“Girl, are you from Israel? Lebanon?”
When I was 5, I permanently relocated to Singapore from India with my parents. This was after the school year had started, so the only place to which I was admitted at the K1 level was a Hindu mission kindergarten. While I loved my two years there, and my parents were happy with my experiences, being in an all-Indian school in Singapore had its complications.
All students had an assigned buddy. I recall a time when we were told to hold hands. My buddy was a Tamil girl who had an unforgettably cute and cheeky smile. A few days later, my teacher called my mum to tell her that I seemed uncomfortable holding my buddy’s hand, and that after holding her hand, I’d wipe my palm down my dress.
My buddy was of a much darker complexion than I was.
At the same time, there was a really fair-skinned Tamil girl on my school bus. Her fair skin seemed so attractive to me that I remember always gravitating towards her. I really wanted her to be my friend but she used to bully me. My parents slowly realised that I feared getting onto the school bus and figured out why. After they intervened, and both sets of parents made us make peace with one another, it was only a matter of days before my dream was fulfilled: my fair-skinned bully, whom I thought was beautiful, ended up being my best friend at school.
So did my darker-skinned buddy, by the way. My parents discovered that I thought my buddy was ‘dirty’ because of the darker colour of her skin. They explained to me that such views were wrong.
I’m 32 years old now, and I still wonder how, at age 5, I believed that someone with a darker complexion was lesser than me in some way. After existing on earth for just five years, where did I learn that? How did I pick up on that?
“Do you use Fair & Lovely?”
Since then, the colour of my skin and the way I look has come up in conversations time after time. What really fills me with shame is that in the past, when people would refer to my skin colour as ‘not black’ or insinuate that I don’t ‘look Indian’, I’d feel so proud.
I was somehow socialised into thinking that not being ‘black’ was an achievement.
“This is my only Indian friend, Simran, and she’s not black!”
During my JC years, it didn’t help that I was in the minority amongst Indian students, since I wasn’t of South Indian descent. I was suddenly one of the fairer-skinned Indian students (despite the fact that my skin colour hovers between a foundation shade of NC40 to NC42).
For the first time in my life, I found out about guys crushing on me. I soon found out that it was considered something of an achievement for a darker-skinned South Indian guy to end up with a lighter-skinned North Indian girl.
That’s when I started to wake up. I was not a conquest. I didn’t want to be one. I was more than my skin colour… right?
“Alamak, I thought everyone would be lighter coloured. I don’t know if I have the foundation shades for you lah, dear.”
Years later, when I was a bridesmaid at 24, the Malay makeup artist didn’t have a good foundation match for my skin. She wasn’t expecting someone “so dark” since the bride was mixed-race and assumed her bridesmaids would be equally fair-skinned.
So, I was the only bridesmaid who had an orange face that day.
I felt ugly, because I’m not orange.
I felt ugly because she said I was “so dark”.
I felt ugly, because I felt deeply othered.
Once again, my skin colour continued to determine how I felt about myself.
“You’re Indian? But you’re so fair.”
I’ve encountered so many conflicting messages about the colour of my skin at every stage of my life, none of which I’ve asked for.
It’s difficult enough trying to deal with being a woman in a world that is still largely patriarchal, trying to live with modern ideals despite your more conservative Indian roots, without needing to deal with the notion that your skin colour is a topic for others to discuss.
Yet skin colour is an important topic, particularly amongst Indians.
From a young age, we are told to “stay out of the sun” or “apply this besan paste to remove your tan” or “remember to use the facial bleach” before an important event. The lighter your skin, the more attractive you’re considered.
As a young adult, I realised that I hated being Indian because I didn’t feel like I belonged to any part of the Singaporean Indian community. I wasn’t dark enough to be thought of as ‘Indian’ by my peers. My NRIC states that my race is ‘Sikh’ (which really deserves another essay on its own) but I wasn’t Sikh enough (whatever that means) to be more integrated with the local Sikh community. I didn’t have a lot of Indian friends growing up because I didn’t feel like I could relate to many of them. I wasn’t Chinese, I wasn’t Malay, I wasn’t Eurasian.
So what was I?
“If I hadn’t heard you talking, I would have thought you were Brazilian.”
When I was 25, I moved to Los Angeles for work. I was a Singaporean Indian woman with a ‘wheatish’ complexion (a term used mostly by Indians) and rebonded hair (because all the Chinese salon aunties would constantly complain about how my hair was ‘too thick’ and ‘too curly’) who was suddenly surrounded by Americans who had different skin, hair and eye colours–different everything.
I would go to my local Target and find an entire aisle of hair products categorised as ‘ethnic’. I always saw women of colour congregate in this aisle, with their beautiful, voluminous hair, with their skin in varying shades of brown.
Like me.
Women of colour. It was the first time I came across that phrase. I realised that I was a woman of colour too.
But hadn’t I decided that I didn’t want to be defined by the colour of my skin? It was too confusing.
At the same time, these women of colour oozed a contagious self-confidence and had an air of self-acceptance. I started trying out those ‘ethnic’ hair care products from Target. I began to observe and fall in love with beautiful curls and kinks and coils everywhere I went–at work, at restaurants, while running errands. When I finally decided to try to embrace my own natural hair, I realised how liberating it was. I realised I found a sense of power in being ‘natural’ and that began to seep into my relationship with my skin as well.
In being ‘natural’, I was telling the world around me that I refused to be changed.
I stopped using ‘brightening’ and bleaching skin treatments and began to notice a healthier glow on my skin. My colleagues gave me the confidence, space and respect to embrace my natural self and supported me on this journey with their tips and advice. I wasn’t too dark or too light; I was simply a shade on the beautiful spectrum of colours I saw around me every day.
In Singapore, I was living in a society that needed to label me for its own comfort. But in Los Angeles, I found a community that allowed me to be who I was.
“You’re not wearing foundation? So this is your natural skin colour? It’s so nice!”
What started as an exploration of my natural hair evolved into me accepting the natural colour of my skin. I’m a woman of colour, and what that colour is really shouldn’t matter. Our skin colours are to be celebrated.
Emboldened by my experiences in LA, when I moved back to Singapore five years ago, I stopped wearing foundation. I started focusing on taking care of my skin, just as I was taking care of my natural hair. I stopped thinking of myself as ‘too dark’. I stopped viewing lighter skin as the definition of beauty. I began to see beauty in all shades, and I saw beauty in myself.
I started correcting people who said I “wasn’t black”, who said I “don’t look Indian”, who said I “don’t look Sikh” and who tried to define North Indians as the “better-looking Indians”. I stopped feeling a silent sense of pride over such comments, and instead grew angry at their condescension and their narrow-mindedness.
Yet I still had to deal with comments about how I looked, because I was still living outside of the tidy labels Singaporean society imposes on others.
Especially so with my now non-rebonded, naturally curly hair.
“Are you Brazilian?”
“Are you from Spain?”
No, actually I’m Indian and we aren’t all just really fair or really dark and my curls don’t mean I’m automatically exotic and yes I don’t wear foundation and no I don’t care about getting tanned so I will not be applying facial bleach thanks very much and yes I’m a Sikh and have you heard of the term ‘woman of colour’?
My entire journey towards reaching this realisation has been uncomfortable, full of shame and loneliness, yet so precious. And I’m glad I embarked on it.
Simran was born in India, raised on the seas and bred in Singapore. She’s a brand strategist & certified yoga teacher with a keen interest in the sticky issues of culture + diversity + inclusion, human behaviour, romance novels and true crime. She has a strong love for Jane Austen and music from the African subcontinent.
