Atoning for Tonal Differences
I’ve often wondered if discrimination is a part of socialization?
Growing up in India, everyone belonged to a wide range of the brown shade. Color as such did not make or break a person’s standing. Although there were plenty of other elements such as caste, religious and sexual persuasion and a new one I was unaware of while growing up — facial features. Indigenous people with flat and smooth features from the Himalayas, are persecuted and treated unkindly by those with sharper features on the plains. Financial status plays a significant role. Which in turn impacts the place of your abode. Referred to as redlining in real estate terms in the U.S.
We lived in Layalka, a development which was a little way away from the established neighborhoods of Kolkata. This was a relatively newer development. Most of the inhabitants of the surrounding neighborhoods who came in possession of the land were squatters. Our plot was purchased. Which somehow put us on higher ground in the hierarchy of land ownership. Ours was the only house with a design that conformed to structural compliances. My dad being a civil engineer with an artistic vision was why. “Shahib Bari” is how our house was referred to locally. “Sahib” meaning “owner” in Arabic was commonly used in the Indian Subcontinent as a courteous term in the way that “Mister” (also derived from “master”) is used in the English language.
“Sahib” is also how most natives alluded to the white skinned British. My father had white skin. So did my aunts and uncles, except for one. Two of them were blond and blue eyed. There was never a question raised about their origin. Thakuma, my grandmother, used to tell us about her experiences about partition and how she would cook rice in a very large container to feed many mouths of a stream of refugees who came from Bangladesh after losing their home and hearth in Hindu/Muslim communal strife. The norm was to never turn anyone away who turned up at your doorstep.
She would also tell us about curfews, food shortages and rationing. Canned goods meant for troops were considered a rare treat by those who ever got to try them. The rest took it at face value and the myth of the Epicurean canned foods prevailed. On one occasion she said that the women were taken away in a convoy of trucks by the British Army. My grandmother, with her small frame, was unable to board the truck on her own. The chivalrous Sahib would spread his palms for her to step on, so she could board the truck.
“Where were you taken away Thakuma?” I would ask, to which she answered, “They would take us away, and then bring us back again”. It was somehow reassuring to me then, in my limited understanding of the ways of the world. Simply knowing my grandma made it back home was enough. Now so many years later, I wonder how my father might have had light skin and eyes having been born to Indian parents. Were those trips traumatic for our grandmothers? May be, maybe not. Perhaps the strong and hungry touch of the young soldiers was way more pleasing than the predetermined touch of my grandfather, that she felt for the first time when she came of age having been married at age 9 to a man who was 24.