To the Women of My Skin

With silver spoons and soured grins, we merely gnaw at the culture you have devoted your life to preserving. Rubbing the dust of dreams from my eyes at 5 in the morning, I find you, my own grandmother, pinching together spheres of dough, meticulously wrapping away treasures of brown sugar for me to later bite into. You cup your hands, the sugared secret resting on your palms, each lump and imperfection being gently smoothed over by your worn fingers. With the creases under your eyes faintly crinkling, you place one onto my outstretched hand. I recognize your disappointment from the corner of my eye, your brows furrowing as I nibble on your creation and feign delight, the overcooked dough a reminder that I should have just eaten cereal. Sixty years prior, you made this breakfast for your siblings as a Christmas gift. Sixty years prior, they appreciated you.

As for the greater circle of your age group, they have never once let me leave their homes with a rumbling stomach or without a cup of warm chai. Despite never uttering a word of explicit affection, your generation has embraced me with open homes and sincere conversation. They have died a million deaths in this life for this to be possible. They have endured the abuse of alcoholic husbands they didn’t choose to marry, of the chastising community that mocked them when they said he assaulted them, of the mother-in-law who they expected to understand but instead slapped harder. They have abruptly ended their educations at twelve to cook for, tend to, and slave over their own siblings, who would have otherwise withered without their sacrifice. You and the grandmothers of your generation have carried an insurmountable burden just for your own grandchildren to despise the culture that has survived across oceans, to attempt to surgically erase their uniquely “misshapen” body parts — the prior permanence of which once served as the proof that their features had been loved for generations.

Yet, in your silent misery, you forget your roots and you reflect the image of the same women who betrayed you and mocked you and pointed at your thick eyebrows and shaded skin and laughed. You smile at the fair-skinned child but attempt to rub away at the melanin of the darker-skinned one. You frown at the girls with the bigger stomachs and the bigger breasts but also at the ones with the too-small hips and the too-small chests. Isn’t it exhausting to be perpetually dissatisfied? When will you look at a girl, whom you see as your past self, and tell her that she is loved in the same way that you wished to be told decades ago?

You call me Ambily, moon, yet not for a second do you comprehend why I yearn for your love to stretch beyond powdered cocoons of brown sugar and sideways smiles. I ache for you to look at me and see the fruition of your effort as a mother and a grandmother, not the imperfections which you know manifest on your own face. When you scrutinize even before a word of greeting, your words land like bare feet on wet concrete. Because you are respected for your efforts and for the adversities that have been woven into the calluses of your fingers, your words carry immense power. They relentlessly pierce and permeate because, in the mind of a teenage, insecure girl, they are not entirely untrue. It hurts more to hear unkind words from someone you care about than someone you utterly hate because to some degree, because you trust their judgment, their words must be true.

At nine I sat at the dinner table with two plates of masterfully constructed Indian cuisine for our version of a Christmas dinner. It’s painfully ironic how you’d often look at me and criticize my collarbones as a sign that I was malnourished, but the second I attempted to indulge myself, you and the rest of our family grinned, your faces contorting into expressions of ridicule, and your laughter echoing against me. I may have been overthinking. But all I could fathom at that moment, with embarrassment filling every crevice of my body, was that you were laughing at me for ever attempting to achieve the imaginary expectations you set for me, and that you would never, ever be proud of me. Nothing is enough for you.

Now at 16, standing in the bathroom mirror and seeing my stretch marks and scars and hip dips and folds, I scream at myself to convince the girl staring back at me that she is objectively beautiful — yet I can’t help but hear your bitter voice whispering reminders of why she isn’t.

Etched years behind the poison of your words is an elaborate scheme of prejudice that has somehow remained in place for far longer than can be justly attributed to you alone. Four thousand years ago, white colonizers arrived in India and imposed on the native population their social systems and values. They established a caste system to bind skin color to value, which in turn perpetuated the superiority of their white features. Then, 3800 years later, India was again penetrated by corruption with British invasion, and thus eurocentric beauty standards crept into every home further. “To have value is to look white,” mothers told their children, because how else could they protect them from the hand of oppression and manic hatred? “To have value is to look white,” is what mothers still rigidly tell their children, their hands clutching their wombs, their arms cradling delicate heads of vulnerability, their fingers laced between silky hair strands as they love and they shelter, all in spite of themselves for what reason? The system that came before you has implanted itself into your livelihood, but this certainly does not mean it ought to torture the future the same way it has tortured you. You are stronger than the white man’s antics in the face of an overwhelmingly beautiful culture. They tried to suppress our great-great-great grandmothers’ beauty because they couldn’t handle it. Do not let them hold that power over you now.

When you recall those wounds, those incidents when older women in your position now criticized you for your insecurities, the physically inalterable things far beyond your control, you wince, because you lack closure. Every time you make an ignorant comment or a jarring remark, you don’t simply reopen those wounds. You plunge salted fingers into those wounds — you devastate each intricately woven tissue and sinew all while remaining in utter ignorance of your own affliction. When you hurt me, it’s because you have been hurt just like me. And you hurt far more deeply because your stinging words are an extension of the fact that you must be more insecure than I am.

To love is not to look at me and affirm that whatever I have endured is a mere splinter compared to what you have endured. No. The day we stop classifying and comparing ourselves is the day we live without a self-loathing so unimaginably inescapable. That is the day when young girls like myself see themselves and their heritage and find delight in it; when young girls like myself end their plight of senselessly hurting themselves and killing themselves because of the wonderful bodies they were born with. To be kind to me is to be kind to yourself.

Sincerely,

Abby