Anushree Majumdar - The Shade of You: What it takes to date a black man in India
That’s the first word all African students learn when they come to India - kala. It hurts till we learn to ignore it
Definitions belong to the definers, not the
defined: Toni Morrison, Beloved
The year I discovered
the works of Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe is the year I met Bryan Ochieng.
It was the summer of 2005, right in the middle of Delhi University’s annual
break. We met outside a nightclub in Mehrauli, waiting for a mutual friend to
drop us home. My mind had wolf-whistled the second I lay eyes on him — he was
the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen — and, as I got into the front seat, I
fervently hoped that his brain had made a similar sound, too. The Maruti 800
was packed, five people had crammed into the back, and it took Bryan several
minutes to tap my shoulder and pass his Nokia 3310 to me. The
compose box said: “You deserve to be taken out for coffee on Saturday.” Bryan
was a man of few words but the smoothest operator I have ever known.
Bryan was an
international student from Nairobi and we met seven weeks before he was to
leave India. In that brief spell, I learned more about race, culture and myself
in a way I could never have anticipated. What does it take to
date a black man in Delhi? The thickest skin you can grow. Two days into our
relationship, a Punjabi man came close to me at the Mehrauli nightclub and
loudly said, “Why are you with him, kudi? Uska maal kitna kala hoga!” I was
ready to retort, but Bryan looked at me and said, “Don’t respond. He’s jealous
because I’m with a girl he wants to be with.” I blushed and he grinned, and we
forgot that flash of ugliness that had reared its head a few seconds ago. But,
later that night, in the auto-ride back to my room, Bryan quietly said, “That’s
the first word all African students learn when they come to India - kala. It
hurts till we learn to ignore it”.
What’s the difference
between an expatriate and an immigrant? Race. What do we call the persecution
of a people because of the colour of their skin? Racism. We’re people of colour
too, so where did we learn it? At home, in the playground, our textbooks, in
casual conversations, in film and advertising - everywhere. Racism is
insidious, and, that summer, I would only discover how much of it is learned
behaviour.
The K-word would
assail us everywhere we went, whether as a couple or in a group with other
students from African countries. We stuck to neighbourhoods we knew, nightclubs
and restaurants that welcomed a predominantly African clientele during the
week, and his friends’ homes. On the street with my new Kenyan and Nigerian friends,
I watched other people watch them with uncertainty and sometimes, unmasked
disgust. The flats they lived in were far from campus areas - dingy, poorly
ventilated and the entrance was almost always at the back. I never saw where
Bryan lived - he told me he was sure to be evicted if he brought an Indian girl
home.
If my friends were
surprised to know I was dating a Kenyan student, so were his. “My last
girlfriend was Naga. Some boys from Africa date Northeastern girls, maybe
because we have more in common with them than other communities,” said Bryan.
Maybe, you should go to more campus events, I suggested, meet other Indian
students. “And talk about what? They know nothing about our countries,” said
Kwame, a Ghanaian student named after Kwame Nkrumah, who lead Ghana to
independence from the British in 1957. We had struck up a conversation about
the freedom struggle in the African continent - the Mau Mau uprising and the
National Liberation Front’s role in securing independence in Algeria, two
events mentioned in my Class XII NCERT history textbook a few years before the
syllabus was changed. But, it was only five years later, when I went to Canada
for my post-graduate degree, that I realised what Kwame was talking about.
As a person of colour
from the developing world, I found it easy to blend in with my mostly-white
cohort because of how submerged I was in North American popular culture. For
their part, they knew about Bollywood and Indian food; some of them had visited
India too. Now, imagine coming to a country where people on the street remember
only one tie with your continent, the history of slavery, and they hurl it at
you like a stone - “Habshi”. Where nothing is known about your thriving film
industry, your music; where your cuisine smells different, so it must make you
a cannibal. Where every single day is a melanin war.
For the middle and
upper classes in India, a certain kind of Blackness is acceptable to us - the
hip-hop/rap group or artiste, the Premier League footballer, Barack Obama, Idris Elba
for James Bond - you get the drift. We can wax eloquent about the double
consciousness of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, or Beyonce’s Lemonade;
talk about diversity at the Oscars; and hashtag Black Lives Matter on social
media. What about the several different cultures from African countries that
international student populations bring to our cities? Ain’t nobody got time
for that?
Some people say that
if you want to know the truth about yourself, travel. I’d say dating is a close
second - it has been for me. The summer before I met Bryan, I briefly dated
Ludovic, a white French man who travelled to Delhi for work. It was heady at
first, to be treated as an exotic being, and to be so close to a culture I had
only seen in films - wine any time of the day, elaborate meals, and French
kissing (delightful at first, but quite taxing after a point). When he showed
me pictures of his family home in rural France, I imagined a life there with
our mocha-latte son, Zizou. Bengali people and the French have so much in
common, I’d muse.
With Bryan, I always
ran the risk of othering and exoticising him, of appropriating parts of his
culture that seemed cool to me - Kenyan hip-hop, cornrows and dreadlocks, a
musical accent that could make the phone book sound good. He displayed
incredible patience and grace during our time together, as he firmly unpacked
my fears (“not all of us are drug dealers”), and taught me to dance with my
hips a little more (“use your booty”). And unlike Priyanka Chopra’s
character in Fashion, I experienced no self-loathing the morning after. But I
did do something unforgivable - I asked him his HIV status. Bryan took a moment
to reply. “I’m tested and clear. Are you?” I shook my head and told him that I
hadn’t gone for a test yet. “And you thought it was okay to ask me?” he said,
and left. It was the turning point in our relationship, at least for me.
I realised that he had
never met my friends, because I had never thought of introducing him to them.
At first, I thought it was because this was due to end soon, but that was not
true, was it? When he asked me to visit him in Kenya, I dithered and said
maybe, because I couldn’t imagine what it would look like; it wouldn’t be as
pastoral and picturesque as the French countryside, would it? When my friends
asked me about his sexual prowess, I had laughed and replied, “You know they
say that once you go black, you never go back”. It would take me some more
years to realise how damaging that adage is, because it bolsters the perception
that black male sexuality is threatening to other men, that it is something
mythic and magical like voodoo. And, if I continued to say that, there wouldn’t
be much of a difference between me and the Punjabi man in the nightclub.
By the time I returned
to college for my final year, Bryan was on his way home. A few nights before he
left, at a party at one of his friends’ flats, we got rip-roaringly drunk on
cheap vodka. I was the lone girl there and the only thing the guys were trying
hard to do was to teach me to say their full names correctly. At some point in
the night, when things wound down, one of them softly said, “What is the point
of thinking about the colour of our skin? The colour of blood is the same
everywhere.”
