My Dusky Lady

By Binkles

If I had my way, I would tell Zo: "Listen, girl, you are just 30, and with a promising career ahead. Earn, and be economically independent. Don't get into this marriage mess". But if I were to do so, Zo’s parents might snap at me for poking my small nose into their affairs, and so I can’t tell her what I want to.

Zo is a good-natured, gentle, humble, generous and well-mannered young woman. But she is conscious of her looks and thinks her dusky complexion and some of her facial features may not get her a husband, a project which her parents have recently taken up on her behalf in great earnest. And so, getting her makeup done and posing for snaps to be sent to her parents to forward to parents of prospective ‘suitable' young men has kept her very busy in recent days.

It has so happened that because of her rather advanced educational degrees, marriage proposals from ‘suitable’ young men are coming in, but Zo's photos have brought in several rejections because obsession with the 'fair-and-lovely' girl still persists in the popular culture. I can understand Zo's hurt. But she needs to find her way to escape the marriage muddle!

I recall my own (and now what I like to think of as rather hilarious) ‘great escapes’ from the ‘finding a suitable boy’ trap when I was younger, some decades ago. By Divine grace, the onset of my puberty was considerably delayed, much to the anguish of my worried parents, who took me to a doctor to have me checked up. The doctor’s experiments on my body under anesthesia revealed that my ‘womanly organs’ were underdeveloped, and so, I was put on strong hormones, which had some awful side effects. When I got my first period, my mother was overjoyed that, finally, I was indeed a 'woman'. But, despite this, happy-go-lucky me remained as flat-chested as I was before and with a very visible moustache flourishing on my upper lip. I witnessed no great ‘young womanly’ urges, including crushes (for either gender). I was happy with myself, just as I was. The desire for motherhood, wifehood, or any other ‘hood’ did not bubble up within me: I was happy reading Red Riding Hood sorts of books (!), working at my job, being economically independent and just being plain bindaas. 

I was flourishing in my career, and at this time, some ‘pious’ friends of my father's spotted me and took it on themselves to bring in wedding proposals for me. They would come home, and then the ritual of 'boy-sees-girl' would happen. I did not like this at all and would be very angry, because no such thing had been imposed on my two older siblings. Was this because they were dusky (while I was pinkish fair), and so, had little chance of getting married?

For me, the whole process of marriage and getting kids, the typical saas-bahu squabbles of the sort I had watched in television serials, the loss of freedom to continue with my career, economic dependence on a male ‘provider’, and so forth filled me with dread. More than anything else, I simply lacked the intense desire for someone of the other gender, which most so-called ‘normal’ girls are said to have. I was a Miss-Fit, and I was quite content that way.

It took me years to convince my parents about this and to finally to ask them to put a firm end to the 'boy-sees-girl' sessions. I told them that if my marriage had to happen, it would, at a level of companionship which would be emotional and intellectual. Luckily for me, this did occur, when I was past 40, and the person I am with today (who identifies as being beyond gender, based on the understanding that our true identity is simply that of being the Soul, which, of course, has no gender) is an intellectual and spiritual companion, guide and philosopher. Ours is a purely platonic friendship.

I hope that Zo gathers enough courage to put her foot down and not succumb to the mounting pressure from all sides to get married at such a beautiful stage in her life when she can bloom in her career, gain economic independence, get over her complex about her looks, and show the door out to the ‘suitable boys’ who crave for a ‘My Fair Lady’ (Remember the wonderful movie with this title that was a superhit decades ago?)!

Each one of us humans looks uniquely different, and we really don’t know the actual reason why we get the looks that we do. We might like to assume that, like other things that we are bestowed with at birth, this happens for the best. Moreover, it’s good to know that goodness of the heart and mind easily triumph over supposedly not-so-good physical looks, and so, even the plainest looking person will look like a gem if there’s ample goodness shining within them. In other words, it's the inner goodness that counts most. That’s what ‘My Dusky Lady’ Zo should know, as should the young folks for whom ‘good looks’ are right at the top of their criteria for a life-partner.