Skip to main content

Black Beauty

Fiction

“Why am I so black when you are so fair?” Veena asked her mother fondly touching the latter’s hand.  “They call me Black Beauty in the school.”

“Ask your father,” said mother who was busy cooking the dinner.  Father was dark in complexion, that’s what mother really meant.  But Veena had not grasped that.  She went to her father since he was a better friend than mother.   The only reason why she had bothered to ask mother was that when her first bleeding took place it was to mother that father directed her summarily.  That was just a few days ago.  “There are some things that only your mother can explain,” father had said.  Veena thought that the colour of the skin was also as mysterious a matter as the blood that came out from the unmentionable part of her body.

“You got my colour, dear,” said father putting aside Akhil Sharma’s Family Life which he was reading.  “Don’t you like it?”

Veena’s nose twitched and her lips pouted.  She realised that she had been unconscious of the fact that her father had a dark complexion.  She looked at him keenly. 

“Are you wondering why your mother married a man like me?”  Father gave her his naughty smile.  Of late he had noticed his daughter spending unusually long time while taking bath.  Unusually long time while dressing up for school.  She had changed her hairstyle.  She was trying to become seductive. 

Akhil Sharma’s narrator had said in the page that Raghu had just put down that writing the story had changed his life.  Her daughter was faced with the problem of the complexion of her skin because the TV in the living room was advertising Fair & Lovely as a remedy for dark complexion.   Is dark complexion a disease to be treated with an ointment?

Yet hadn’t he married Meena precisely because of her fair skin?  What constitutes fairness?  Is it the colour of the skin?  Would Othello have loved Desdemona had she not been white-skinned?  Why did Desdemona love Othello? 

No, darling, explained Raghu to his daughter.  Life is not about the colour of the skin except in TV commercials and in the minds of people who live commercialised lives.   Commerce is what drives mediocrity and mediocrity is what drives commerce.  Life is far beyond commerce so long as you rise above mediocrity and realise that the colour of your skin is as illusory as the promises of Fair & Lovely.  Iago was the Fair & Lovely in the life of Othello.  In every person’s life an Iago is sure to appear.  Some time or the other.  Iagos come in various forms.  In the form of people who pretend to help you, to seek your charity, to promise you publicity for your blogs, to offer you a better job...

“Who is Iago?” asked Veena when she couldn’t understand what her father was saying much as she was used to his eccentric explanations.

“Iago is...”  Raghu wondered what to say.  His daughter was only in grade seven.  “Iago can be the colour of your skin.  Iago can be those who judge you by the colour of your skin.”

Raghu had been fighting with certain Iagos for quite some time.  Those who said things like “Oh, the last blog of yours was written when you were intoxicated, wasn’t it?” or “Maybe one day your blog will win the Booker Prize?”

“Iagos are unavoidable, darling,” said Raghu.  Life is all about meeting Iagos and going beyond them. 

Going beyond Iagos is dangerous.  Raghu knew it.  But he didn’t tell that to Veena.  She was not old enough to understand that yet.  One of Othello’s heroic flaws was his isolation from Iago and such people.  Superiority and the isolation that necessarily accompanies it are tragic flaws.  Raghu knew it.  Unless you know how to convert it all into a narrative.  The narrative is the real beauty, dear. 



PS. This story is dedicated to someone who is very dear to me and is tormented by the colour of her skin.  The irony is that the person is unlikely to read this.

Comments

  1. For many problems like this,money is right medicine.An earning lady is seemed in a different angle.And fairness has it's own headaches.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's one way of looking at it. I think the complexion turns immaterial when people begin to perceive our intrinsic worth.

      Delete
  2. Beautiful story Tomichan. As you rightly pointed out, complexion is just another thing in our body. It shouldn't by anyway rule us. Very crisp and meaningful story.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Insignificant things like the skin pigmentation have become important in our times. Sign of the superficiality that has gripped our civilisation like a plague.

      Delete
  3. Meaningful narrative!
    Our craze for fair complexion is our tragic flaw (most Indians: not only dark but even fair ones are obsessed too)
    Sad that the person who inspired this great post is unlikely to read it..!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That person is perhaps too young to be interested in my blog. I understand that.

      Delete
  4. One of the most intriguing thing that plagued my young life - the color of my skin.. one of the most frequent question in my mind those days was why everyone not born with same color or at least why girls cannot be all fair? and funnily I would despise a fair complexion guy thinking I could have been fair instead of him.. After a certain age, all Veenas who gain strength comes out of that color thing just like I have.. hope your near one also will find her real beauty within..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sometimes complexion becomes a complex and hence dangerous. I guess most people grow out of it only to face other problems as seen in the character of the father in the story.

      Delete
  5. If she does read it, I doubt if it will have a positive impact on her. A complex that stems because of the color of your skin or anything else about your appearance is something that you have to overcome yourself, and until you do (eventually everyone sees how unimportant it is, and eventually everyone grows to love themselves), no amount of posts or peptalk can help them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Only religious preachers expect their audience to be converted miraculously, Sreesha. No literary writer looks forward to any conversion. I write because "the narrative is the real beauty" (the last sentence in the story) for me.

      Delete
  6. Ah yes, Iago comes into our lives in different forms. And sometimes we play Iago sometimes knowingly and sometimes unknowingly. :)

    On another note -- what a brilliant creation Iago was; such a well-crafted character!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, of course, while others become our Iagos, we become theirs :)

      Shakespeare was a genius. Who can question that?

      Delete
  7. Nothing can help them as it's in their mind. Even though some have a dark complexion, it's not a bad thing. The society distinguishes it and makes it look bad....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Kejriwal’s Arrest in Modi’s Kurukshetra

For some mysterious reason, Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest reminded me of Haren Pandya. Maybe, because Pandya’s 21 st death anniversary is approaching (26 March). Have you forgotten Haren Pandya? He was the Home Minister of Gujarat before Narendra Modi assumed dictatorial powers in that state. Modi chose to teach humility to Pandya by making him the Minister of State for revenue. Pandya chose not to learn humility from Modi and resigned from that post in Aug 2002. Remember Gujarat of 2002? You should. A fire engulfed a train on 27 Feb 2002 killing 58 Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya where they had gone to discover their god, not very unlike Christopher Columbus undertaking a voyage to discover India and messing it all up. What caused the fire in the train? Lord Ram knows probably. The upshot was that there was a riot in Gujarat by Hindus against Muslims. Haren Pandya is one of the BJP leaders who gave statements in many places indicting Modi for the riots. He asser