Anchal Joseph

Perhaps the reason Krishna and I got along so well was that we were both severely dark-skinned.  In a society that looked down its patrician nose on anything except milk-and-almond hues, this was considered most unfortunate, especially for a girl. 

The excerpt goes on to say:

I paid for it by spending hour upon excruciating hour being slathered in skin-whitening unguents and scrubbed with numerous exfoliants by my industrious nurse.  But finally, she’d given up in despair.  I, too, might have despaired if it hadn’t been for Krishna.

It was clear that Krishna, whose complexion was even darker than mine, didn’t consider his color a drawback.  I’d heard the stories about how he’d charmed his way into the hearts of women of his hometown of Vrindivan—all 16,000 of them!  And then there was the affair of Princess Rukmini, one of the great beauties of our time.  She’d sent him a most indecorous love letter asking him to marry her (to which he’d promptly and chivalrously responded by carrying her off in his chariot).  He had other wives, too—over a hundred—at last count.  Could the nobility of Kampilya be wrong?  Could darkness have its own magnetism?

When I was fourteen, I gathered up enough courage to ask Krishna if he thought that a princess afflicted with a skin so dark that people termed it blue was capable of changing history.  He smiled.

This was how he often answered my questions, with an enigmatic smile that forced me to do my own thinking.  But this time he must have sensed my confused distress, for he added a few words.

“A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so.  And often others see you as you see yourself.”

 It’s as if Indian -American author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has dreamed a mythical tale of princesses, warriors, magic, and treachery. However, the fiction she writes is truth for many.  In India, children laugh at dark-skinned people.  But India does not suffer this malady alone.  African Americans, women in particular, can certainly relate to this shameful cultural disorder—as well as the sometimes painfully descriptive words: “darky,” “blackie,” “smoke,” “midnight,” and, yes, even “blue.”

Model Anchal Joseph was once made to feel like an ugly duckling as a child . . . but that was then.

What lies do you believe about yourself?  What lie is making you blue?