Fair and Lovely

NINAD JOG

"Ninny has become so white!" my father said. "I could barely recognize him. I looked right past him in the rush of arriving passengers."

My mother stared at me. "He has become white as a foreigner!" she said, her eyes filled with wonder. The appreciativeness in her tone was unmistakable.

It was the summer of 1993, and I had just returned to India on my first trip home after living in the U.S. for two years as a college student. I hadn't noticed any change in my complexion, but I took my parents' word for it.

***

Not that my skin color mattered to me, like it does to many Indians. Perhaps because I don't have as much visual acuity as people around me do. There's nothing wrong with my eyesight, nor am I color-blind. But I'm not good at perceiving the looks of people and objects, and I'm sufficiently challenged at drawing and painting that I failed a state-level drawing exam in middle school which my friends passed easily.

But my paucity of visual skills may be just part of the reason for my indifference towards my skin complexion. Raised in India, where fair complexion is synonymous with good looks, I was lucky enough to have a complexion that's fair by Indian standards. Indifference would have been a luxury that I could have ill afforded had I been dark of complexion and asymmetrical of facial features.

***

Fair-skinned though I was always told I was, I must have tanned sufficiently from living in tropical India while growing up. For when I first met a fellow Indian student in the U.S. whose contact information I had, he gasped. "You're so black!" was the first thing he said to me. "I thought you'd be fairer!"

I was taken aback. The remark was quite unusual, coming from an Indian, albeit one who was whiter than me. He said he had expected me to be fairer, for people from my caste were light-skinned, and he had figured out my caste from my surname. This guy had a point. Fair though I may have been by Indian standards, I was on the darker side by the standards of my caste.

***

My parents are not the only family members who I've heard speaking glowingly about fair complexion. Several years ago, when a cousin of mine had a daughter, my grandmother told all her friends how fair-skinned the baby was. The child's birth weight, eye color and other particulars came a distant second.

My sister and I were sure our grandmother practically worshipped fair complexion, especially since she herself was white as a Caucasian. But it didn't quite add up. For the man that my grandmother had fallen in love with and married, back in the 1930s, was black as an African.

I doubt if my grandmother would have married my grandfather if she favored fair-skinned people above anyone else. Matters weren't made any easier by the fact that my grandfather was from a different caste than my grandmother, and inter-caste marriages were taboo at the time, as were so-called "love-marriages."

Over the years, I think I've figured out the reason for my grandmother's joy at her great-granddaughter's fair skin. The baby was fairer than either of her parents: something that's uncommon but not unheard-of in India. Extolling the baby's fairness was my grandmother's way of conveying her surprise.

You'd think my parents must be light-skinned, given how glowingly they spoke of my fair complexion when I returned from the U.S. But my mother is dark-skinned, while my father is almost as light-skinned as my late grandmother, although the contrast between their complexions isn't quite as stark as the contrast between my maternal grandparents.'

***

Whether they are dark-skinned or light-skinned, Indians tend to uphold light skin as an ideal. Women in India use cosmetics with names such as "Fair and Lovely," since fair equates with lovely.

But what struck me on a recent visit to India was to come across women dressed from head to toe, riding scooters and mopeds in Pune in broad daylight. Even their eyes were covered by sun-glasses. They weren't Muslim women wearing burqas; they were women wearing colorful head-to-toe clothes to keep themselves from being tanned. Looking like a zombie by covering yourself up was a small price to pay to keep from getting dark and ugly.

***

My own professed indifference to my skin color ended with a bang when I was found to have a vitamin-D deficiency recently. I had two choices to raise my vitamin-D level. I could take supplements or I could sunbathe. While I'm free to take supplements all year round, I can sunbathe only in late spring and summer, for it's too cold in the Washington D.C. area to sunbathe in other seasons, and the sun's rays don't contain enough vitamin-D-producing ultraviolet-B light in other seasons.

So off to Delaware's Rehoboth Beach I went - with the goal of sunbathing for a few hours without wearing any sunscreen. I can't swim and I don't play volleyball, so walking around in the bright sun and wading in the water was all I could have hoped to do.

"I want to become dark-skinned like you," I told one of my Indian friends. "I wouldn't have had a vitamin-D deficiency if I had sunbathed all these years."

My friend gave me an odd look. Refusing to toe the line on aiming for the preferred fair complexion was simply the latest example of my reluctance to follow the norms.

Bare-chested and wearing nothing but shorts, I spent four hours in the blazing hot sun and got badly sunburned. My chest and back turned red over the next couple of days, and itched a lot before it turned brown and the skin began flaking off. I felt like a chameleon at times and a snake at others as I molted for days on end. It was a novel experience for me, and an unsettling one at that. I’ve been scared a few times in my life, but never have I jumped so thoroughly out of my skin.

I must have got what I bargained for, for the new skin that grew underneath the burned white one had a tan brown enough to make a White man proud.

Wade in the water though I did at the beach, I had surely gone overboard. I was red-faced when I realized that what I now saw in black and white terms had left me black and brown all over.

All may be fair in love and play, but there's little that's fair when you sunbathe without applying any sunscreen.