Colour codes

When my brother and I were kids, my grandmother used to rub Touch-Me talcum powder on my brother’s face, neck and arms.

When my brother and I were kids, my grandmother used to rub Touch-Me talcum powder on my brother’s face, neck and arms. “I don’t know how you got so dark,” she’d mutter, dabbing his face with ghost powder. I was eight, then but I knew — and I suspected Dadi did, too — that Ali got his chocolatey colour from our father. I gingerly ventured once to say so, “But Dadi, Abu is also dark and Ali has obviously inherited…”

“No he has not,” she replied, sternly monosyllabic, “My son is as fair as a rasagulla.”

Recently, I was home in Lahore after a month’s stay in Delhi. I was told, delicately, that I had gotten darker. “Have you been travelling a lot, beta?” my grand-aunt asked. “Not really,” I said. “I’ve been driven around in Delhi but have seen some of the city on foot.” She pursed her lips noncommittally but, unable to restrain herself, she added that my arms had been the worst victims of the heat. I told her that it was cool to have ‘bronzed’ arms and I was happy my jaundiced sticks have a bit of colour in them now. She wasn’t convinced.

My mother fondly recalls the palpable relief on Dadi’s face when I was born. With a shock of black hair and milky white skin, I was Dadi’s little aesthetic wonder. My maternal grandfather, normally above such classifications, couldn’t contain his delight, “She’s just like my grandmother — Barfo Begum.” Then he apparently leaned closer to me and whispered, “Little Barfo… barfo… barfo…” and I was said to have responded with a loud gurgle of laughter. Since then I’m ‘Barfo’ to my mother’s side of the family. When I tell friends abroad that ‘barf’ is ice in Urdu, and that we in India and Pakistan are a tad fixated on the issue of skin colour, their brows furrow expectedly: “But you’re not that fair.” When I said this to Dadi some years ago, she marked it down to the nasty Hepatitis bug I got when I was nine and continued, “Before that your face was as white and soft as a ball of cotton.”