Kartika_Issue15

ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
by herself and pushing away the cookies. No, thank you, Mom, she says.
Gone is the Anya who would clap her hands and scream with joy when I
jump at her from behind a door.
All this is long but I want to show how she has not been herself since the
start of school, in spite of her father’s brilliance as a Doctor of Nuclear
Physics, and myself an M.A. in Hindi Literature specializing in Poetry. But
from your email of yesterday, I know now what is wrong and that is the Self-
Portrait! From the first day of school, when she jumped down all the steps of
the bus to tell me about it, I know Anya is working on her Self-Portrait. At
that time, she was only worried whether she would be able to draw it well.
“Mummy, will the picture look like me?” she asked. I embraced her again
and again and said it would look like her, just like her perfect round face, her
almond eyes, her sharp nose, her gulabi mouth. I understand that gulabi is a
foreign word to you but there is no English word for the beauty of the gulab,
queen of flowers. And I waited and waited for her to finish her Self-Portrait.
Then your photo came yesterday and it was just like a clap of thunder when I
looked at Anya’s face and neck in the colour of “Brown” in the Self-Portrait.
This is the reason my Anya hangs her face! My Anya is not brown-coloured.
Anya’s skin colour is not the same as the colour of the skin of Wei or Marisa
who I have noticed are declaring their skin to be “Peach.” Anya is not pure
white like the children Ashton, Delilah, Mabel, Jack, Jared, Jennifer,
Spencer, and Sara or like the skin of the child David, whose forefathers, I
believe, are from Africa. Her skin is different from the skins of all these
children. In particular, Anya’s skin is golden-yellow like my own skin, a
colour sometimes called wheatish, a colour that, even in India, only some
people are endowed with including some females from the state of Rajasthan
like myself, a colour prized for its glow when the light of the sun falls on it,
never for too long of course. And now every day Anya walks into her
classroom she will see hanging on the wall this terrible image of herself that
is not her colour at all.
This is the reason my Anya hangs her face. I know this even though Anya’s
father, being a man, is unmindful of the importance of the issue and
concerned only about how well Anya drew the Self-Portrait and says that
Anya must learn to draw better so that both of her eyes look at the same
thing and her chin is not pointing to one side. I am aware from Anya that she
has used crayons made by the Crayona Company for her Self-Portrait and
she has told me there is no Crayona colour that more closely represents her
skin. I hereby inform you that I am going to write to the Crayona Company,
attention of their General Manager to ask them to prepare the appropriate
colour to depict the skin of wheatish-complexioned females from the
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