Birds of Summer

As the mercury rises (it's hot!), there’s a new outdoor species. Never seen at night, it flutters and clusters around motorbikes in daylight, riding on them, driving them. There are unusual and distinctive head markings: a burka-like wrap, usually white, around the scalp area, low over the forehead, swooping around the lower half of the head to neck and shoulders, a narrow slit for the eyes. Is the Taliban on vacation in Banaras?

In many examples of the species, these mummy-like markings are accompanied by long white gloves from fingertip to bicep. Are they burn victims?

It's a little like that.

Huge round sunglasses projecting from the eye slit are the giveaway. These are young girls, teenagers and young women in their 20s. This is how they keep the unrelenting, sizzling sun from darkening their arms and faces as they move around the city!! Pollution and dust are the reason some folks tie a scarf over nose and mouth on most days, and the heat definitely brings out head wraps out on the road, but these are special birds of summer.

These beswaddled young women frankly admit what they're up to. Who’s surprised? If you looked only at television ads and news anchors over here, you’d think Indians had only the lightest of complexions. They are, of course, a rainbow of shades from dark to light. Ads for skin creams—even for guys!--all promise to "whiten" the skin in 2 weeks, 30 days, 6 weeks, to peel off the bad outside dark skin that is not you to the good fair you underneath.

Where does this come from? Not the British, though they might have made it worse by preferring fair skinned servants and functionaries. This goes back at least to the Puranas, ancient tales of the gods compiled from the 5th to 17th centuries CE.

Two I know about seem to reflect a cultural preference for fair skin (though hindu myths never have one meaning or version).

The mythological origin of Holi, the riotous celebration of spring when everyone paints each other with colors, wet and dry, is not well known in Banaras. In one version Holi is a holiday of Krishna, the dark god of the common people, a cowherd who challenged the supremacy of the Vedic gods and made cows an object of protection instead of sacrifice. It seems Krishna was jealous of the fair skin of Radha, his childhood playmate and later his erotic soulmate. Krishna’s mother told him to paint Radha with colors, and this is what Holi commemorates, at least in this version.

Parvati, Shiva’s wife, “gleamed with skin like the petal of a blue lotus at night.” Ond day Shiva fought with her, saying, “Your slender body, shinking darkly upon my white body looks like a black female serpent coiled around a white sandalwood tree. You look like a dark night touched by the light of the moon, like the night during the dark half of the lunar month; indeed, you offend my sight.” (This from a guy with a blue throat.) Eyes red with anger, Parvati had a few choice words for Shiva, but stormed off to become golden anyway by doing austerities in the mountains.

It took a more than face cream. Parvati put off her cothes, put on the bark of trees, heated herself with the five fires in the summer, lived in the water during the monsoon, slept in the winter on bare ground and went without food. Even then it took Brahma to grant her a boon so she could divide herself into black Kali and fair Gauri. In the Puranas, Shiva was pleased with this transformation.

In the matrimonials (marriage ads online and in the classifieds; traditional Indians don’t date!) fairness, expressed also as ‘gori’ (for the golden goddess) and ‘wheatish’ is a highly prized nuptial trait. These two ads are not untypicalin their fairness claims (though I also chose them because they lack other typical requirements that i'll deal with in another post):

For a bride:

Match for Punjabi Khatri [Punjabi word for Kshatriya, the warrior caste] boy 29/5’10” working MNC [multinational] GGN [city of Gurgaon] 9.6 LPA [9.6 lakhs per annum, means Rs. 90,600] seeks Prof Qlfd Tall, Fair BE [bachelor of engineering or]/MBA working girl. Send BHP [biodata, horoscope, personal profile] to [gives contact info].

For a groom:

Suitable match is required for beautiful, slim, gori, cultured MBA girl (28/162—[height in cm] from a high status upper caste hindu family of educationists. Caste no bar. Please correspond on email [which address is given].


This hierarchy is utterly wrongheaded. The god-given glowing complexions of Indian women are stunning against the rich and colorful fabrics they wear of shimmering silk and cloud-like cotton, often with mirror pieces sewn into them, shimmering and sparkling with silver and gold embroidery and glittering stones and beads. At dressup time, their expressive eyes and smooth dark hair are set off by exquisite gold jewelry pieces for head, forehead, nose, ear, eyebrow and neck, not to mention forget the shining rainbow stack of bangles on their wrists, and with extravagantly drawn eye makeup and the reddest of lipsticks, which only they can get away with because of the already dramatic contrast of their skin with their eyes and hair. They look exactly like goddesses should look. They emit light.

To my eyes, fair-skinned Westerners look exceedingly uninteresting clothed in the fantastic colors of Indian textiles. Our skin appears flat. We are ghostly and pale. Our eyes, hair and skin simply disappear. Indian women in their finery, their jewelry and clothing sparkling and glittering against their skins with every move and gesture, are transfixing.

I read that Pres. Sarkozy means to ban head veils for French drivers on the spurious grounds that they limit the field of vision. If he tried to do that here, young women would run him down with their cycles, and not because they couldn't see him.

Ugh, a lizard just fell on me. Rahu and Ketu went on vacation for the winter, but once the warm weather returned they got busy. Now my flat is a lizard village. You can hear their sticky toes pattering out reptile tabla as they hunt on the killing fields of the walls. I also have a wasp's nest in the shower room, ants, and an ancient (to be that large) cockroach in the bathroom sink with whom I've reached an accommodation (ahimsa and all that). One should not imagine that respectable Indians would put up with this menagerie for a minute, though pretty much everyone shares space with lizards. Mosquitoes, one of the lowest creatures in the reincarnation food chain, have thankfully died off on their own. It's too HOT for them.