& Lovely

A few decades ago, there lived a little girl living in a small state in the far south of India. The deep and dark lustrous nature bestowed upon her kids, all the lovely shades of gleaming brown skin. The little girl was born to run under the sun a wee bit more than her parents and siblings. Enjoying the comfort of her tending parents she grew up with her cheery soul.

All was well and good until this brown cherry stepped into her teens. On one such dull ordinary day, a piece of shit fell from her classmate’s mouth - ‘You look like a boy. You are dark and your hair is unruly.’

If this was the only prejudicial remark that happened in her whole life, it wouldn’t have mattered. That was just the beginning. As the girl bloomed, the taunts took new shapes and forms. And like every brown-skinned girl of that era, tubes of ‘F & Lovely’ were emptied on her face. And then came the stiff evaluation, baap of all baaps assessment of a woman's charm - groom hunting in an arranged marriage. She, being blissfully dumb about the intricacies of the society, was not aware that her market value is pretty dim with dark skin.

On one such dull ordinary evening, a revelation came, in the form of a badly timed call. Her parents were outside when she picked up the phone. On the other side of the call was a lady searching for her future daughter in law. After the initial pleasantries, the lady eagerly asked - ‘Are you white?’ The readers should have by the time realized that the protagonist of the story is quite dense when it comes to picking up the social cues. She, with every vivacity and enlightenment that a 20-year-old woman can claim, replied, stupidly - ‘Kerala, Indian’. Followed by a short pause, the other side rephrased - ‘Are you beautiful? Do you have flawless fair skin?’ ‘I have pimples, but I am fair.' went the reply.

Partly baffled partly excited, she narrated the whole incident to her parents late in the evening. The dismay on her Dad’s face was hard to miss. ‘One more down the drain’ he said. Maybe because she looked totally naive or maybe he wanted her to handle the future calls better, he explained - ‘You shouldn’t have said fair. Fair stands for very light skin like your friend B. You have a wheatish complexion. And then there is dusky skin like C. If you had noted down their number, we could have asked them not to take the pain of visiting us’.

Before the reader go tch. tch. tch, let me tell you, she found her better half in a gentle soul from a faraway land in her 30s.

I wouldn’t have written this note, had I not overheard this amazing conversation she had with her 8-year-old sun-kissed daughter. We were having a candid discussion on the recent turn of events about ‘& Lovely’, assuming that the kids were occupied otherwise. The little girl was miffed at her mother for some silly reason and hollered: ‘Mamma, you are not so pretty as well.'

I could read from the mother’s face that she was taken by surprise. She took a minute and replied calmly:

‘I am aware that I am not pretty as per the conventional beauty standards. But you know what, I also am in luck when I find people who are interested in me. Shallow ones are winnowed out by Mother Nature.’

The child softened. She asked: ‘Do you think I am also not beautiful?’

The mother approached her child and nonchalantly replied: ‘It’s up to you to decide. But you should also accept that good looks are one of the many qualities that humans possess. And like with other qualities each individual will have it in varying measures. It's a quality like intelligence, grit, eloquence, creativity, resilience, etc. Not everyone embodies every quality.'

I found it an empowering take on the whole subject. Instead of telling our kids that everyone is beautiful, we should be telling them that it doesn’t matter. It is ‘Ok’ to be not having the features that the society attributes to being pretty. It’s 'Ok' not to be stunning. If one is quite pretty, well and good. If one is not, that is well and good too.