by Sara Chansarkar
I was born brown, as brown as the bark of the mango tree outside our house. I’d inherited Amma’s features—her round eyes and sharp nose—but not her wheat-colored skin tone. My coloring tinged a shade even darker than Baba’s skin. Perhaps, Amma never needed to apply a dot of kohl on my face to ward off buri nazar, the evil eye that outsiders are known to cast on cute, bonnie babies.
***
My grandmother, Daadi, admonished Amma for giving birth to a girl, that too a dark brown one. She blamed her for not drinking the saffron-laced milk that would have guaranteed a light-skinned baby. Daadi applied ground almonds to my face, rubbed in a paste of turmeric and lime, fed me the whites of coconut with the brown carefully scraped off, but my skin refused to shed its color.
***
The kids I played hop-scotch or jumped ropes with in the alley called me kaali—a black girl—although I wasn’t black, just a deep brown. I ran back home and wept into Amma’s cotton sari. She told me I was beautiful like the night, my eyes bright like the stars, my voice sweet like the koel’s.
***
School for me was loathsome looks and lonely lunches while other girls shared tiffins and jokes with each other. I couldn’t pay attention to letters and numbers, my grades stayed the lowest in the class. Daadi said the best use of a girl’s time was in learning to cook and clean. Baba nodded his approval and had me quit school. I was relieved. When I sat in the courtyard after completing the chores, shapes and objects called to me. I started sketching—a crow perched in the shade of mango leaves, an earthen pot darkened by the door shadow.
***
The night before Uncle’s wedding at my other grandmother’s place, while the women sang and danced to the sound of dholak, I sat in the corner room, sketching out a spotted goat. Uncle came in, said he had the perfect cure for my skin, if only a little painful. He clamped a palm to my mouth, and pushed into my ten-year-old body, later wiping me with a handkerchief, ignoring the moisture in my eyes.
***
Daadi, through her chain of contacts, arranged showings of me to prospective grooms. I walked to the verandah where the guests were seated, my sixteen-year-old body draped in a pink sari, carrying a tray of chai and samosas. The boys and their families sipped the chai, then left abruptly, spooked by my skin, ghostly gray with layers of white talcum powder applied by Daadi.
***
No matter if a woman is pale like bone or dark like coal, a man’s thirsty eye finds a water hole elsewhere, Amma said one night as she pleated and tucked the red sari with garish purple flowers Baba bought for her—the exact pattern Chameli Aunty next-door wore on last Diwali. Then, she pinned a half-opened chameli bud in her hair.
***
I sketched clouds and culverts, ruts and roosters, shading everything dark, my subjects permanently ill-lit. Amma sent me to learn art from the old teacher, Masterji, who lived at the far end of our village. There, I met Masterji’s daughter Naina, a girl my age, with beautiful eyes befitting her name, but lightless. She sat, peeling potatoes under the mango tree in their courtyard. Masterji told me that chickenpox had stolen her sight in early childhood.
***
Under Masterji’s guidance, my sketches became lighter, my objects reflecting the light falling on them. In lieu of the art class fee, I helped Naina around the house, held her hand and took her shopping to the vegetable market. Her hands were soft like butter and the tone of her skin light like the radish she bought as I haggled over the price.
***
The day Masterji died of a heart attack, I dabbed Naina’s tears with my sari and pressed her face to my breast, her ear against my heartbeat. While consoling her, my fingers brushed the skin under the arm-hole of her sleeveless kameez. Hundreds of goosebumps rose like little dunes on her tender body. She wrapped her dupatta around her quivering shoulders and arms. That evening, as we sat listening to birds flying back to their nests, Naina leaned against me and said she loved the scent of chameli flowers I wore in my hair. She urged me never to leave her side.
***
By twenty, I’d found my purpose in teaching art to Masterji’s students. On rainy days, I missed Amma and her songs about clouds and rain-drenched flowers. As I watched water trickle down Masterji’s corrugated roof, I sang like my mother. Naina listened while stirring daal in the kitchen, said my voice was sweet like a koel’s. Later, in the light of the moon that sat low on the branches of the mango tree, I watched her pale hand stroking the strip of brown belly exposed between my blouse and the sari. A roll of warmth unfurled inside my heart and crept into my eyes. Naina licked my tears, her tongue a poultice to my condemned skin.
Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. Born to a middle-class family in India, she later migrated to the USA. Her stories and poems have appeared in numerous publications, in print, and online. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2022. She is the winner of the ELJ Micro Creative Non-Fiction Prize and the runner-up for the Chestnut Review Chapbook Contest. She is currently a Prose Editor at Janus Literary and a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut flash fiction collection “Morsels of Purple” is available for purchase online. Her chapbook will be released in 2022.
Website: saraspunyfingers.com
Twitter: @PunyFingers
If you would like to submit original art for the print issue and/or feature online for this essay, check out our art contest at bit.ly/asianvoicesart, running May 1st-July 1st, 2022.