How I came to love my dark skin

Recently, when I was perched on what could easily have substituted as a gynaecologist's chair - legs splayed, hands spread outwards against each arm rest, dress hitched high enough to barely cover my delicates - I re-encountered the extent of my darkness. It wasn't the state of almost nakedness that prompted this; two women, one on each side of my body, made a fair contribution. The one on my right lifted the powder puff from its receptacle and rubbed it over my ankle.

The talc contrasted sharply against my skin. "Arms pehle karte hain," said the woman on my left. Let's do the arms first. A firm strategy now in place, both women proceeded to first spread hot wax over my skin, after having powdered it, and then to rip it off with a white paper strip, removing, in the process, all the unwanted hair.

At least two months had passed since I was last deforested, which meant there was a fair amount of hair to pull off. The women performed the procedure simultaneously, and, despite their dexterity, my nerves smarted from each erasure. When the ordeal was finally over, one of them wiped each of my limbs with a wet cloth before baptising me with astringent. My skin gleamed.

It was only later, in the bath, that I realised this was my most pleasant experience to date at a beauty parlour. As I revelled in the silken feel of my waxed body, I actually wore a smile. Apart from my epiphany about the density and extent of my darkness, there was nothing exceptional about this particular session, which is precisely what made it extraordinary. Perhaps, the women were too eager to have lunch to be their usual inquisitive selves, or perhaps it was that they had mistaken me for a married woman (I was wearing a sari and a bindi when I had come in an hour before to make an appointment, something they asked me about later).

Under normal circumstances, ten minutes into being waxed, I am usually asked one of two things: to either bleach my face or get a fairness-inducing facial. "Look at your skin, it's all tanned," one such "professional" once told me. "That's the colour of my skin, you idiot," is what I wanted to say. Instead, I placed one waxed arm against my face to show her the colours matched. "Your whole body is tanned," she said, now alarmed. "We can make it lighter."

Having put up with this manner of inane observation for most of my life, over time I learned not to let it get to me.

As a black-skinned feminist I've learned how the conjunctive "but" can be used as a compensatory word to stinging effect: "You're beautiful, but dark" or "You're dark, but you have great features". The otherwise simple act of accepting a compliment continues to be fraught with anxiety, mostly the consequence of my mother's conditioning.

"You look so dark in this colour," she often said if I wore anything non-pastel.

"But people have told me I look nice in this [navy blue] dress," I would say in my defence.

"They're just saying that, they don't really mean it," she would assure me.

Multiply this conversation by a hundred, and what you're left with is an inherent suspicion about any vocalised admiration - the side effect of a now deep-seated insecurity about my appearance, which can make for highly stunted exchanges. So when a stranger makes the effort to seek me out in a room or a street to tell me I'm "beautiful", my first instinct is to distrust him and guard my valuables. Beauty is something I cannot seem to take as a given. It seems to lie too disadvantageously in the eyes of beholders.

The entire advertising industry profits from my being not acceptably beautiful, from my being anomalously dark. I'm their target consumer, who refuses to buy into their spiel. Ergo, I presumably deserve all the humiliation I face.

Long ago, I attempted to defend myself against the societal predisposition to characterise me first as black by seeking refuge in humour. I did so at my own expense. I laughed at myself. It was the only way I could participate in the joke I was seen to be. If some eager friend wanted to take a photograph of me after sunset, I'd laugh it off and tell them I would be camouflaged by the night sky. "You need a very strong flash," I'd say. Or if I'd arranged to meet an acquaintance who was yet to meet me in the flesh, I'd forewarn him or her to look for a tall and dark girl. Or I'd invent a story about how some Goan ancestor of mine must have had an affair with an African slave.

Granted, it was self-deprecating, to say the least, but as long as I was in charge of the narrative, it couldn't damage me.

I am yet to forgive myself for being so flippantly self-damning throughout my girlhood. I hadn't realised then how self-destructive self-deprecation can be. As I approached womanhood, as I slowly amassed enough experience of being the object of desire, I realised my only redemption against this deep-seated, nationwide prejudice was to embrace my blackness. That society continued to see the world in shades of black and white was the failure of humanity. And I, too, was implicated, because I had inadvertently subscribed to that hegemony by never questioning it, by allowing it to reduce me, by permitting it to aff ect my otherwise equanimous state of being. If I embraced my "unfortunate", "inferior", "undesirable" skin tone, I could perhaps let the light in.

"Is it difficult to photograph dark skin?" I asked my lover, a photographer by profession.

"It's a question of compensating the exposure," he told me, an answer that was in sync with the reading I had done about camera settings online. It depends also on the light, he explained: the midday sun, for instance, would be unflattering to a cricketer from the West Indies playing a test match. "Either you'd bleach out the white of his uniform or you'd darken his face. You have to compensate the exposure," he reiterated. His advice had all the gravitas of a maxim.

I met my lover a few days after I'd turned 23. It was the first time my itinerant body had been offered a sense of home, of being in a place where I didn't feel like I needed to be elsewhere. Soon after that first meeting, I wrote him an epistle informing him that I'd left my heart behind in his white kettle, and that bits of it were probably dissolving with his sugar everyday and entering his bloodstream along with the tea.

"I remember your body so well," I confessed over the phone the evening after I first met him.

"I do too... I remember your skin, so dark and taut and beautiful."

It was the first time he testified to my beauty, an act that would come to be performed increasingly rarely as our relationship progressed from the unexpected comfort of a one-night stand to the underrated humdrum of the everyday. I've never grudged him his reluctance to flatter. I found it refreshing. I had come to be repelled by men who practised repetition, where each sexual encounter would be punctuated by their grateful, charitable moans that attested not so much to my alleged beauty but to the exotic appeal of my black naked body: "Look at your skin, how it glows in the light."

Even now I cannot explain how or when I came to be desired. Having spent my girlhood being made to believe that my dark skin would interfere with any such possibility, I was and remain surprised by every instance that proves the contrary.

Sometimes my lover says things that assume the form of epiphanies. For example, once, when I told him about a potential rival, he seemed unfazed that another man should be attracted to me. "Ah! So you admit I'm beautiful?" I said.

"It depends on how one defines beauty."

"And what is your conception of beauty?"

"I think of beauty as light. Light that shines through from within... Yes, I think you're beautiful."

After he said so, I remembered how fortuitous it was that we first met in a virtual room, when my status on Facebook was an audacious one in which I stated that I was reflecting light.

"Nice status," he typed, initiating what would evolve into a seven year-long ongoing dialogue.

Considering his profession, I took his comment as a compliment.

I knew it wasn't a superficial one based on a profile picture, but had everything to do with my choice of words and what they evoked when I had placed them together in a sentence.

They say the body renews itself every seven years. In the span of the last seven years, my lover and I have come full circle. Our love is renewed.

I am the same person I was when I met him: fragile, belligerent, yet stronger than I give myself credit for. But I am different. I have become beautiful.

Three weeks ago, an hour before I was to leave for Dubai on an assignment, he came over, his camera in tow. Despite having asked him more than a year earlier, it was only now, in the heat of a deadline, that he finally brought himself to photograph me. Though his portraits of past lovers are renowned for their utter beauty, he never sought to replicate the pattern with me.

I have, in these seven years of our togetherness, existed outside the scope of his lens: more companion than muse; more partner than passionate lover. I am his middle-aged love. As I explore the boundaries of thirty, he is inching towards 60, his body already succumbing to time: my lust wantonly waxing while his own wanes with age; my spirit and flesh eternally willing, his increasingly in a predicament.

He waltzed into my bedroom, drew the blinds to let in the afternoon light, cleared my bed of the many books that had been strewn across the mattress, and motioned at me to take a seat. I saw myself captured in the sphere of his lens, my skin gleaming, my eyes trapping light, my lips eager. He told me to look away from him, to raise my chin ever so slightly, to withhold my smile. Then he pressed the shutter and made a memory of me.

I studied myself in the mirror today. I have become leaner, the consequence of regular running and a mindful diet. The three-inch wound from the self-inflicted burn leapt out at me, strawberry pink.

I no longer fear that it may never be erased. It has been etched in, almost, and seems permanent. It is a ghastly sight, but less so than when it was first imprinted. I expect no miraculous transformation by which it will be rendered invisible. Coconut oil and Silverex can only do so much.

I must make peace with all that it symbolises: a moment of defiance, when I involuntarily allowed myself the luxury of overconfidence. I refuse to be tainted by the scar it will leave behind, which in time will be discoloured to meld with the rest of me. The edges will darken, the fleshy pink will eventually dissolve and my blackness will be almost restored. Until then, and even after, I will continue to write into it.

My body will continue to be my instrument, my blackness my deliverance, my skin my muse.

(Reprinted with the publisher’s permission.)