Even though I am an Indian, the mention of white skin, fair hairs and coloured eyes makes me slightly heady. A tingling of the senses, a desire more so because it's forbidden by my history, my psyche's guilty pleasure. In fact I'd rather not touch, just bathe in the looking. How earth colours contrast rather than corroborate the skin, how flecks spurt out of translucent pupils so beguiling to the montoned eye, how blushing is an actual reddening of the forehead or cheeks, how muscular and unisexual most white bodies are! They are fascinating because they are contrasting, alien, and yet human!
Katherine Mansfield's 'Her First Ball' is in my Faber modern short story collection. The word 'Ball' sends just a pleasant, mild, familar wave through me, but a few years before I'd have had my hands clasped and begging to hear all about it. When I read her story I though of white girls, their porcelain beauty, their plenitude of color variations in dress, eyes and hair although much lacking in skin tone. Ribbons and gowns and satin footwear : this is the stuff of childhood dreams. A childhood sadly storied in a very ordinary house with drab cream-colored walls and nobody to seriously revel in the Occident with. My sister and I used to share about music and stories that had made their way to our country from abroad. We were very comfortable and pleasantly happy talking about Backstreet Boys, Celine Dion, Agatha Christie and Harper Lee but she was always traditional and it never got her the way it still gets me. I learnt their language pretty well, best among my neighbors and family, but am unhappily more ashamed of it than proud at this uncertain age of 24.
Yes in the same way Occidents exoticize the Orient, the Orientals engage- this seems to be human nature. Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy makes the world spin like a disco ball. Desire is the flame of a wax candle birthing dazzling bubbles of gold and glitter, burgeoning fantasies. And so it happened with me also.
Although now I am trying to mongrelize. Talk about irony.
