Readers Write In #696: The ‘Dark’ Past

By G Waugh

It sometimes boggles my mind when I think about how much of my unnecessary past I carry with me. Any offhand comment, or a passing observation, a casually generated thought tossed off like a used cigarette butt by someone in the days of our growing up may get stuck in our minds and continue to haunt us for decades. In Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan, this very same idea – of how much needless baggage we carry even as we pass from one stage of life to another and what consequences do they end up leading us to – forms the core of the story.

Alisha played by Deepika Padukone is the daughter of a failed businessman in Gehraiyaan. Her mother commits suicide after Alisha’s father’s business goes bust. This event that happened in her childhood sticks to her mind like say, an over-chewed bubble gum that doesn’t easily come off your shoe’s heel. She studies well, moulds herself into a professional who is capable of conceiving a great, workable business idea. She tries to obtain funding for that but to no avail. Her cousin Tia played by Ananya Pandey, on the other hand is getting married to a multi-millionaire Zain played by Siddhant Chaturvedi. Soon after Tia’s engagement, Alisha gets introduced to Zain, both of whom find themselves somehow attracted to each other. Soon they begin an affair and despite Alisha’s closeness to Tia, she keeps this under wraps. In addition, Zain soon promises that he will be able to secure funding for her business idea through his connections.

Despite the affair, Alisha’s conscience enjoys considerably impunity owing to the fact that she still cannot get over her mother’s suicide that happened on account of her family getting pauperized overnight. Her obsession to escape her mother’s fate fuels her ambition, smothering even the tiniest guilt that might arise out of this treacherous affair. 

Soon, nothing goes according to her plan and as expected, one misfortune follows another, finally leading to even Zain’s untimely death.

***

This is precisely what stuck to my mind while switching off the TV as the credits rolled at the end of Gehraiyaan. Like many others who had had unpleasant memories from childhood, who had had to carry stigmas from the past like birthmarks all along, my mind too was brimming with instances from my own life where I had made decisions in my late twenties curiously based on events that had happened way back – probably at an age when I was losing my first milk teeth.

I must have been in my first standard in school when we had been on an excursion to some theme park in Chennai. At the end of the day, when all the rides were exhausted there was a small event that was organized by the team that was managing the excursion. We were all assembled in a place that looked like an amphi-theater and a man attired in a long overcoat holding a magic wand appeared in front of us. He performed a few, amusing tricks which drew great applause and cheers from children like us. Suddenly he stopped performing to blow a few words on the microphone,

‘Children, can I get one among you on the stage please? A smart looking kid probably!’

The entire crowd that comprised little children went abruptly silent. Many of my friends were too timid to walk on to the stage but I still don’t remember how I had the guts to raise my hands up. Without waiting for the approval of the magician, soon after raising my hands I got up and proceeded to walk in the direction of the stage. 

‘No, wait. I asked for a smart boy. Can you please get back to your place?’

The magician was talking on the microphone pointing his finger at me. He chose a boy from the front row, my classmate Adithya. He had, I remember still, well-combed fine hair, eyes that resembled a pair of Discus fish and most importantly, skin that glowed like fresh, cream milk. 

See I was just around six years of age then. I knew that I had dark skin and curly hair that remained rebelliously defiant even after multiple rounds of profligate oiling and ruthless steamrolling. I probably should have known that I did not fit the definition of the word ‘smart’. And when Adithya climbed the stage, even I could not refuse the fact that he belonged right ‘there’.

That evening, returning home on our chartered bus, peeping out of the window into the light drizzle that continued throughout the journey, I must admit that I was slightly offended. But it was not something I thought, that was totally unexpected or unwarranted. My skin was obviously dark and I felt that it was natural to be turned away on that ‘premise’ alone. Even for dance events arranged for our Annual Day Celebrations, my friends who had skin color lighter than me were obvious choices. Children who were darker were chosen rarely and on those occasions, they were relegated to the last rows of their respective dancing arrays. But like most children of that age, the ‘slight’ that I had endured during that evening did not fester on me for long that day and I was happy to have been allocated a seat in the bus right next to the window. 

But the memory of that incident alone, somehow stuck in an abandoned corner of my budding brain like a used polythene bag that sticks to the barbs of a wire fence soon after a storm.

***

Later in the ensuing decades, my skin color was something that was always made fun of, by many of my classmates and kids in the neighborhood. When I entered adolescence, I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of girls in my class who were much ‘fairer’ than me. Many of my friends used to remind me of my skin color and cautioned me towards getting close to any of these girls. Even though my appearance was not something that I had cared much about during schooling, the fact that I had darker skin than most of my classmates was something I was not allowed to forget at all, all through those years.

During college, every time I had the opportunity to talk to a ‘fair-skinned’ girl during laboratory sessions when the classes were broken into smaller chunks to work as teams, this ‘dark-skin’ stigma kept me tongue-tied throughout. I had no reservations in talking to girls who were just slightly fairer than me and frankly they too were extremely friendly with me. The whole four-year period in college had somehow given me enough reason to demarcate girls into two clear categories – one, the ones who were only ‘slightly fairer’ than me and two, girls who were out of my league altogether. In other words, girls who resembled Anjali of Angadi Theru fame belonged to my league and those who were fairer than her were all ‘extra-terrestrial’ creatures, best kept away from.

***

When I had joined an IT bellwether in my early twenties, something wholly unexpected happened. I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of girls both senior and junior to me, girls from a lot of diverse backgrounds, locations and cultures. Many of them were fair-skinned, attired in Western formals, with no bindis on their forehead, ‘flaunting’ their arms in sleeveless outfits (unlike women from my background). Needless to say, the first few days after getting introduced to them were very difficult for me. If I had doubts or questions regarding work to be cleared with them, it was very difficult for me to even make eye contact with them at first. 

But within a few weeks, even if I had issues adjusting to the nature of work in my team, there were absolutely none with regard to my relationships with women colleagues. The fact that they were friendlier to me, especially those fair-skinned women who belonged to wealthier and completely alien cultural backgrounds, than with those who belonged to the same background as them was something that left me astounded initially. Within months, some of these women, mostly seniors, had become so close to me that they even had the habit of gently brushing my hair with their fingers after a sarcastic comment or two during our coffee breaks. I sometimes had to immediately rush to the restroom, to admire myself in the mirror, twirl my thin moustache and comb my hair a bit, while muttering to myself, ‘You are not so bad after all, Jeeva!’ with a huge sigh of relief.

***

Frankly this was one of the best things that happened to people like me soon after we joined the IT bandwagon. I knew a lot of people from rural backgrounds with only a very rudimentary skill in communicating in English. Some rural friends of mine had initially by choice abstained from rubbing shoulders with people belonging to the cities who read Arthur Conan Doyle and Robin Sharma, watched Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire and listened to Beatles and Pink Floyd. All of these people had within a few months, managed to dissolve themselves into the ranks of the white-collared proletariat that the technology industry fostered and within a few years were enormously successful in shattering their insecurities, complexes and stigmas.

For those who were not directly affected by these divisions of skin color, races and backgrounds, these events may not have made much sense. But for those who were reared for close to two decades in a particular environment with certain value-systems and rooted specificities with respect to views and preferences, these changes were nothing short of earth-shattering. All these years, I was told repeatedly to stay away from a certain type of woman directly and indirectly. Why? I was bred in a particular environment which was deemed naturally inferior to those which fostered these women and I was bound to be rejected by them violently if I dared to make an advance, no matter how friendly and harmless it was supposed to be. But one fine day, much to my delight, I was told all of a sudden that nothing matters other than how you perform at work, how well you deal with your colleagues and superiors, how you contribute to your company’s growth, and that all those difficult baggage that you had been carrying all along were all just dead weights that were meant to be left right at the edge of the glittering arch that marks the entrance of your office premises!

***

Despite so many liberating events such as these, when it came to choosing a partner for life, I could not but hold myself back from telling my parents, ‘Dad, please make sure that the girl you zero in is not excessively fairer than me!’

Old habits die hard. When I think about Alisha now, I feel like forgiving her.

Frankly, I am not so upset with the society that treated us dark guys with a discriminating eye because I too have sometimes regarded one or two darker guys than me with the same attitude, in my early days. 

In Vijay Sethupathi’s 96, there is a moment when Ram confesses that he could have come back into Jaanu’s life if he had wanted, right at the time when her marriage was getting finalized. She, shocked at the revelation, quickly asks, ‘Why didn’t you come then?’

Ram says, ‘I was afraid you would reject me because I was darker than you!’

I was one of the very few in the theatre who cheered, much to the astonishment of many.

You may succeed in leaving the past. But sometimes, it just doesn’t leave you.