Schooled in the Colour Brown

“Why are all the Indian girls sitting together?” asked Mrs Veera loudly, pointedly. With eyes opened wide, and neatly threaded brows raised in disbelief and promptly furrowed into submission, she shot us a quizzical look. A piercing gaze we could not escape. 

I saw the expression on Mrs Chee’s face. It read: I am just as puzzled as you are. Ironically, it seemed as though she was put on the spot and suddenly tasked with the duty of feigning concern that this was even noteworthy to begin with. Was she somewhat relieved though that her brown colleague had taken it upon herself to address how we, undeniably brown girls, were seated in a ring? Perhaps so.

We were a circle of brown young ladies. Although we quietened down at once, our deliberate formation screamed aloud something potentially dangerous and far beyond our control.

 I was fifteen and, just like my other Indian girlfriends in the nineties,was growing up Indian in the most clueless manner possible. We did not at all concern ourselves with the historical origin of the term, ‘Indian’ nor did we realise that being labelled Indian was a state-sanctioned form of consciousness imposed on us. A tool to create and maintain orderliness at a societal level was definitely not what we associated being Indian with. 

However, our ununiformed brownness was now charged with disobedience. Alleged with an unwillingness to act congenially towards our other peers, we sat and squirmed silently in slow-rising shame. In that cavernous school hall, we momentarily lost our voice. We had no room for it. Our mouths stayed shut. Our shoulders hung low.

In 1994, in the world of high profile pageantry, a certain Miss Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen had won the coveted Miss World and Miss Universe titles respectively.

Indian girls like myself secretly basked in their glory. Their victories drew attention to our Indian-ness. It allowed us to imagine that in some way we, too, possessed the potential to become and be considered beautiful even if we were not entirely convinced of it just yet. 

This time round, our brownness demanded attention as well. Unfortunately, it was not the good kind. We unceremoniously received it in the form of blank faces and questioning looks from the others.

Who were the rest of the girls? Well, groups of all-Chinese girls. Pale yellow, a more muted tone, hummed a pleasant melody in the background. Its presence was rarely questioned. Make that never, maybe. It was no more than a simple case of exercising common sense. Being part of a majority meant you could make your own spaces and actually own them unquestioningly, too. Our brown pubescent bodies, however, did not know any better. In that setting and at that very instant, we were not offered the same condition, were we? Definitely so.

Not one of us was able to answer Mrs Veera’s question as she singled us out collectively. In our defence, it was a rhetorical question after all. “Come on, girls. Let’s get moving,” commanded Mrs Veera as she walked towards us, quickening her pace to signal that we ought to get up with a sense of immediacy.

“Sort yourselves out.”

An order was given and so, we disbanded, slotting ourselves awkwardly into the other remaining groups. Space was made for each one of us renegade brown girl. This was how some of my schoolmates and I made ourselves the token brown girls, ready to accommodate some kind of an organisational ideal, a contrived ending to a mildly dramatic episode. We could now proceed with the agenda set for the day at our leadership camp. Normalcy, as we knew it, had returned.

Whatever our short-lived gravitation towards one another was, it was an affront to Mrs Veera’s senses and her sensibilities of what it meant to be a good, compliant civil servant. This was how she chose to keep her brownness and ours in check. Was she possibly protecting us because she saw what we could not as naïve teenagers? Most definitely so.

I left school, grew up, and made my way back into it as a teacher. Just like Mrs Veera. I did not ever want to pull the same stunt she did on that one humid afternoon all those years ago. I did not, but I knew all too well that I could never stop being a brown woman. My forever coloured skin shaped the way I moved and situated myself in personal and professional spaces. This was not all on Mrs Veera. Not at all. Mrs Veera just made me grow up a little faster, a little harder. That was all, and she was in good company with so many others who had left all kinds of stubborn stains on my psyche.

In the classroom, I was once told by a student that his black friend, a teenager of Indian origin, would not be attending the lesson. ”Oh, come on, he’s brown not black,” I thought to myself and was especially relieved that I had not thought that out aloud because that was not the point. I knew that the Korean student thought it was actually funny. He had expected me to be tickled by it. I composed myself and posed him a question. “Now, have you ever been referred to as The Yellow Friend?” He and his classmates stared blankly at me in stunned silence. I told myself that perhaps a non-answer was the best answer sometimes.

I learnt that growing up and being Indian was an act of negotiation. I needed to work out how and when to either intensify or tone down my brownness depending on the context. Navigation in the staffroom was no different. 

When a cliquish bunch of my English-speaking ex-colleagues gathered regularly near my work desk flaunting how much they liked one another, they spoke and cracked jokes ever so loudly in Mandarin. They laughed without holding back. Unapologetically. Boisterously. Their collective Chinese-ness, I noticed, could roam and breathe freely as it wished. Deep inside, I knew I would have never been able to get away with this overt display of camaraderie had I ever decided to revel in my Indian-ness the same way they did. 

This is the kind of privilege that usually cannot be marked out in time and space in a concrete fashion. Like ether, it evaporates quickly even before you can articulate it, and you start to ask yourself if this is even a big deal to begin with. Acknowledging what I know and feel to be true after all this time, I would say, “Definitely, most definitely so.”