Winter Reds
Neethu Krishnan
Every winter, it resurfaces, at least once. The scoff and the remark, or the winter mock, as I call it. Like a screensaver of bouncy balls, it bobs about in my head until I acknowledge it. It’s one of those inane comments that survives, reassembles post-shredding and floats back unchanged, perennial. Maybe not therapy material, but somehow not trivial either. It sits in this grey area, in the file of faceless, inconsequential people, sometimes absolute strangers, with their infamous one-liners in red against them, their entire personalities referenced from that one inopportune moment ambered in time.
*
It is a winter morning. I’m in the IT lab of my junior college, typing HTML codes into the computer with numb fingers. My lab partner, wide-eyed, keeps dissociating from the task at hand, so she’s mostly ornamental in the pairing. Being the studious perfectionist, I don’t mind completing the work for two. The computer assigned to us sits right by the AC vent on the wall, such that its cold gusts blow straight at me. My fingers and face sting from the combination of the early-morning Mumbai chill and the whooshes from the AC. I drop a comment on the lines of I feel my face grow red to my partner in fantasy land; conversation sometimes anchors her to the present moment. I don’t remember her response from this time though (or if she even heard me over her thoughts), for a sharp laugh, or rather a single mean approximation of one, a “Ha!” from my left, punctuates the next moment in my recollection.
It’s the spectacled one of the two boys at the neighbouring computer. We are not friends. Despite being in the same Bio-IT class, attending lectures in the same classroom since eleventh grade began, I’m not sure we have ever engaged in casual conversation, so I’m startled by his bizarre interjection. One, I didn’t know he was eavesdropping. Two, I missed the joke, if there was one.
In my memory, the event is a silent montage without much contribution from my part. The pieces are simple yet the whole disconcerting: my comment about the cold, his snigger, his annoyed explanation at my still puzzled face, a flash of menace in his black eyes, my polite smile and unseeing stare back at the computer screen, already cataloguing the exchange as one of those long-lasting, unfading, tacky neon baubles.
His explanation, almost verbatim, translates from Hindi to English as Your cheeks are so black, how can anyone even see red on it? He uses “kaala”, the Hindi word for black—not dark, not brown, not non-white; just pure, light-swallowing black. A vitriol shot at point-blank fired with such visible disgust, I pray and hope, for once, the red of my embarrassment and shock doesn’t render itself visible through my colour-negating “black” as he sees it.
*
I was, apparently, born an unnaturally dark baby. The moment my mother saw my disturbing dark colouration, she was worried and concerned for me, she recounts. What if the pitch black stayed so? She didn’t have to agonise for long, for in a day or two the deep pigmentation faded to a healthy-looking pale brown. What if the irreconcilable shade had stuck? I wonder only in rhetoric.
My mother says I was bullied for my tan skin in primary school, though I have no recollection of this, probably because my brain blocked out the trauma. My parents had to intervene and confront the bullies at school, because I was a wallflower who took all the verbal attacks without a single word of self-defence and only cried about it later at home. While I have no memory of this period, I do have vivid recollections of other instances where my skin colour was in the spotlight and my comebacks equally insufficient or non-existent, as with the winter mock.
*
I starkly remember how a single comment flushed such volcanic shame and anger through me that I pulled down a profile picture on WhatsApp within an hour of posting. It was a baby photo of me, which became the conduit for an insensitive comment. In the photograph, my mother is holding one-year old me in her arms, and both of us appear similarly fair in the image. In my earliest baby photos, I am a fair, chubby baby. Over the years, the paleness would constellate to light brown and then the darker tan, the target of the primary school girls’ attacks, but in the frozen frame of scrutiny of the unexpected comment, I’m a fair child. This schoolmate was quick to offer his feedback within minutes of my uploading the baby photo. He started off with a query, asking if it truly was me in the photograph. When I replied in the affirmative, he conveyed his shock accompanied by the gaping-mouthed emoji, followed by his pressing question: How, then, did I grow up to be “kaali”?
I didn’t and still don’t know how much of it, or if any fraction at all, was an innocent physiological concern. Was any of it genuine, albeit intrusive curiosity, or was I squinting through rose-tinted glasses and hazarding harmlessness in what was intended as an acerbic jab? No matter the context, the only thing flashing before my eyes then was the straightforwardness of the pointed-out defect: the black. What was I supposed to say? This is how brown babies work? I don’t remember the details of whatever variation of a cringy apology or excuse I made for my colour, but I do recall wasting not a breath in contemplation. It stung. To fortify myself against unprecedented, insensitive queries from the similarly curious that I wouldn’t have confident responses for anyway, I immediately pulled down the baby photo and restored in its place a click of my adolescent, brown self. It maybe worth noting that this ‘friend’ also happened to be the one who addressed me on and off as Dinah doll, from the children’s cartoon “Noddy and friends”, which I’m guessing was for the perceived likeness in skin colour, since there was no other similarity, however remote, to draw otherwise between the curly-haired, button-nosed, brown-eyed porcelain doll and me.
*
I’m a South Indian, which means my skin falls on the darker side of the Indian brown skin continuum. “Kaala/Kaali” (he/she gendered black) is a colourist slur in India when used deliberately to demean a person, not limited to attacking a person’s physical appearance; “kaala” stands in for ugly, sub-human, impure; most of all, a personal flaw. Specs guy, by virtue of being lighter on the wheat-to-molasses spectrum, had bullied me to my face, to put it mildly, which I registered only years later, in retrospect.
While in every other memory of my colour-related jabs there was always a shield between me and the commenter in the form of a screen or the buffer of an accompanying familiar person, the absence of a protective barricade, I guess, was what made the winter mock stick like it did, despite being only one of the countless unwarranted remarks about my colour I’ve endured since childhood, like every other non-milk complexioned girl in India has. So, while this one shouldn’t have lounged as long as it has, I guess his blunt delivery merits feathers (and a writing about, a decade later).
The rest of my colour-associated memories are too numerous and faceless, garden-variety comments from relatives and acquaintances, including one from an old lady in my building who on spotting me with my fair-skinned mother asked, eyebrows raised, if I was the daughter, and when my mother nodded in response, she stated the obvious—that I was very dark, and continued laying out her laundry on the clothesline, tut-tutting and shaking her head in disapproval until we disappeared up the stairs. I almost laughed at her. It wasn’t my first rodeo.
*
Another haunting instance that refuses to fade with time, though the subject of contempt in the one wasn’t even me, transpired in school with an English teacher. As the student editor of the school magazine, when I presented for her approval the rough drafts and shortlisted visualizations of the cover page, the teacher was pleased with everything but the stock photo I’d proposed for the cover: A fountain pen pincered between the thumb and forefinger poised above a white sheet. She kept saying the picture was perfect, was the right idea, that I just had to find a different one.
I didn’t grasp what was wrong with it, and the fact that she refused to state in concrete terms what needed changing didn’t help either. She dodged spelling out the matter of concern in explicit words for some time until she grew tired and quit roundabouting. The hand needed changing. It didn’t look good on a cover page, she stated matter-of-fact. Still not quite getting it, I scrutinized the photo. It looked a normal enough specimen, in fact it looked like mine, except plumper and manlier. Find a lighter one, she prompted, reading my confusion. The photo refocused in an instant. I finally saw what she saw when she scrunched her nose in disagreement at the picture: the dark brown knuckles, the non-pink cuticles, the sharp line of jarring contrast in the side profile of the fingers where the deep brown of the outer palm met its whiter insides. She was right, I thought. Who was I to contest her grown-up, world-wise opinion anyway? I acquiesced and got her a buttery hand with baby pink nails the next day, and she was sated with its aesthetic perfection.
*
Almost two years later, in yet another classroom, my skin was in the spotlight again. In a five-minute break between lectures, a newly befriended girl in my bachelor’s degree class in Microbiology—a course I enroll in amidst a gruelling personal battle with an undiagnosed chronic illness—points to my left cheek, and says I have a smudged streak of Kohl across it. I’m starkly aware, indeed, of the slash of blue-black running to the middle of my left cheekbone from the outward corner of my eye like a tear streak and also of the uneven stipples of the same shade dotting my undereye, lower left cheek and sides of the nose that the girl has likely missed or attributed to uneven skin tone, but none of it is from the kajal rimming my eyes. She knows this as well as I do, for it’s not the first time she’s drawn my attention to the discoloration with an odd air of amusement, and it won’t be the last.
Immediately after we’d met, she’d gesticulated at my cheek mark—the most prominent of the many tiny clouds of darkness dispersed across the left half of my face—suggesting I fix the runny kajal. I’d explained it to her then, that it wasn’t bleeding Kohl but a patch of unexplained hyperpigmentation that’d appeared six months into my illness, either brought on by the sickness itself or as a side-effect of one of the many trial-and-error medicines I was made to try since. She’d nodded as if she understood. The next day, however, she repeated the amused miming.
The charade continued for about a week, most days of which, I didn’t even have any kohl on. Her supposedly concerned fixation with smudged makeup didn’t make sense, and then, it sunk in for me, belatedly, that she likely found a perverse pleasure in the whole act, the pointing out of a defect I couldn’t fix or just wipe off. I knew I should just be sorry at her juvenile pettiness, but I couldn't help feeling a tinge of anger and hurt.
I’m not sure what catalysed her pretend amnesia to evaporate without conflict or confrontation from me, but all I remember is it had stopped, and the baton had passed hands, or rather mouths. This one, another fresh acquaintance, couldn’t stop obsessively telling me every chance she got, of how pretty I could have been if only I didn’t have that glaring ugly mark ruin the whole face. She’d shake her head in unsolicited sympathy every time she droned on about how the mark was impossible to miss, and how it eclipsed anything good I had going elsewhere on my face. Strangely, I agreed with her about the glaring obviousness of the dark patch.
Despite the mundane lightweight colourism backgrounding my life, rarely had I seriously given any consideration to my skin; that is, until the hyperpigmentation. I hated the mark, and I desperately wanted it gone. It was all I could see when I looked in the mirror, the inky stamp of mismatched colour on which everyone’s eyes naturally landed or flitted to in conversation. In the first year of its appearance, I refused to be photographed. While most doctors dismissed it as a mere cosmetic concern that posed no health risk, some prescribed strong creams that’d cause my skin to flake and darken and eventually did nothing to lighten the patch. As someone who’d previously never tried colour-correcting make-up, I remember being briefly obsessed with a Beauty Blemish cream that was advertised as a perfect concealer of uneven patches. When the ayurvedic oils and the prescription dermatological creams and the unending catalog of internet remedies like curd, honey, aloe, apple cider vinegar, gram flour, turmeric, papaya etc. failed to produce any results, I pinned my hopes on concealing what couldn’t be corrected. The BB cream, my last resort, was a disappointment; the discolouration just shone ashy instead of black through the cream’s loud orange. It was the first and last time I used it, or any skin make-up, for that matter.
I was embarrassed and exhausted. The moment I washed the goop off, I examined the unrelenting splotches of intense dark against my smooth brown skin in the mirror and decided I was done fighting it. So what if I had discolouration? Was it unpleasant to look at? Sure. Did it interfere with anything other than my supposed idea of aesthetic colour symmetry? No. What was the worst that could happen if the scar stayed? Absolutely nothing, save for the inconvenience of entertaining stray questions of the curious few. Did my sense of self revolve around a slash of dark skin? Briefly, yes, but no more.
*
It sounds simplistic in retrospect, but the day I examined the contrast of the grainy hyperpigmentation against the brown of my face, it made me appreciate the normalcy of my plain earthy skin tone for the first time. I’d never hated nor adored my skin at any point in my life, in fact, never paid it any heed, but the siren of the attention-grabbing patch made me feel gratitude for what I’d taken for granted. I quit all my patch-lightening attempts after that and strangely felt confident in my skin as never before.
Later, when friends, irrespective of skin tone, fretted about a microscopic pimple leaving a dark spot on their skin, discretely and unconsciously covering that part of their face with a scratching finger or a handkerchief whenever they interacted with others, it put things into context for me, the ridiculousness of it all. I saw the tiny suns of unsustainable beauty ideals each of us unwittingly spun about, the gravity of which centred us in our desired and acceptable solar systems of prettiness and relevance only when we ticked off the checkmarks—of our own making and those fostered by community, and the not fulfilling of which stripped us of the benevolence of gravity, imprinting upon us an imminent sense of doom and abandonment, as we hurtled towards the outskirts of a dark and desolate universe where we feared being relegated to unlovable nobodies.
If I were to continue being conscious about my hyperpigmentation in the way my friends worried about inconsequential tiny pimple marks, I’d have had to veil half my face, but, thankfully, I didn’t feel the need anymore. It was liberating, dare I say, even empowering, to not bother about it. I stopped paying attention to it entirely until half a decade later I noticed out of the blue that it had almost lightened to the point of blending in with the rest of my skin and I didn’t feel any different.
*
Today, I don’t care if my melanin negates all colour and light, as long as it is functional. But the me from a decade ago, overwhelmed and bludgeoned, accepted the mockery of her skin tone as an honest accusation, a personal responsibility, a repentance-demanding fact of existence. She was someone who, on wearing white or light-coloured clothing, always encountered strangers unfailingly swoop in with needless fashion advice, recommending darker shades, maybe blacks, so she could appear lighter. The brights were a strict no-no for her kind of complexion. On sticking her head out of a car into the midday sun, she was always scolded for willingly allowing her skin to be roasted a darker shade of coffee; one that wouldn’t even come off with the papaya-honey scrubs or the milk and honey face packs as they did for her lighter-skinned contemporaries, who grew up watching and internalizing every television ad that showed her colour as the one that would always get bullied or rejected. Whether in the job interview, the marriage arrangement, or general societal standing: only after being colour-corrected by the cream, talcum, or facewash would she be worthy of respect and imbued with an inherent goodness, purity and authority.
She knew to expect only back-handed compliments, if any, prefaced with, “For someone so dark, you have...”. She heard the gossip among various aunties about her senior — an acne-pockmarked, deep brown skinned stranger she knew by face from school corridors — who’d procured eyewateringly expensive, limited-edition, source-undisclosed and rapid-acting vials of a skin whitening concoction from somewhere in Karnataka. Her senior had started to appear multiple shades lighter with each passing week. She’d felt a deep kinship and sympathy for this senior, who must’ve had so much worse happen to her if she’d had gone to the extent of sloughing off her true skin, shedding layer after chemical-bleached layer until what remained could please the societal mirror she was trapped in.
*
By mobilizing my attention to things that mattered, the bouncy ball screensaver gradually disappeared. From someone who's learned to keep the distracting balls at bay, I'd like to offer this observation for the benefit and closure of my past and easily ruffled version:
You are warm-toned (gold looks better on you than silver), it qualifies as warm beige, I think. (Definitely somewhere between milk-tea and dusk.) While I’ve never confirmed in the mirror, I’m positive a blush should show on you (not that it matters in any realm of consequence in everyday life). For what it’s worth, the polite smiling and looking away that seemed a weak and lame comeback at the time, sounds about right. I hope you recognize now his bullying slam was not just mean, but also technically and factually wrong.
Moreover, even if the red weren’t to show through, you owe no one the offerings of beauty, objective or subjective. You aren’t to feel apologetic for the skin you were born with, though now obvious in hindsight, you were yet to learn this platitude was deeper than a phone wallpaper quote. You don’t need to laud your melanin as exquisite or pummel self-love into it, either. Not hating it or being bothered by the unsolicited comments it cannonballs your way shall suffice. You are not an aesthetic.
***
About the Author:
Neethu Krishnan is a writer based in Mumbai, India. She holds an MA in English and an M.Sc. in Microbiology and writes between genres at the moment. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Spectacle, Bacopa Literary Review, Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging (Volume Silver), Spoonie Journal, Seaside Gothic, Lucent Dreaming, and elsewhere. She is a 2022 Best of the Net poetry nominee, and recipient of the Creative Nonfiction Award in Bacopa Literary Review's 2022 contest. You can find her @neethu.krishnan_ on Instagram or on facebook.com/neethu.krishnan.944