COFFEECOLOURED, IN A ‘FAIR’ MADRASI FAMILY
The recent HT series on the racial rot in our mental health brought back a string of experiences of growing up Indian. There is no doubt in my mind that the rot originated in the northern plains and, in ghastly irony, became the norm in the south as well. Despite my paleface bloodline from thevadanadu or northern lands, I was noticeably a coffee bean, a “sootball, not a snowball” as the Ottoman bride of a Nizam of Hyderabad called her baby. It upset people in the family.
My mother’s mother, Ponni, meaning ‘the Golden One’ in Tamil, couldn’t bear to see the tanned teenage legs between my school skirt and socks.
Drawing me into my room, she shut the door and sat regally on the edge of my bed. She daintily pulled her up sari a little way, enough to show me a shapely leg with a trace of blue vein visible under translucent white skin.
“Why are your legs so brown?” she asked me sternly in English. “See my leg, like alabaster.” She was not amused when I grinned, hugged her hard, saying, “What a pretty Paati”, paati being Tamil for granny, and ran off, pigtails flying.
I must have stifled a snicker as I left for it was her dead daughter, my mother, who had told me what to do, “Just listen, smile and go away.”
Apropos of nothing, my mother had liked to cite Audrey Hepburn, whose ears “stuck out like Gandhi’s,” she said, “but look how she made an asset out of a liability with that haircut and those clothes, so stylishly gamine.”
I quite liked my café-au-lait skin tone, but being “dark” in a light-skinned family came up ritually. My father’s nicknames for me were The Miscegenation and The Throwback, to a “scuffle in the sand”, he joked, between a dark-hued Unknown and “one of us” somewhere back in the ancestral line.
When I was nine, in Bombay, I was sent away from a photo shoot for the ironically named Dharamyug (a Hindi magazine).
Vishali, my father’s ivory figurine of an aunt, told me when I was 11 or 12 that my great-grandfather Raghavaiyya’s skin was so pale and fine that when he drank hot coffee you could see the flush go down his throat. “Perhaps you could try lemon juice,” she said.
Other ivory-pale old ladies of the clan were just as blunt. They sat on polished teak swings in inner courtyards, threading strings of flowers for daily worship and putting them away delicately in silver baskets. “Is this Kausalya’s daughter?” they would ask on our visits to Madras. “Niron
kammi”, her complexion is below par. I would smile docilely, on my best behaviour, waiting for hand-outs of adhirsam, little fried sweets that were, I discovered, like the gulgule made for Govardhan Puja. This ancient ritual honouring the tilled earth is performed by many north Indians including those of the same ancestral lines as my father and mother.
It’s wryly amusing to recall this now. But it’s not remotely funny to think that this attitude blights, even kills innocents. Reject this rot if you love your country.