When A Friend Saves You
We were 12 but what she said that day saved me from a lifetime of being diffident about my complexion.
I was 12 and it was like stepping into a different world. Or a different stage. Or the same stage with different backgrounds that keep changing. The actors were the same but they started playing, let’s say, more grown up parts.
Especially the girls. They became quieter. The five girls who would play any sort of games (involving a lot of running around) during recess and lunch breaks, stopped.
When we went into sixth standard, our school had separate grounds/play areas for boys and girls. “The twain shall never meet — not during the break and not on my watch” could have been my school’s motto. The boys were now forbidden fruit. I don’t know what the school was really scared of. It almost reinforced the idea that ‘touching impregnates’.
Anyway, my dilemma was that I played only with the boys. And this was taken away from me. I tried egging on a few girls to play but somehow everyone just automatically started clumping together to stand and chat or sit and chat.
What was there to chat for 12 year olds? What a bloody waste of time. I detested it. It was made worse when I imagined how much the boys must be running around and playing. To keep myself busy, I simply started running around, needling through the different clumps, chasing an imaginary person. No one cared. Neither did I.
On a couple of occasions I did give these clumps a shot. Couple, because I clearly remember those. From one, I slid away the moment they spoke about periods and pads. I hadn’t got my periods yet so this discussion was moot. Moreover, with the mention of a ‘pad’ my imagination ran wild. I imagined a note pad down there!
The second time I gave a clump a shot, it had the potential of shaking my confidence forever. It very nearly did.
There were three of us in the pavilion—the girls play area—during lunch. We were standing on the stairs in the sun. One of them moved into the shade and said, “It doesn’t matter for the two of you, but I will become dark”. Well, of course we were already dark, so how much worse could we have gotten. She was fair. Very fair. Once again I slid away from the clump.
But “It doesn’t matter for the two of you…” had become an earworm. Not much affected me. So for this to get stuck was something.
That evening, my parents were visiting some family friends and the children tagged along. One of my closest friends Stuti was there.
Stuti and I go back a long way. Our mothers were school friends and their marriages brought them to Telco Colony in Jamshedpur. Stuti is what you can say is my first bachpan ka dost. We were in different schools — She in all-girls Sacred Heart Convent, I was in a co-ed Little Flower School. We became classmates only in class 11 and 12—when she joined my school and we studied commerce.
She was the quiet one but we were pretty much alike. What stands out though is our love for cycling and paying zero attention to how we looked or what others thought of us. (She, however, was also a voracious reader but more on that in another post)
Anyway, so that evening we met. We were swinging on the iron gate, pushing it back and forth in a rhythm, watching an occasional bike go by or people walk past.
The earworm was still bugging me. It was creeping and crawling within my system. I was very quiet, so that made the two of us that evening. She asked what was wrong with me, I imagine like a 12 year old would. I was itching to get rid of that sentence. It didn’t need much prodding. I narrated the episode to her, still swinging on the gate.
GIRLS-PAVILION-SUN-FAIR-DARK-WHITE-BLACK
Stuti heard me out. And this conversation remains crystal clear in my mind to this day.
Stuti: “When the skin has white spots, what is it?”
Me: “Not good, I guess.”
Stuti: “And when you have little black spots on the skin, they are called?”
Me: “Beauty spots.”
That was it. White wasn’t necessarily good. And black wasn’t bad.
We smiled at each other. We must have chuckled at that. We continued swinging on that iron gate. We were singing “Yahan ke hum sikandar” aloud.
Stuti crushed that earworm once and for all that evening. We had moved on to better things in life.
I was reminded of this conversation, late last year, when a mum of one of my little friends said how she found him googling “Can dark boys have girlfriends”. He is in class 6, about the age I was when this incident happened.
This was the first essay in the Ochre Sky Writing Circle workshop. The prompt was “I was 12…” There aren’t enough THANK YOUs
& !!!
Note to self: for funny and adorable writing, always turn to Savvy.
I remember reading this, but I read it again, every single line. Because, I lived with that earworm too. For the longest time. The beauty spot analogy made me smile, Savvy. Thank you for sharing. Like always, loved those beautiful pictures!