Because it would let you carry off hot pink

the way the black models do, the way I do,

I meet your light face with confusion

I feel rivers rise under my cheeks

in this wide and sunburnt country

what colour should dark people blush?
Back in Madras with a cousin six shades paler

and aunts saying Well she can carry off

any colour because she’s fair.

maybe you should wear pastels?

So, I take old blues and beiges to the tailor

lavenders dulled by dust, old roses

stained with British chai

So, I bring nothing bright with me to these

salt-rimmed shores with my visa

no saris of jewelled seas, no kurtas with

sapphire mists tacked on


on Chapel street, the drunk girls call out

Poppadums, Poppadums!



I don’t know why I pause before I tell you

that the man who plays the didgeridoo

on Bourke street called me sister.

They think you’re one of them lot!

you say and mimic my head-shake

your eyes roll like earth marbles.




Later, my desi friends bristle too,

all fellow savarnas thinking:

It’s one thing for white people

to see only our colour and race

(not our high and pitiless birth)

but for “them” to think we are the same!



Back in Madras, this is cast as story:

Well my grandfather was so dark

they once mistook him for a ____!

made to sit outside the high-caste house

coffee left for him not in steel tumblers

but glass with its sides cut sharp


like a prism – dividing light

even rainbows could not fall on our streets

without showing proof of lineage.



Here in hot Christmases, you daub zinc

on your face like grandfather’s caste marks

just as easy to wash off

Strange camouflage, I thought, because

it just makes you whiter in this brown land;

litmus that shows you don’t belong.

You don’t need the sunscreen, mate you said

Surely you get enough sunshine over there?

But no, it singes us too, some of us,

coffees too hot, poppies too tall and ruddy,



Opal-heart countries so white they could be mirror


I walk towards the glare and it casts back my shadow

– my brothers tar their faces to jive on Saturday TV

– my compatriots call people monkeys on the field


what’s done to us was done by us



My brown skin, sure, dark enough for pink

but flecked with inherited prejudice

melanoma from both our suns.