Reflections on being in a place where people’s faces look like their face
Some hopefully non-judgemental thoughts about growing older
I’ve just returned from a month of being in India, the majority of that time spent in Bangalore, where a lot of my family still live, and where I once lived as a child for around five years. It was an experience that shaped and changed my emotional DNA, meaning that when I am in England, where I live, the memory of it tugs in the background. A missing, a longing, a yearning.
It is a place I used to visit without fail at least once or every two years, but then Covid hit, and I was busy gobbling up experiences to make up for what had been lost and it became six years.
I decided I didn’t want to make it a flying visit. I wanted the city to unfurl around me slowly. For there to be time for coconut water and naps and leisurely conversations with my aunts over tea. Usually it’s a mad trolley dash between relatives’ houses and shopping and ticking off my favourite foods bingo, but I didn’t want to feel exhausted and wrung out by the end. I wanted to return to England with my memories and thoughts pressed like flowers in a notebook, eager for the day I’d be back.
Bangalore is a place that is coded to my history; the exact spot I got off the school bus a stop too late, scaring the bejeezus out of my mother. The old ice cream shop that was once a new ice cream shop with its banana splits and chocolate sundaes. These are the things I thought I’d be nostalgic for on the plane ride home, but unexpectedly it was something else.
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The first thing I am always aware of when I land in India is the fact that almost everyone’s skin colour looks like mine, or an iteration of it. From the lightest creams to the deepest mahogany, being surrounded by people who resemble me, means I let something heavy in my shoulders go.
The closest approximation I can find to describe it, is how it must be for a fish person to have to constantly breathe on land without realising how much pressure it exerts on their lungs, their body, until they slip into water and it feels effortless. It doesn’t mean India is a utopia, and lord knows colourism is rife and thriving like bacteria on an old gym towel, but it means something is taken out of the equation when you interact with people.
That returning sense of ease in my own body was familiar, but what became apparent to me over the first week and beyond, was the impact of people’s faces looking like…their faces. By that, I mean the resounding lack of cosmetic tweakments and alterations.
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I thought long and hard about whether I should write this, and how to write this. I wouldn’t want anyone who has cosmetic tweakments to feel bad about doing them, and I wouldn’t want them to mistake my curiosity and reflections around this as judgement towards those choices. But – and there is always a but – as a forty-something woman trying to construct a sense of self in a world that continues to roughly force its version of what you should be, I feel the boot of that pressure to look unlined and smooth, upon my neck.
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