The Right Sort of Girl

by Anita Rani

  That is an incredible thing to think about. There’s a hold over you, silencing you, shaming you, when you are a girl. The consequences aren’t even known or tangible, but they are so sinister and ingrained that it keeps you in submission for life. FACK ME! The only thing that comes to mind is judgement. That if I were the sort of girl who talked openly about puberty and womanly things, if I made public the details of what 50 per cent of the planet go through, I’d be judged as a wrong ’un. A wicked, evil, dirty woman or worse, the sort of woman to lead other women astray. A troublemaker, a bad girl, a bad influence with loose morals, too free, a homewrecker, a witch, too independent, a churail, no respect, too gori, too Westernised, lost her culture, a coconut. Chi chi chi. Bringing such shame.

  How have we allowed this to happen when it’s half of the planet who go through it (and, may I point out the obvious, the most important half of the planet) if the survival of our race is your thing? Holy saturated sanitary towels, Batman – somebody has done a right number on us.

  I can’t protect little me anymore, but I can certainly arm any of you out there, if you need the armour. Let’s talk!

  4 Girls are told not to eat eggs, meat or rich food too, as it will speed up the onset of their period.

  5 Once, at a ninth birthday party, we were all given half rubber balls that you turn inside out, place on a flat surface and they then slowly unfold until they ping into the air. I decided to sucker the rubber thing to the middle of my forehead, which everyone found hilarious, so I left it there, like a proper wally. Half an hour later, I prised it off and had an oval-shaped bruise left in the middle of my forehead that didn’t go for a week. Idiot.

  Love Your Skin Colour and Your Nose

  Tanning. A simple, natural process, whereby the sun reacts with human skin, making it darker. Melanin is the natural pigment produced in our bodies; it absorbs UV radiation and protects our skin from more UV by making it darker. Nature is perfect. It’s a wonder.

  In the 300,000 years of human evolution, the human body has sussed out a huge amount. The body and mind are both remarkable: giving birth, mind-blowing; if a nail drops off, it regrows, bonkers; broken bones can heal, people learn to walk again after breaking their backs, incredible; space and ocean exploration, great feats of engineering; those nutters who run ultra-marathons in the Sahara Desert, mad; the dudes who sit for years in meditation, growing beards and gnarly nails, brilliant – and, to top it all off, the skin tans to protect itself.

  Yet, Asians, people who are from the Indian subcontinent – a hot land, where the sun beats down and kisses the earth and everything on it – have a major problem with tanning. I’m looking at you, colourism, I’m staring you down and I’m taking you down, because I’ve had enough.

  ‘You wanting to be light-skinned is just like us wanting to be tanned.’ No, it’s nothing like that. This is far more sinister. Colourism is an insidious prejudice that begins when you’re born. ‘Baby is so fair’, ‘Baby is dark’. Already, on day one of it breathing freely, out of its mother’s womb, someone – grandparents, aunty, uncle, father, mother, a passing stranger – has already made it aware of the shade of its skin. If it’s fair, it will be told how beautiful it is. If it’s dark, a sympathy smile. Welcome to the world. Congratulations, you’ve already been judged. And to top it off, you’re hairy too. This corker of an issue affects both boys and girls but, of course, for women the implications are far greater. The biggest issue being marriageability. Fair-skinned girls, now they get the best price, but who will want a dark-skinned girl? A fair-skinned wife is a sign that a husband is doing well, well enough to get a bride with pale, pale skin. She’s prided and paraded by the mother-in-law because her skin shows wealth, that this family have the capacity to find a creamy daughter-in-law.

  What kind of damage is being done to our self-esteem and psychology when we can’t even tolerate our natural skin tone? A preference for fair skin and aligning lightness with power has always existed in India, but it was perpetuated by colonialism. We were colonised by the white man, who came and took from our land to build his own – doesn’t matter how many railway sleepers they laid down (and technically, they didn’t do any of the laying, it was Indians who did the graft), no matter how forcefully they came, how much they took and how callously they left, we still believe that, on some level, just because of the shade of the coloniser’s skin, they are superior. Come on, team, let’s get real here! They were not in India doing us any favours. Now, I’m not sure anyone really remembers why there’s a preference for light skin, where the prejudice has its origins. There just is.

  Skin shade is relative because no matter what the general pigment of your people, this view holds true. For South Asians, class, caste and colour all intersect, which leaves dark-skinned, poor, low-caste women in an extremely vulnerable position. I’d like to say that those who moved abroad left these archaic and damaging thoughts behind but, sadly, colourism is alive and thriving amongst South Asians in the UK. It’s not helped by Bollywood. In India, Bollywood stars, who all tend to be light-skinned, are paid fortunes to advertise skin lightening products. These products are seriously problematic and the idiots who take money to advertise them are part of the problem.

  India is a land of many layers but it’s highly prejudiced and discriminatory towards people who are poor, people who belong to lower castes and now, worryingly, people who aren’t Hindu. If you’re poor and spend a lot of time outdoors in the blistering Indian sun, you’re going to be a few shades darker than those stepping from air-conditioned cars into air-conditioned buildings. To top it all off, people who have the most influence over the masses in India are fuelling the prejudice and lining their own pockets. They are not just preying on insecurities, they are creating insecurities to sell those products. I doubt any of the products actually do what they say on the tin, which is good, but also means the entire thing is a scam. The people being pushed to buy the creams are the brown, everyday working-class folk of India, who will never attain the insanely glamorous lives of their idols. They are all various shades of beautiful brown.

  The first time I went to India, I was two years old. I spent a lot of time playing outdoors, in the dusty red earth of my grandmother’s house in the village in Punjab. ‘Teri kuri kali hogeyi,’ my great grandmother shouted to my mum, as I was happily playing with a stray dog’s puppies, ‘Your daughter has gone black.’ There is no word for tanned, there is no word for getting dark, the word used is black. My little brown body had tanned, naturally, so much so that both my cheeks had burned and cracked. I was yanked indoors and Vaseline was slathered all over me. From that day on, I’ve always been warned about the sun.

  ‘Thupe na baeeth’ Don’t sit in the sun.

  ‘Pith karke baeeth’ Sit with your back to the sun.

  Your ‘rang’ should be ‘saaf’: your ‘colour’ should be ‘clean’.

  This prejudice needs to be acknowledged, confronted and we really need to address it. There may be many reasons for colourism, such as successive conquerors in India being fair-skinned, both the Mughals and the Brits. Implying that darkness is bad is another prejudice perpetuated in the stories of my childhood. Even in temples, the goodies, gods and goddess are always fair-skinned and the baddies or the demons are always dark.

  Weddings are where colourism really shows its ugliness in all its judgemental glory. The aunty network or as I call them, the illuminaunty, love to compare notes on shades of brown, especially at weddings. The illuiminaunty don’t do subtlety, they don’t do politically correct.

  ‘Girl is pretty but so dark-skinned.’

  ‘Look at that boy, so fair, he looks like a prince.’

  ‘Who will marry her with that complexion?’

  ‘She will look so dark in all the wedding pictures, not like a radiant bride.’

  ‘Her skin is so fair, you can see the Coca-Cola going down her throat.’

  There’s so much pressure on brides to look at their most translucent. I’ve seen absol
utely shocking make-up, foundation seven shades lighter than the person’s skin, being applied to create ashen-faced monsters, walking to their doom. Back in the eighties and nineties, when there were hardly any foundations to match Asian skin tones, options were thin anyway, so people would pick light shades which would make lovely brown skin turn a sallow grey. I’ve met a few make-up artists in my time who’ve had problems trying to match my shade, too.

  Colourism doesn’t just exist in the South Asian community, it’s a huge problem in all of the non-white world. The skin-bleaching industry globally is worth well over three billion pounds. When I made a documentary exploring the issue for BBC1 a few years ago in 2009, Japan was the country which spent the most on skin-lightening products. Now, according to the World Health Organization, 77 per cent of women in Nigeria use skin-lightening products. Another multi-billion dollar industry created around our insecurities and the perpetuation of an insidious myth, that light skin is the most beautiful.

  Bollywood movies have perpetuated this beauty myth and I believe it’s now worse than ever. The actresses of my childhood were dusky, brown-skinned beauties, with big almond eyes, Indian noses and full Indian hips and a slightly plump physique – a sign of being well fed and wealthy. (Look up Rekha, Sridevi and Hema Malini when they were young.) Now the beauty ideal has changed and a lot of actresses could pass for white European, and some of them are. The look is fair skin, small Western nose, big boobs and no hips. It’s not uncommon for actresses to get plastic surgery to attain the Disney Princess look. Add to that never ever seeing anyone other than white faces in the cultural landscape growing up, our self-worth was and still is taking a battering.

  My nose has always been a bone, or rather cartilage, of contention with myself. I’ve always hated it. It’s from my dad’s side, it’s Granny’s nose. All my aunts and uncles have it, as does my brother. Our strong Roman profile. We’d sit and giggle about the family nose when we’d get together but, on my own, when I’d look in the mirror, I’d hate what I saw. This wasn’t helped by often waking up in excruciating pain as my mother would try and mould my nose in my sleep. Always trying to mould me. Mum said she was shaping it so it didn’t look like a pakora! (A pakora is a deep-fried ball of potato and onion – an onion bhaji, that’s what my nose was being compared to, by my own mum!)

  It’s no surprise that I very nearly had a nose job on a few occasions and I was even offered one for free by a plastic surgeon I was interviewing in LA if I’d appear on his TV show, Dr. 90210. He said he could fix my ‘Indian nose’. I discussed it with my agent at the time, who told me it was a bad idea and that I’d be ‘too pretty’. My nose adds character to my face. Too pretty? Is there such a thing? At 25, I didn’t give a crap about character, I wanted to feel ‘too pretty’. It seemed to me that it was the small-nosed pretty girls who were getting all the work. Pretty and white, or just white. Anyway, as is obvious, I didn’t go through with it, mainly because it was for his show and would be there for people to watch forever, plus I hate the idea of surgery. Every time I think about getting it done, and it is a reoccurring desire in my life, it always happens when my self-esteem is at rock bottom. Funny that. Plus, what message would I be sending to young South Asian women with strong noses? We need to reclaim the aquiline aesthetic. Us big-nosed beauties need to step out there with our heads held high and our noses even higher. Take a deep inhalation through both nostrils and as you exhale, say to yourself, my nose is magnificent.

  It doesn’t just stop at skin colour or the line of your nose. In South Korea, a country that has more plastic surgery per capita than any other country, double-eyelid surgery is very popular. To give the eyes a more rounded, Western look. How has this happened? Who is setting the Eurocentric beauty agenda for us to aspire to, this cultural colonialism? Is it advertising? Magazines? Television? Is it the luxury brands that have historically only used Western women to model their clothes? Is it Hollywood movies?

  Why are we being told to hate what we see in the mirror?

  Can we mix it up, please? I’d like to see a broader representation in movies and in my magazines. Women of all shades, the darker the better. And while you are changing up who you cast, how about women who have depth and strength of character and something to say, not just eye candy to make the male lead look more interesting? How about we start by at least having women a similar age to the male lead? Tom Cruise will be in his eighties, no doubt still doing his own stunts, and his female love interest will still be in her twenties. And bigger woman please, women who look like they eat food. And maybe a few hairy women, too. Yes, more big-nosed, hairy women.

  * * *

  At 15, I put on a bit of weight. Up until then, I’d always been super active. A Little Miss Fidget, who loved to play games and sports. I was lucky I had natural hand-eye coordination and decent balance, so I’d get picked for most sports teams at school and, if I lacked the natural talent for something, my enthusiasm would fill the gap. I was not fast at all, but if a team was ever a woman down to run, up I’d step. I’d always come last in the race but I was always happy to volunteer. At 15, things changed. I lost my hockey boots (first excuse) and I’d started working at my local radio station and became more interested in drama, so my activity levels dropped off. I’d grown as much as I was going to, nothing to do with my tamarind consumption, but I was still eating with the abandon and carefree spirit of someone who has never worried about weight, at least three–four rotis a night. Actively encouraged by my Punjabi culture, which revolves around food and doesn’t really have set meal times. Eat when you’re hungry! There is a Punjabi phrase about roti, ‘you don’t count them’, just keep making them until the people you’re feeding have to roll themselves off their chairs.

  So, naturally, becoming more sedentary and eating all my mum’s lovely food, I got plumper. It was noticed. Noticed by my PE teacher. ‘Come on laydeez!’, she’d scream, in her long, lined, warm tracksuit bottoms and cosy fleecy hoodie, with us in our athletics knickers! Oh, the humiliation. ‘Girls at your age should not have little bellies, I see little bellies.’ I knew she was talking about me. It was also pointed out by one of my straight-talking friends: ‘You’re getting fat.’ She told me straight and I respected it because I knew she was right. I hated my body and I’d never seen it like this before. I started to exercise. Every single day, I’d come home from school and start a workout. I’d step on and off the bottom step of the staircase 100 times to warm up, then head into my room to continue the manic sweat session. I’d just move as fast as I could. I was already used to dancing around in my bedroom, so this was just ramping it up to include squats, knee raises and side-stepping – basically whatever I could do in my tiny box bedroom surrounded by all my stuff. It worked. The weight fell off.

  Now, let’s put this into perspective. I wasn’t fat. I’ve never been fat but for some reason the seed was sown. The seed of body insecurity. That grows as you do, so every time you look in the mirror, you think you need to shape up. There is nothing wrong with exercise and keeping fit. I’m one of those annoying people who loves to exercise. I’m a huge advocate of keeping our bodies moving as long as we can, as long as we’re alive. It’s vital for life. Energy and vitality and mental health can all be improved with a few squats and a jog around the block. It also means you can eat that wedge of carrot cake when you fancy. But I was never fat. It just wasn’t true. Fat was all I could see, however.

  As the grown woman that I am, I’d love to tell you I’ve dealt with all of these issues, but childhood insecurities are a pain to get rid of, not helped by constantly being reminded of my perceived inadequacies by the world around me. They don’t just magically disappear. On top of that, I have a new dose of grown-up issues I’m lumbered with. My insecurities still exist, not quite the crippling, nauseating, debilitating insecurities of a teenager. They do ease up the older you get, you’ll be relieved to know! I’ve definitely grown into the way I look and finally I’m unapologetic about my ethnicity. I’
ve even found the power to write them down, in the hope that it will also help me beat them down. But, at 40, you start to worry about other stuff, like aging and making the most of your time and running out of time and your position in the workplace and white supremacy and the patriarchy and your relationships and whether you’ll ever achieve your full potential and how to navigate your next 40/50 years before you drop dead . . . Just the massive existential stuff. No longer just worrying about how to get rid of a bit of belly. Although, that is still a worry.

  I’m much less nervous about the way I look, but I’ve yet to have a proper beach holiday where I confidently prance around in a bikini (or even just walk in one). Sadly, I’m not comfortable in my body and I worry that I’ll have spent a lifetime worrying about it and then get to 90 and wish to God I’d embraced it, loved it and owned it. Felt body beautiful. I also like to think 90-year-old me will be the wildest, carefree version of me ever, where I can do whatever the hell I want, like hang gliding in just a pair of heels or something.

  Is everyone walking around feeling a little bit self-conscious? How many of us are walking around in bodies we don’t particularly like? A remarkable body, with a beautiful beating heart and oxygen pumping round it, which means we can wake up and enjoy another day on planet Earth. We all need to start to find a bit of compassion for ourselves and dial down the negative monologue. And be grateful for what we have, just as we are. Keep the big important issues that we really do need to tackle but being fat, getting old, our skin tone, these are all just distractions. We are so fixated with that stuff, we are missing out on enjoying life, magnificent life. Let’s all look in the mirror and love what we see, including all the flaws. I want to love all my dodgy bits, my mistakes, my fuck-ups and flaws. I want to see it all and think it’s great!