in love with her sister who was very fair. His parents were so smote with the skin colour that they were desperate to get Avinash married to the sister.
This was probably the cruellest of all blows. A few days later Ipsita took her own life as she could not live with any more discrimination.
This trauma of being dark-skinned is centuries old, an agony that ailed our country years before the ‘Black lives matter” movement that began recently.
Racism in all possible avatars, lurks in our culture. I come from the northeast region of India from a state called Assam.
People from this part of the country look different. When I first came to Delhi after marriage, I was shocked to see the filthy ridicule that the women from the northeast faced here. We have flatter facial features and smaller eyes. Very often I would hear of unfortunate incidents; students from the region being bullied, beaten up and hassled by the locals.
In fact, a relative had even suggested to my father that I should do rhinoplasty (nose-job). I was so amused and angry at the same time that I almost turned into a rhinoceros (a symbol of Assam) and attacked him.
The Covid pandemic saw many from the region being slurred as “Coronavirus” in grocery shops and elsewhere. “Go to Wuhan and stay there,” some would rudely scream.
It came as a great relief to learn that the skin-lightening face cream, Fair & Lovely, is going to be renamed, swapping ‘fair’ and ‘light’ in its advertising for ‘radiance’ and ‘glow’. I have often wished for a whitening and cleansing potion for the inner being, for the heart and soul.
A potion that would help us see all skin-types, all races as one.
In the end all lives matter.
— Navanita Varadpande is a writer based in Dubai. Twitter: @VpNavanita
