Multiply this conversation by a hundred, and what you’re left with is an inherent suspicion about any vocalised admiration – the side effect of a now deep-seated insecurity about my appearance, which can make for highly stunted exchanges. So when a stranger makes the effort to seek me out in a room or a street to tell me I’m ‘beautiful’, my first instinct is to distrust him and guard my valuables. Beauty is something I cannot seem to take as a given. It seems to lie too disadvantageously in the eyes of beholders.
The entire advertising industry profits from my being not acceptably beautiful, from my being anomalously dark. I’m their target consumer, who refuses to buy into their spiel. Ergo, I presumably deserve all the humiliation I face.
Long ago I attempted to defend myself against the societal predisposition to characterise me first as black by seeking refuge in humour. I did so at my own expense. I laughed at myself. It was the only way I could participate in the joke I was seen to be. If some eager friend wanted to take a photograph of me after sunset, I’d laugh it off and tell them I would be camouflaged by the night sky. ‘You need a very strong flash,’ I’d say. Or if I’d arranged to meet an acquaintance who was yet to meet me in the flesh, I’d forewarn him or her to look for a tall and dark girl. Or I’d invent a story about how some Goan ancestor of mine must have had an affair with an African slave. Granted, it was self-deprecating, to say the least, but as long as I was in charge of the narrative, it couldn’t damage me.
I am yet to forgive myself for being so flippantly self-damning throughout my girlhood. I hadn’t realised then how self-destructive self-deprecation can be. As I approached womanhood, as I slowly amassed enough experience of being the object of desire, I realised my only redemption against this deep-seated, nationwide prejudice was to embrace my blackness. That society continued to see the world in shades of black and white was the failure of humanity. And I, too, was implicated, because I had inadvertently subscribed to that hegemony by never questioning it, by allowing it to reduce me, by permitting it to affect my otherwise equanimous state of being. If I embraced my ‘unfortunate’, ‘inferior’, ‘undesirable’ skin tone, I could perhaps let the light in.
‘Is it difficult to photograph dark skin?’ I asked my lover, a photographer by profession.
‘It’s a question of compensating the exposure,’ he told me, an answer that was in sync with the reading I had done about camera settings online. It depends also on the light, he explained: the midday sun, for instance, would be unflattering to a cricketer from the West Indies playing a test match. ‘Either you’d bleach out the white of his uniform or you’d darken his face. You have to compensate the exposure,’ he reiterated. His advice had all the gravitas of a maxim.
I met my lover a few days after I’d turned twenty-three. It was the first time my itinerant body had been offered a sense of home, of being in a place where I didn’t feel like I needed to be elsewhere. Soon after that first meeting, I wrote him an epistle informing him that I’d left my heart behind in his white kettle, and that bits of it were probably dissolving with his sugar everyday and entering his bloodstream along with the tea.
‘I remember your body so well,’ I confessed over the phone the evening after I first met him.
‘I do too … I remember your skin, so dark and taut and beautiful.’
It was the first time he testified to my beauty, an act that would come to be performed increasingly rarely as our relationship progressed from the unexpected comfort of a one-night stand to the underrated humdrum of the everyday. I’ve never grudged him his reluctance to flatter. I found it refreshing. I had come to be repelled by men who practised repetition, where each sexual encounter would be punctuated by their grateful, charitable moans that attested not so much to my alleged beauty but to the exotic appeal of my black naked body: ‘Look at your skin, how it glows in the light.’
Even now I cannot explain how or when I came to be desired. Having spent my girlhood being made to believe that my dark skin would interfere with any such possibility, I was and remain surprised by every instance that proves the contrary.
Sometimes my lover says things that assume the form of epiphanies. For example, once, when I told him about a potential rival, he seemed unfazed that another man should be attracted to me.
‘Ah! So you admit I’m beautiful?’ I said.
‘It depends on how one defines beauty.’
‘And what is your conception of beauty?’
‘I think of beauty as light. Light that shines through from within … Yes, I think you’re beautiful.’
After he said so, I remembered how fortuitous it was that we first met in a virtual room, when my status on Facebook was an audacious one in which I stated that I was reflecting light.
‘Nice status,’ he typed, initiating what would evolve into a seven-year-long ongoing dialogue.
Considering his profession, I took his comment as a compliment. I knew it wasn’t a superficial one based on a profile picture, but had everything to do with my choice of words and what they evoked when I had placed them together in a sentence.
They say the body renews itself every seven years. In the span of the last seven years, my lover and I have come full circle. Our love is renewed. I am the same person I was when I met him: fragile, belligerent, yet stronger than I give myself credit for. But I am different. I have become beautiful.
Three weeks ago, an hour before I was to leave for Dubai on an assignment, he came over, his camera in tow. Despite having asked him more than a year earlier, it was only now, in the heat of a deadline, that he finally brought himself to photograph me. Though his portraits of past lovers are renowned for their utter beauty, he never sought to replicate the pattern with me. I have, in these seven years of our togetherness, existed outside the scope of his lens: more companion than muse; more partner than passionate lover. I am his middle-aged love. As I explore the boundaries of thirty, he is inching towards sixty, his body already succumbing to time: my lust wantonly waxing while his own wanes with age; my spirit and flesh eternally willing, his increasingly in a predicament.
He waltzed into my bedroom, drew the blinds to let in the afternoon light, cleared my bed of the many books that had been strewn across the mattress, and motioned at me to take a seat. I saw myself captured in the sphere of his lens, my skin gleaming, my eyes trapping light, my lips eager. He told me to look away from him, to raise my chin ever so slightly, to withhold my smile. Then he pressed the shutter and made a memory of me.
I studied myself in the mirror today. I have become leaner, the consequence of regular running and a mindful diet. The three-inch wound from the self-inflicted burn leapt out at me, strawberry pink. I no longer fear that it may never be erased. It has been etched in, almost, and seems permanent. It is a ghastly sight, but less so than when it was first imprinted. I expect no miraculous transformation by which it will be rendered invisible. Coconut oil and Silverex can only do so much. I must make peace with all that it symbolises: a moment of defiance, when I involuntarily allowed myself the luxury of overconfidence. I refuse to be tainted by the scar it will leave behind, which in time will be discoloured to meld with the rest of me. The edges will darken, the fleshy pink will eventually dissolve and my blackness will be almost restored. Until then, and even after, I will continue to write into it.
My body will continue to be my instrument, my blackness my deliverance, my skin my muse.
SQUARE PEG, ROUND HOLE
MITALI SARAN
I have a vivid memory of a train ride, years ago. The third-class compartment in the overnighter from Delhi to Calcutta was packed. It was after 10 pm and I was out of cigarettes. Since we’d exchanged a few sentences, I asked the passenger next to me for one, from the packet outlined in his breast pocket. He glanced nervously at his family – a wife, a couple of teenagers – and fished one out. After a beat he said, ‘How old are you?’ Twenty-seven, I told him. ‘And you aren’t married?’ he said, flustered. ‘You should be married.’
> I wandered out to the empty vestibule and lit up. Four seconds later a small phalanx of young men had lined up opposite me in the narrow vestibule to stare in gape-jawed silence. I said, ‘Namaste,’ and got nothing back. Were they disapproving? Just curious? Uncertain? I couldn’t tell. For lack of ideas, I offered them a drag. They broke into horrified half-smiles, turned around and fled. Uncertain, then.
Uncertainty is the most common reaction I get in India, and it comes from being a hybrid animal in a deeply structured society. Nobody knows what box I belong in.
I’m an Indian woman in her mid-forties, single, childless, jobless, who dresses like an uncool teenager, wraps presents in newspaper, drinks, smokes, occasionally pops into a bar or a movie theatre alone, drives around in the middle of the night, has no ambition, dances tango, has taken to the guitar, is a commitment-phobe and an atheist, and says no a lot. For many people, if there’s a box that this fits into, it’s got a big ‘Handle with care’ sign painted on it. People do.
At a nearby petrol station, there’s a mechanic who’s been topping up my car and checking my tyre pressure since I was twenty-six years old. The first time I ever took my car in for servicing, I jumped down into the filthy pit after him to look up the skirt of my car. To this day, when I pull in to the station, this mechanic asks, ‘You’re here on holiday?’ It’s no use telling him, for the ten thousandth time, that I live in Delhi, right around the corner: he decided, eighteen years ago, that I either am not Indian or live abroad. He believes this with unshakable resolve.
India is a famously complicated place. For women, it’s doubly complicated – we live with staggering mainstream sexism and both casual and egregious violence at every level of the power pyramid. You can choose not to conform, but only if you’re willing to negotiate the crass misogyny and judgement that will come your way, and to risk your physical safety. Driving at night, you might be followed by a car filled with men who try to run you off the road. Walking down the street, you might find people staring and breaking into song, or groping you. People will try to make you aware of your shameful oddness in thousands of little ways.
Shame is key.
India’s goddesses are fearsome, beautiful, bare-breasted powerhouses who make and break universes. They hold weapons in their many hands, and represent power. India’s flesh-and-blood women have vaginas, which make them the very fountainhead of shame. This country worships phalluses, but women are raised to believe in their own shamefulness, and taught that female modesty protects the whole world’s honour. There are degrees, of course – perhaps you’re a rural woman who allowed an unrelated man to see her face uncovered, or you’re a city slicker showing too much cleavage – but shame is the monkey on your back, and when it shows up, it imperils your whole family’s reputation. It’s been a long historical fall from the erotic celebration of Khajuraho to the prudery of today.
I appear not to have come preloaded with shame. My parents had more of it; they were raised in boarding schools by Irish nuns and Jesuit priests, but they were also great readers, well educated and forward thinking. They didn’t make a big deal of shame while we lived outside of India. I did ten formative years of growing up in Switzerland and Indonesia, blissfully unaware of the shit-storm that a bare leg or a public kiss could elicit. When we were home on vacation I had spectacular fights with my parents over things like wearing shorts or going out for a late coffee with a man I had only just met, but they argued for my safety, not against shame. I wore shorts anyway, and I went out for coffee anyway.
There was just one time in my teenage years that I confronted their socialisation – my father walked in on my boyfriend and me necking, and exploded: ‘This is not a flophouse!’ I remember being not ashamed of myself but shocked that he was calling me a hooker by implication. I yelled at him about it later and got a remorseful apology. I never heard anything like that from him again, whatever his opinions may have been.
I moved back to Delhi after college, living alone in my parents’ house while they were abroad. I chose to not choose shame, or the crappy words that come with it – loose, bold, fast, immodest, forward, slut, whore. A neighbour once leaned out of his window, wearing a singlet, and called across to the balcony where I was having a late-night smoke with a male friend: ‘You shouldn’t do all these wrong things.’ You could point to many things about my life that aren’t terribly orthodox, but the bottom line is I’m not squeamish about bodies. They sweat, bleed, excrete and get horny. This is, first and foremost, what it means to be human, as much as appreciating opera and writing philosophical treatises. Bodily truth is the frontline of existence in the world. I’m given to potty talk, menstruation talk and sex talk. I use my vagina the way I want to, and I am not ashamed of being a sexual being.
How do you go about being like this in a society that bleeps the word ‘arse’ out of TV shows? I discovered very early that eight times out of ten, doing the unexpected (or not doing the expected) deliberately, calmly and normally can calm and normalise the situation. Twenty years ago, the first time I walked into the local hole-in-the-wall liquor store, which is also stuffed groin-to-butt exclusively with men, you could hear a pin drop. I made my way in, making eye contact, smiling and saying excuse me, and they shifted scrupulously aside. They stared, but they were courteous.
When you don’t fit in, people are much more likely to assume that you don’t belong and don’t know any better than that you need to be taken down a peg or two. When they know that you do belong, they are very much more uncertain about how to treat you. Uncertainty has two positive points: it is not objectionable; and it makes people hesitate, a breach which you can nimbly fill with deliberate calm and normalcy. When you choose calmness and normalcy, you are often choosing it for the other person too, who didn’t know which way to go.
The columns I write for a national newspaper range in subject matter from the conceptual and political to the wildly personal, and they reflect my life as much as my thoughts. I’ve talked about a chequered love life, about not being built for marriage, about not wanting children. As much as I’ve received appreciation, I’ve also received reader mail like, ‘I think you are insane … For God’s sake, stop your corrupting writings in a responsible newspaper.’ Unhinged Hindu fundamentalist keyboard warriors cry ‘Prostitute!’ at the drop of a hat, but usually only when a column criticises the government. Men sometimes write to say that they’re fans; those emails are filled with a kind of benign, intense curiosity – ‘How does your life work?’ ‘What sort of creature are you?’ ‘Do you think we could get a drink sometime?’ – forgetting, I guess, that people you like in print are usually disappointing in the flesh. But most of the people who bother to write say something that boils down to ‘Exactly!’ and ‘Me too!’ (I think there’s a square peg, round hole cohort out there.) Inexplicably, one notable slice of mail comes from readers asking me for a job, or some vaguely worded ‘guidance’. I’m constantly writing about how financially and professionally clueless I am, so that always cracks me up.
I left my brief marriage, to an absolutely lovely man, for no good reason other than I’m not built for marriage, which, if you ask me, is a very good reason. I knew that before we got married, and told him so. He said that it would just be easier on everyone than if we lived together. I said that if I got restless or unhappy I would leave. He said we’d cross that bridge when we came to it. When the time came, he said, ‘Well, you always said that this might happen, and I will support whatever decision you take.’ That makes him a jewel among men, particularly Indian men.
Leaving a jewel of a man is not the sort of thing you do lightly. In a society that is pathologically devoted to marriage, and hates free-range vaginas, you can expect shock and horror. Oddly, other than a few close friends who urged me to think about it, nobody said a single word to me, though I know people talked about it a lot. That’s the upside of living in a liberal elite cocoon in which people are too polite to bring up your separation, but love to speculate behind yo
ur back about whether maybe you’re a lesbo. After we split, my ex-husband used to take special pleasure in making sure we arrived simultaneously at a party, just to confuse the crap out of everyone.
After that breakup, I came back to my mother’s house (we had lost my father some years earlier). It was meant to be a stopgap arrangement, but somehow it turned into the default.
My mother is an odd mix of the madly brave and madly fearful. This is a woman who has done many courageous and interesting things in her life. She learned Old Javanese, served as a guide-lecturer on a catamaran sailing around the Indonesian islands, took her kids into volcano craters and overcame the temptation to leave them there, did a postgraduate degree in her forties, has written a very scholarly book, travels the world and still loves a zippy car. She values independence as much as security. She saw to it that I got my driving license in my twenties, and a couple of months after that handed me the keys to her car in a foreign country so that I could drive friends six hours across the peninsula. After my father died, she found the steel she needed to deal with many things she had never had to, and developed spectacular financial acumen. She’s no pushover, this lady, but goodness, you can’t take the parent out of her. So I choose to ignore the parent in her.
For a while, she sat up every time I went out, waiting for me to come home, and yelled at me for making her worry. For a while she assumed that I would participate in any dinners or teas hosted at home for her friends, and was hurt and disappointed when I refused to on the grounds that they were her friends, in her life. After a certain amount of bloodletting, however, she and I came to a fairly peaceable understanding that I was not going to mend my ways. Either she’s very progressive or I broke her spirit, or an asthmatic person has only so much breath to waste on deaf ears. I realise that she might face some disapproval of my allegedly wild ways from her family and friends, and I appreciate the fact that she never brings it home to me. Maybe she knows it’s pointless.
Walking Towards Ourselves Page 7