Fair and Lovely, Dark and Ugly

“It is a curse to be born a dark woman in this country.”  Her expressive eyes, carefully sculpted nose and very full lips engraved on a chocolate complexion would never allow a foreigner to think her color would be the bane of her 28-year-old life.

Amaya William’s earliest childhood memory sways her back to the windowsill she was tied to at her home in Mumbai, India, being punished by her mother for her sister’s deviltry.  Stripped of her clothes, stark naked, her body was etched in pain as Mom rubbed ‘lal mirchi’ (red chili powder) on her full-blown tiny frame.  She was five at the time.  That was a preview of her life’s coming attractions.  The stoic girl quietly states, “That’s just the way things were in my house; I was punished for any and everything.” 

The fiercely independent girl is dressed casually in a simple white t-shirt over a pair of dark-brown cotton harem pants; her square shoulders and straight posture gives her an air of confidence and a noticeable physical presence.  She cups her compact face with both hands, the plastic black bangles dancing around her wrists as she begins a stroll down memory lane, recollecting those painful years growing up.  We’re sitting in a cozy little restaurant set up on one of the less busier streets of Bangalore, India, perhaps to escape the shoals of traffic.  They take you around the world with their foods in small, thin paper plates.  But their specialty is the fruit shakes, which is one of the reasons Amaya and I chose the place.  

After a blithe waiter, quite generous with his smile takes our order of two mango milkshakes, Amy, as most address her, tries to light a cigarette, struggling against the restless monsoon wind.  I have been here a little over a month and still marvel at the remarkable weather, the garden city’s first element that won me over as soon as I stepped outside the airport on the last day of May to experience India for the first time from the United States of America. 

As I shape my first question, she is deeply focused on the smoke escaping in perfect little circles from the opening of her mouth.  There seems to be a transparent honesty about her demeanor that I noticed the first day I met her at the publication company I was interning for.  She bears a loud and clear message in her guise: I am what I am, like it or not. 

For Amy, the color discrimination began at home. Four sisters, born in succession, but “I am the black sheep of the family, literally the “black” sheep of my family.” The fact that her other three sisters were born lighter than her made her the object of constant discrimination.  Although she says she has blocked most, some memories are so stubborn, no matter how much you try to edit, erase, they remain just as they are.  She remembers how her mother would vigorously rub fairness creams on her face and her body in hopes of lightening her color when she was about eight years old.  “I associated dark with being dirty and ugly because that is what I was made to believe.”  Little Amaya would scrub herself for hours, thinking her color would somehow fade, that the ‘dirt’ would rub off.   The dejected eight-year-old girl tried to hang herself from a ceiling fan at her Mumbai home.  “Of course, that didn’t work all that well,” she laughs while I cry, without tears, for her past, envisioning a dispirited little girl, suicidal at an age when one doesn’t even understand death.  All because of the misery her skin color brought upon her.  

As a child, Amy desperately longed for affection, attention from her parents.  She quietly watched as her sisters were coddled with countless hugs and kisses, while she was never even addressed by sweet names.  Her parents would often leave her alone at home when they would go on a ‘family’ outing.  “Another incident that is stuck in my mind is when Dad had come to watch a dance all of us participated in, and after the performance was over, we ran up to him, but he literally pushed me away and hugged my other sisters.”  The only reason, she adds, that her three younger siblings were favored over her was because they were fairer.  “Who will get married to you,” she remembers her mother’s caustic words, echoing her relatives’ barbed comments on Amy’s dark skin.  “All I saw when I looked in the mirror was a black cloud.  I never thought dark can be beautiful.”  I catch myself thinking on and off during our conversation how it would feel to feel so ugly. 

Amy developed an eating disorder at the age of 12 or 13, and “my mom didn’t even notice.” She’s placid throughout the interview as if she has become numb to it all.   That was the inside story. Outside her home, at school, Amy had become quite sentient in discerning the color politics.  She was a talented singer and a ‘decent actress’ but was never given the opportunity to participate in any of her school events because “my color was always against me.”  And when she entered her teen years, she got stuck in an abusive relationship with her first boyfriend, and tolerated his verbal and physical attacks for years simply because, “he was the first person who told me that I was beautiful.”  She says she had never heard the word beautiful and her name in one sentence before and that made a world of a difference to her and was reason enough to keep her bound to him for six years.  “I seriously had no self-esteem, no self-confidence whatsoever.” 

As a result of this deep-rooted complex, after the breakup with her first boyfriend, Amy flatly says she became ‘promiscuous.’  “I was always vying for attention.”  Still, she says, most of her boyfriends would be afraid to introduce her to their mothers because she was dark.  The times she was able to meet a couple of her boyfriends’ mothers, one had said, “oh, you’re half South Indian, that’s why the color.”  Another one had told her son after meeting Amy, “but she’s so dark.”  Unbelievable.  I think about what a mountain people make out of one little remark on skin color in the West, and how it is generously accepted in the East.  They fight against it in the West, but live with it in the East.  “Just yesterday I was passing by a bus stand and repeatedly got called a “Negro” by some guys.”  She says she is so used to being called names like ‘kaali’ (blackie) by strangers that it just doesn’t faze her anymore. “If I were to enter the marriage market, I would definitely have to settle for someone who is much, much older than me and far from the type of men I like,” she says.  She’s right.  Almost all the matrimonial columns that appear in print and on line here list ‘fair’ as a requirement.  She manages a smile that reflects acceptance, forgiveness, and to a degree, pity – pity toward the mainstream Indian society who is brainwashed into believing that dark cannot be beautiful. 

Amy has managed to change her family’s mindset and her parents, today, are genuinely apologetic for their behavior.  “My mother started changing her mind when I was discovered at a beach in Vizak by a photographer who wanted to click my pictures.” But even now, it’s “you’re dark BUT you’re beautiful, not you’re dark and beautiful.”   

            Twirling a strand of the thick black medium-length hair framing her face, Amy says this obsession with fairness is so deeply ingrained in the masses, it’s at a point of almost no return. White is simply better, she says.  And not only is it more attractive, but equates to a better husband, better job, and a more successful life in general. “In most companies, if I was competing for a position against a candidate less qualified than myself but lighter in skin, she would get the job.” Dark skin is associated with dirtiness, ugliness, and at its very best, seductive.  Seductive only on the ramp, or in Indian films.  “But even in Bollywood, Aishwariya Rai will always be better than Sushmita Sen mainly because of her color.”  The heroines of this monstrous film industry are usually light-skinned, at least the good girls, but who is chosen to do the seductress roles or steamy dance items? Ask anyone who is familiar with Bollywood, and the first face that pops up would be of sultry Bipasha Basu.  That is just the way it is.  Fair is innocent, desired, pristine. And dark, for the most part, spells doom. And it’s no secret either. 

Amy takes me to visit a popular chain, “Health and Glow,” scattered around Bangalore in every district of the city.  Just as I am warned, we encounter a dizzying range of fairness products.  The shelves are swamped with a variety of whitening soaps, masks and creams by Fair and Lovely, L’Oreal, Ponds, Garnier, Avon, Jolen, just to mention a few.  Some claim to turn your color shades whiter in ‘just 7 days,’ promising you beauty, romance and, adjusting to the so-called modern times in which women are stepping up in the work industry, power.   

‘The modern Indian woman,’ a term I heard countless times during my trip, unchained from archaic mindsets, rules and regulations to gain an identity of her own.  Now she has the freedom to be her own person.  She is fabulously independent, has power over her life and DOES NOT have to live with her dark skin.  That is the prejudice reinforced by in-your-face advertising for cosmetic products.  Here, the color of your skin can do wonders or blunders to your life if you are a woman.  We talk about the promotion of this dangerous prejudice and I recall the ridiculous commercial featuring top Bollywood stars, which I initially thought was a spoof! The campaign, consisting of several episodes, involves a dusky Indian actress, Priyanka Chopra, former Miss World, who is dumped by her fiancé, the famous Saif Ali Khan, for a light-skinned woman.  The heart-broken girl finds her hope in a jar of Pond’s White Beauty cream, and sure enough, her complexion is transformed, and so is her ex-lover.  The only fairness I found in Fair and Lovely was that they don’t discriminate against sexes; the company recently launched a product for the guys.  The commercial: A sinewy young man wearing trendy clothes and riding a motorbike is rejected by his beloved because of his dark skin, but after using the magical ‘Fair and Handsome,’ his color changes from brown to bright white, casting a spell on his sweetheart. 

Our interview ends at Amy’s apartment, which she shares with three other single girls.  We flip through some beauty magazines in which she points out the dusky models, saying, “only in the magazines Zee (my nickname).”  It’s a farce that dark women are considered beautiful here, she says.  “A big lie.” Although Amy has grown to love herself, “there are still times I feel insecure about my color.”  And while the family scars have been treated, she admits she is not attached to her parents and one of the reasons she moved from Mumbai to Bangalore was because her identity there, at home, was largely dependent on her color, in fact, that was, pretty much, her only identity.  

The ride back to the guesthouse in the rickshaw transports me back in time to Pakistan, where I spent three weeks before arriving here.  India is not alone in its prejudice against dark skin.  In Pakistan, darker-skinned individuals are often at the bottom of society making up majority of the lower caste.  A remark made by a poverty-stricken ‘maalish vaali’ (masseuse) while I was in Lahore is pounding my memory.  (Translated from Urdu) “Whether your child is black or white, a child is still a child; my parents love me even though I’m so dark.” 

(Two months ago) Razia Bibi, a plump woman in her forties with a round face greets me with a wide smile exposing a set of straight, white teeth as I come out of the huge room I am staying in.  It’s a lovely house that has the look and feel of ‘old Lahore.’  Most maids and servants don’t even offer a handshake in Pakistan according to the norm; while the Muslim country condemns a caste system of any kind, the practice tells otherwise in almost every household, middle to upper class.  I am introduced to her by my host, my auntie’s 70-something mother.  Razia comes home every single day to help relieve ‘Nani’ (grandma) of her arthritis pain with an oil massage.  I step forward to give her a hug and her dark eyes show surprise as I put my arms around her. 

Razia is dark, very dark, just as most servants and lower-class members of Pakistan’s society I have seen in the past.  She has smooth, clear skin but her face appears to be invisibly scarred by suffering.  I can see it.  Within the first hour of meeting her, I learn she is quite talkative.  She is the breadwinner of her family and works seven days a week to support her unemployed husband who is addicted to heroin and all her five children.  Razia is the second wife of a man who has twelve kids in total but has stopped working since years while she has many more years on her face than she has lived.  Her honest exhaustion, somehow, puts me to shame. 

We are sitting in the lounge without any electricity in the cruel heat of summertime.  While Razia unfolds her life to me, I notice that she speaks as if she is almost apologetic of her color.  She had been kidnapped for marriage, and is trying to tell me how worried her parents were even though ‘she is black.’  I listen quietly, trying to harden my expression of sorrow for her life and absorbing the gravity of what she has just said.  I notice how her otherwise dolorous eyes light up when she speaks of her ‘fair grandchildren.”  That is the only characteristic she speaks of repeatedly when she talks about them.  I am too overwhelmed by the tragedy of her entire life to push the subject of color discrimination further with Razia, but the seed for my story has been planted by her comments. 

I spend the rest of my stay in Lahore observing the fairness fixation.  Compared to Indians, Pakistanis are usually lighter in skin, and when it comes to beauty, a number of them think they are superior than their neighbors based on skin color! I hear derogatory comments on Indians by a few Pakistanis which begin with ‘kaale’ meaning ‘dark ones.’  And these are people that belong to the educated sector.  India and Pakistan have long been rivals since the partition of 1947, but to use skin color as an attack is just pitiable.  They don’t realize it, and I don’t make them realize it, at least yet. 

Every single salon I walk into offers a variety of whitening services which include ‘face whitening,’ ‘body whitening,’ etc.  And those are the more expensive, sought-after services according to the employees.  The markets are also inundated with fairness products, mostly for women, reinforcing long-held prejudices against dark skin.  You see powdery white faces on Pakistani television, weddings, parties and the red-light district where prostitutes have dipped themselves in foundation shades lighter than their skin tone. 

The rickshaw jerks and I abruptly come back to the present.  We are not far from my temporary home in Bangalore.  I wonder where this color fixation came from, how these cultures became so terribly infected with this ridiculous obsession with fairness.  Is it a carryover from the colonial times during the British rule when Pakistan and India was one country? White was superior then, and although they have long gone, white remains superior.  We’re less than a minute away from my destination.  I glance at the meter to pay the rickshaw driver his due.  I gather my belongings as he pulls the colorful little vehicle in front of my guesthouse.  The old white dog, imperturbable by her surroundings, is sleeping outside the dwarfed gate of my temporary lodging.  My thoughts follow me as I step down from the rickshaw.  In the dark of the night, I walk toward the main door thinking that neither India nor Pakistan was able to gain independence from the British. 

“It is a curse to be born a dark woman in this country.”  Her expressive eyes, carefully sculpted nose and very full lips engraved on a chocolate complexion would never allow a foreigner to think her color would be the bane of her 28-year-old life.

Amaya William’s earliest childhood memory sways her back to the windowsill she was tied to at her home in Mumbai, India, being punished by her mother for her sister’s deviltry.  Stripped of her clothes, stark naked, her body was etched in pain as Mom rubbed ‘lal mirchi’ (red chili powder) on her full-blown tiny frame.  She was five at the time.  That was a preview of her life’s coming attractions.  The stoic girl quietly states, “That’s just the way things were in my house; I was punished for any and everything.” 

The fiercely independent girl is dressed casually in a simple white t-shirt over a pair of dark-brown cotton harem pants; her square shoulders and straight posture gives her an air of confidence and a noticeable physical presence.  She cups her compact face with both hands, the plastic black bangles dancing around her wrists as she begins a stroll down memory lane, recollecting those painful years growing up.  We’re sitting in a cozy little restaurant set up on one of the less busier streets of Bangalore, India, perhaps to escape the shoals of traffic.  They take you around the world with their foods in small, thin paper plates.  But their specialty is the fruit shakes, which is one of the reasons Amaya and I chose the place.  

After a blithe waiter, quite generous with his smile takes our order of two mango milkshakes, Amy, as most address her, tries to light a cigarette, struggling against the restless monsoon wind.  I have been here a little over a month and still marvel at the remarkable weather, the garden city’s first element that won me over as soon as I stepped outside the airport on the last day of May to experience India for the first time from the United States of America. 

As I shape my first question, she is deeply focused on the smoke escaping in perfect little circles from the opening of her mouth.  There seems to be a transparent honesty about her demeanor that I noticed the first day I met her at the publication company I was interning for.  She bears a loud and clear message in her guise: I am what I am, like it or not. 

For Amy, the color discrimination began at home. Four sisters, born in succession, but “I am the black sheep of the family, literally the “black” sheep of my family.” The fact that her other three sisters were born lighter than her made her the object of constant discrimination.  Although she says she has blocked most, some memories are so stubborn, no matter how much you try to edit, erase, they remain just as they are.  She remembers how her mother would vigorously rub fairness creams on her face and her body in hopes of lightening her color when she was about eight years old.  “I associated dark with being dirty and ugly because that is what I was made to believe.”  Little Amaya would scrub herself for hours, thinking her color would somehow fade, that the ‘dirt’ would rub off.   The dejected eight-year-old girl tried to hang herself from a ceiling fan at her Mumbai home.  “Of course, that didn’t work all that well,” she laughs while I cry, without tears, for her past, envisioning a dispirited little girl, suicidal at an age when one doesn’t even understand death.  All because of the misery her skin color brought upon her.  

As a child, Amy desperately longed for affection, attention from her parents.  She quietly watched as her sisters were coddled with countless hugs and kisses, while she was never even addressed by sweet names.  Her parents would often leave her alone at home when they would go on a ‘family’ outing.  “Another incident that is stuck in my mind is when Dad had come to watch a dance all of us participated in, and after the performance was over, we ran up to him, but he literally pushed me away and hugged my other sisters.”  The only reason, she adds, that her three younger siblings were favored over her was because they were fairer.  “Who will get married to you,” she remembers her mother’s caustic words, echoing her relatives’ barbed comments on Amy’s dark skin.  “All I saw when I looked in the mirror was a black cloud.  I never thought dark can be beautiful.”  I catch myself thinking on and off during our conversation how it would feel to feel so ugly. 

Amy developed an eating disorder at the age of 12 or 13, and “my mom didn’t even notice.” She’s placid throughout the interview as if she has become numb to it all.   That was the inside story. Outside her home, at school, Amy had become quite sentient in discerning the color politics.  She was a talented singer and a ‘decent actress’ but was never given the opportunity to participate in any of her school events because “my color was always against me.”  And when she entered her teen years, she got stuck in an abusive relationship with her first boyfriend, and tolerated his verbal and physical attacks for years simply because, “he was the first person who told me that I was beautiful.”  She says she had never heard the word beautiful and her name in one sentence before and that made a world of a difference to her and was reason enough to keep her bound to him for six years.  “I seriously had no self-esteem, no self-confidence whatsoever.” 

As a result of this deep-rooted complex, after the breakup with her first boyfriend, Amy flatly says she became ‘promiscuous.’  “I was always vying for attention.”  Still, she says, most of her boyfriends would be afraid to introduce her to their mothers because she was dark.  The times she was able to meet a couple of her boyfriends’ mothers, one had said, “oh, you’re half South Indian, that’s why the color.”  Another one had told her son after meeting Amy, “but she’s so dark.”  Unbelievable.  I think about what a mountain people make out of one little remark on skin color in the West, and how it is generously accepted in the East.  They fight against it in the West, but live with it in the East.  “Just yesterday I was passing by a bus stand and repeatedly got called a “Negro” by some guys.”  She says she is so used to being called names like ‘kaali’ (blackie) by strangers that it just doesn’t faze her anymore. “If I were to enter the marriage market, I would definitely have to settle for someone who is much, much older than me and far from the type of men I like,” she says.  She’s right.  Almost all the matrimonial columns that appear in print and on line here list ‘fair’ as a requirement.  She manages a smile that reflects acceptance, forgiveness, and to a degree, pity – pity toward the mainstream Indian society who is brainwashed into believing that dark cannot be beautiful. 

Amy has managed to change her family’s mindset and her parents, today, are genuinely apologetic for their behavior.  “My mother started changing her mind when I was discovered at a beach in Vizak by a photographer who wanted to click my pictures.” But even now, it’s “you’re dark BUT you’re beautiful, not you’re dark and beautiful.”   

            Twirling a strand of the thick black medium-length hair framing her face, Amy says this obsession with fairness is so deeply ingrained in the masses, it’s at a point of almost no return. White is simply better, she says.  And not only is it more attractive, but equates to a better husband, better job, and a more successful life in general. “In most companies, if I was competing for a position against a candidate less qualified than myself but lighter in skin, she would get the job.” Dark skin is associated with dirtiness, ugliness, and at its very best, seductive.  Seductive only on the ramp, or in Indian films.  “But even in Bollywood, Aishwariya Rai will always be better than Sushmita Sen mainly because of her color.”  The heroines of this monstrous film industry are usually light-skinned, at least the good girls, but who is chosen to do the seductress roles or steamy dance items? Ask anyone who is familiar with Bollywood, and the first face that pops up would be of sultry Bipasha Basu.  That is just the way it is.  Fair is innocent, desired, pristine. And dark, for the most part, spells doom. And it’s no secret either. 

Amy takes me to visit a popular chain, “Health and Glow,” scattered around Bangalore in every district of the city.  Just as I am warned, we encounter a dizzying range of fairness products.  The shelves are swamped with a variety of whitening soaps, masks and creams by Fair and Lovely, L’Oreal, Ponds, Garnier, Avon, Jolen, just to mention a few.  Some claim to turn your color shades whiter in ‘just 7 days,’ promising you beauty, romance and, adjusting to the so-called modern times in which women are stepping up in the work industry, power.   

‘The modern Indian woman,’ a term I heard countless times during my trip, unchained from archaic mindsets, rules and regulations to gain an identity of her own.  Now she has the freedom to be her own person.  She is fabulously independent, has power over her life and DOES NOT have to live with her dark skin.  That is the prejudice reinforced by in-your-face advertising for cosmetic products.  Here, the color of your skin can do wonders or blunders to your life if you are a woman.  We talk about the promotion of this dangerous prejudice and I recall the ridiculous commercial featuring top Bollywood stars, which I initially thought was a spoof! The campaign, consisting of several episodes, involves a dusky Indian actress, Priyanka Chopra, former Miss World, who is dumped by her fiancé, the famous Saif Ali Khan, for a light-skinned woman.  The heart-broken girl finds her hope in a jar of Pond’s White Beauty cream, and sure enough, her complexion is transformed, and so is her ex-lover.  The only fairness I found in Fair and Lovely was that they don’t discriminate against sexes; the company recently launched a product for the guys.  The commercial: A sinewy young man wearing trendy clothes and riding a motorbike is rejected by his beloved because of his dark skin, but after using the magical ‘Fair and Handsome,’ his color changes from brown to bright white, casting a spell on his sweetheart. 

Our interview ends at Amy’s apartment, which she shares with three other single girls.  We flip through some beauty magazines in which she points out the dusky models, saying, “only in the magazines Zee (my nickname).”  It’s a farce that dark women are considered beautiful here, she says.  “A big lie.” Although Amy has grown to love herself, “there are still times I feel insecure about my color.”  And while the family scars have been treated, she admits she is not attached to her parents and one of the reasons she moved from Mumbai to Bangalore was because her identity there, at home, was largely dependent on her color, in fact, that was, pretty much, her only identity.  

The ride back to the guesthouse in the rickshaw transports me back in time to Pakistan, where I spent three weeks before arriving here.  India is not alone in its prejudice against dark skin.  In Pakistan, darker-skinned individuals are often at the bottom of society making up majority of the lower caste.  A remark made by a poverty-stricken ‘maalish vaali’ (masseuse) while I was in Lahore is pounding my memory.  (Translated from Urdu) “Whether your child is black or white, a child is still a child; my parents love me even though I’m so dark.” 

(Two months ago) Razia Bibi, a plump woman in her forties with a round face greets me with a wide smile exposing a set of straight, white teeth as I come out of the huge room I am staying in.  It’s a lovely house that has the look and feel of ‘old Lahore.’  Most maids and servants don’t even offer a handshake in Pakistan according to the norm; while the Muslim country condemns a caste system of any kind, the practice tells otherwise in almost every household, middle to upper class.  I am introduced to her by my host, my auntie’s 70-something mother.  Razia comes home every single day to help relieve ‘Nani’ (grandma) of her arthritis pain with an oil massage.  I step forward to give her a hug and her dark eyes show surprise as I put my arms around her. 

Razia is dark, very dark, just as most servants and lower-class members of Pakistan’s society I have seen in the past.  She has smooth, clear skin but her face appears to be invisibly scarred by suffering.  I can see it.  Within the first hour of meeting her, I learn she is quite talkative.  She is the breadwinner of her family and works seven days a week to support her unemployed husband who is addicted to heroin and all her five children.  Razia is the second wife of a man who has twelve kids in total but has stopped working since years while she has many more years on her face than she has lived.  Her honest exhaustion, somehow, puts me to shame. 

We are sitting in the lounge without any electricity in the cruel heat of summertime.  While Razia unfolds her life to me, I notice that she speaks as if she is almost apologetic of her color.  She had been kidnapped for marriage, and is trying to tell me how worried her parents were even though ‘she is black.’  I listen quietly, trying to harden my expression of sorrow for her life and absorbing the gravity of what she has just said.  I notice how her otherwise dolorous eyes light up when she speaks of her ‘fair grandchildren.”  That is the only characteristic she speaks of repeatedly when she talks about them.  I am too overwhelmed by the tragedy of her entire life to push the subject of color discrimination further with Razia, but the seed for my story has been planted by her comments. 

I spend the rest of my stay in Lahore observing the fairness fixation.  Compared to Indians, Pakistanis are usually lighter in skin, and when it comes to beauty, a number of them think they are superior than their neighbors based on skin color! I hear derogatory comments on Indians by a few Pakistanis which begin with ‘kaale’ meaning ‘dark ones.’  And these are people that belong to the educated sector.  India and Pakistan have long been rivals since the partition of 1947, but to use skin color as an attack is just pitiable.  They don’t realize it, and I don’t make them realize it, at least yet. 

Every single salon I walk into offers a variety of whitening services which include ‘face whitening,’ ‘body whitening,’ etc.  And those are the more expensive, sought-after services according to the employees.  The markets are also inundated with fairness products, mostly for women, reinforcing long-held prejudices against dark skin.  You see powdery white faces on Pakistani television, weddings, parties and the red-light district where prostitutes have dipped themselves in foundation shades lighter than their skin tone. 

The rickshaw jerks and I abruptly come back to the present.  We are not far from my temporary home in Bangalore.  I wonder where this color fixation came from, how these cultures became so terribly infected with this ridiculous obsession with fairness.  Is it a carryover from the colonial times during the British rule when Pakistan and India was one country? White was superior then, and although they have long gone, white remains superior.  We’re less than a minute away from my destination.  I glance at the meter to pay the rickshaw driver his due.  I gather my belongings as he pulls the colorful little vehicle in front of my guesthouse.  The old white dog, imperturbable by her surroundings, is sleeping outside the dwarfed gate of my temporary lodging.  My thoughts follow me as I step down from the rickshaw.  In the dark of the night, I walk toward the main door thinking that neither India nor Pakistan was able to gain independence from the British. 

Comments

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[adult chat]

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