‘I Wanted to Be White With Straight Hair’
On not ‘paling’ in comparison and celebrating my heritage
There was me, leaning against the wall. The photographer was arranging something, so most of us were just milling around, talking.
‘She’s really beautiful. Have you seen X today? Her dress, the way she is perfectly made up?’
‘Well…I don’t think…anyway, she’s not my type’.
It was 2011 and I was better in tune with my Austen and Eliot than I was with beauty standards or the complex interplay between race, colour, and attractiveness. I was 17 years old, still getting to terms with my weight and my hair, so this gave me pause.
My classmates were talking about a girl of Indian heritage who was the full package-smart as a whip and just as beautiful. (Before you ask, I was your average nerd, no comparison.) That day, she had outdone herself in a gorgeous black dress and the perfect shade of red lipstick. Honestly, I thought she was runway-ready. The girl who chimed in with my thoughts was of mixed heritage, the boy who answered was Austrian. I’d never thought of him as racist (he’d told me there was no doubt to him that I was Austrian, whatever people had said to me in contradiction), but, at that moment, he did give way to unconscious bias.
The idea that white is beautiful, that predominantly Caucasian features such as white skin, blue and green eyes, or blond and red hair are considered more desirable was made very clear to me that day. Granted, it’s been a decade since then and Gen Z has gone a long way in taking society to task. But notions centring beauty around whiteness have never really gone away — think K-pop idols with their flashy makeovers, brightly dyed hair and contacts or even the infamous Indian skin cream Fair and Lovely.
My experience that day is not an isolated phenomenon. I read an article in Good Housekeeping by a senior British journalist with Indian roots where she writes about a dance partner in school who humiliated her by categorically refusing to touch her beyond the bare minimum. (All the other girls who faced no issues with him were white.) Another award-winning Welsh-Indian journalist writes in an issue of Glamour about a girl who told her that her face ‘was the colour of poo’.
I, too, could sing a song of micro-aggressions. When listening to friends in school lamenting about ‘tanning too much and growing dark under the sun over the summer’, I’d joke that they’d never be as dark as me. The conversation would peter off but I’d still be aware of the fact that they didn’t want to look like I did-in any shape or form.
To be fair (no pun intended!)-neither did I.
My curls were glossy and my hair voluminous but all I could see was unruly frizz, broken hairbands and the impossibility of wrangling my mane into those oh-so-coveted sleek up-dos. Back then, all the products were seemingly targeted at straight hair. The influx of support for centuries-old ayurvedic traditions like hair oiling was still non-existent and drug store shampoos and conditioners weren’t yet making waves over their inclusion of antioxidant-rich ingredients like amla, brahmi and shikakai. Brands like Fable & Mane, which offer the best in terms of Eastern and Western synergy, didn’t yet exist.
What I had was a herbal blend of coconut oil thrust at me by my mother. It seemed greasy and the scent, though not gross, had nothing on a fruity bouquet. But I couldn’t stop — attempts to only use shampoo had produced bone dry, limp lanks, my curls bleached of the abundance of moisture they needed to look vibrant. The conundrum was this, though-one needed to get the dosage right. Too much hair oil and too little shampoo would make you look like a Bella Lugosi villain, all slick and overtly glib. Like the older women I’d see in church when visiting Kerala, my home state, with their glistening plaits. Too little hair oil and too much shampoo and I’d be Hermione Granger in the Philosopher’s Stone. Five times out of ten, I was battling one or the other of the described scenarios.
Haircuts were a nightmare. These were not curly hair specialists, mind you, but your run of the mill neighbourhood hairdressers. Well-meaning but ill-equipped to handle my specific needs and, I shudder to think, those of people with even tighter curl patterns. Styles such as layers were useless due to my curls and the sheer amount of hair to tend to would exasperate professionals. Mostly, it was a train wreck, with me waiting for my hair to grow back to erase their respective signatures.
Once, though, I felt elated. The hairdresser asked me if I’d like to have my hair blow-dried straight, to which I agreed. I’ve still got the pictures. My hair looked smooth and sleek. No frizz, no impossible knots. My bangs, finally on point. It’s a turning point that seems to be a universal experience for many young women with a different ethnic heritage. One of the journalists whose story I read had the very same story to report. There’s also a video I remember seeing of a young Afro-Asian girl who practically beams into the camera after getting her hair straightened out.
All of this speaks to the ways in which it is easier-at first-to conform to accepted beauty standards rather than set your own status quo.
What saved me was that, in school, I was a part of a class of people where the naturally popular and not-so-popular individuals were not divided by exact fault lines. You weren’t ostracised for not having the right clothes or ‘looking good’. Having a good laugh, being kind or smart, those things counted more in the end. Individuality, though not actively promoted, was tacitly accepted.
Still, at that stage of my life, I would have given a pretty penny not to be Indian. Outside of the struggle with hair and looks, I was frustrated by having to don brightly coloured, beaded salwars and gold necklaces at parties and when visiting India. Traditional clothes made me look frumpy — especially because anything I could buy was far removed from the truly beautiful outfits in Bollywood films I could ‘tolerate’. In a time when girls aspired to the visual of a starving Kate Moss in skinny jeans, wearing colourful pantaloons made me feel like a loser.
Reading back these lines, I’m struck at how superficial my concerns were. Yet one needs to remember that to a teenager with little financial means, convinced that a year was an eternity, still aspiring to be universally liked, it does not feel like that. I even felt a sting years late when I skimmed a gossip column that explained how the Princess of Wales once related her concerns regarding her daughter’s ill-fitting bridesmaid dress to her famous sister-in-law, Meghan Markle. Her daughter had been in tears, apparently.
It’s ridiculous to be envious about something like this yet any young girl who has ever suffered the indignity of wearing something that made her feel insecure and completely out of place will wince in sympathy. My parents would not have understood. Raised lovingly in an immigrant family, grades were the things that mattered first and foremost. Looks, though appreciated, were a matter of luck and biology, doomed to fade in any case. Though this made me level-headed, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t wish my mother had taught me some basic makeup skills or really anything in lines of self-care and grooming. Not just to look better but to feel better in my own skin.
In the quest to carve out my own space in spite of my ‘deficits’, I focused on fashion. I liked clothes and would beg my mother to let me shop for myself — which she allowed after I cheekily proved my choices were better. (The ladies in my family would grow to raid my closet over the years in search of something to wear.) I may not have known my way around makeup but I was blessed with good skin (no pimples-a rare thing as a teen) and could just about get away with it.(Though my caterpillar eyebrows really didn’t make my case!)
Still, concern over the way I looked because I was Indian began to chip at my self-confidence. With no one to confide in who could actually understand my struggle to assimilate while staying true to my culture, I began to reject my ‘Indianness’ in everything from eating curries (the smell that lingered on hair) to being Catholic (because nothing was more uncool than appearing like a religious zealot). I was adamant about enjoying all the freedoms my peers enjoyed — a seemingly unlimited curfew being the least of those things. I wanted to understand pre-drinking rituals and not be out of the know when it came to in-jokes the next morning. I wanted to go to school trips to Italy or Ireland rather than spend that time in India. Dating! A hurdle so large I gave up on it without trying.
It took me breaking off my studies, volunteering with the homeless and leaving the country to get rid of my insecurities. Abroad, I began to see that the things I thought were my weakness actually gave me comfort. I found a good friend in a fellow Indian who also became my housemate. Lonely, I found myself looking up Indian recipes and cooking up a storm in the early morning, taking pride in a pantry stocked with everything from tamarind paste to ashwagandha. Chasing stories as a student journalist in a town where walking was often more reliable than public transport, I dropped pounds like water. What I had worried about became non-existent without any conscious efforts on my own part.
These days, I’ve mellowed out quite a bit. Though I still love clothes, they are not a means to mask any perceived self-deficiencies in terms of looks. I don’t follow trends, I just buy what I like. My heat-styling tools have grown dusty. Having taken it upon myself to improve my knowledge of curly hair regimens — especially during the pandemic — I’ve fully embraced my natural hair. And when I think of writing or when I actually pitch stories, I’m thinking of ways to profile my community, their sorrows and their joys, rather than being content to adopt a typical Eurocentric outlook.
Recently, I even hit a milestone with regards to my body image. A girl I met who I think of as a new ‘friend crush’ told me that I was beautiful and that she loved my curls (‘natural, aren’t they’?). It stumped me because I hadn’t worried about the way I looked in years beyond one flash of wistfulness over my first silvery hairs. (That was instantly tempered by amusing thoughts over whether I could pull off the streaked look as well as Rogue in X-Men.) It made me laugh because I could appreciate the compliment without wanting to hold on to the moment. Because I am Indian and I am Austrian and I am ugly and I am beautiful and none of it matters. It’s me, just me, after all.
