He usually just smiled through my cooing descriptions, but once, just once, he slipped. After I'd told a Mexican toddler she was a cutie, he said rather brusquely - "You do realize your own kid will look nothing like this?"

"What do you mean - this?" I blubbered.

"This equals fair, chubby look. 'Cute' in your words."

I was shocked. How dare he suggest that color and looks were all I cared about? Hadn't I showered the exact same kind of attention on African American kids I'd seen in the mall? When my mother-in-law had suggested I stop drinking coffee, and a friend had told me to eat almonds - all to improve the baby's color - I had laughed outright and said I was happy whatever color my baby was. I knew enough about science and genes and melanin to know my kids would never look like "this". I shut my mouth rather pointedly, and decided never to bother with a sourpuss like him again.

Flash forward: My daughter's birth - She was here, the little bundle I had waited 9 months to meet. She had a pretty mouth, pink, full, a little bow, just like her dad's. When he held her for the first time, I noticed how much fairer she seemed. We analyzed every feature of hers - and eagerly claimed this part and that as our own genetic imprint. Everything about her was perfect, except the tips of her ears, which were a deep reddish brown. I wondered if people would notice her birthmark, and tease her later in life, but decided that long hair would hide it just fine.

There was so much to do - mastering breastfeeding, changing diapers, timing my sleep around my little one - that I forgot about the birthmark. When her pediatrician came in for a final visit before I was discharged, my husband showed him the ears and asked if the birthmark was permanent and if it could be removed.

"Um.. that. That's the actual color of your baby's skin," said the doctor. "Slowly the rest of the body will darken to match it."

My husband and I simply stared. I remember my exact thought at that point - "The black creeps out of the ears." All those almond feeders and coffee abstinence advocates had never told us that my baby would be born a certain color, and the darker color would just spread out from her ears.

Under our ever watchful eyes, that's what her ears proceeded to do for the next 3 weeks. Take over every nook and cranny, till she became an even chocolate brown.

One afternoon, about a fortnight after her birth, I sat down and wept. I sobbed to my mother about all those times when well-meaning but utterly rude relatives had wondered how I would ever get married, given how dark I was. I remembered the stupid jackass TA who would always grade my pretty friend higher during our viva voces or quizzes. Wasn't it enough that I had to go through all this? Does life have to treat her that way too? I asked. My mother listened but in the end, said quite matter-of-factly, "It's your inner beauty that counts, right? And you don't have to saddle her with your own baggage."

I quietened. Though my own experiences had me question the wisdom of her first point from time to time, I had also largely believed it when my parents told me my inner beauty mattered to everyone. And she was absolutely right about the other part too. My daughter didn't have to be like me. Here maybe life would be different for her. Maybe all I needed was a voice of reason in those hormone-crazed days post-pregnancy, but it soothed me a great deal to have my fears out in the open with my mom.

When Karen Walrond had posted about Lisa Lerner, a Jewish American woman who had adopted transracially from India, and who had a hard time dealing with how dark her adopted daughter was, I thought it was time to confront my own demons. Change the Jewish American to Hindu Indian, add a husband, and change transracial adoption to biological daughter, and you would have my story.

My mother has written about her experiences as a dark child in a fair family here. Usha Vaidyanathan, a prolific blogger from Bangalore, wrote about the same topic and how she's thankful that her skin color never came between her and her "milky white" sister. She says:

Perhaps all dark girls in this country have the same story to share. Today most of us do not openly talk about fair skin being an essential pre requisite for being considered pretty...

What a pity we don't talk about it. At least discrimination has a name here. In Asia people go about their covert racism without even thinking about it. If more people like Pissed off Paki wrote about color racism maybe we'd be on track to dealing with it. Or maybe, like my story or Lisa Lerner's, we have only just begun admitting it even to ourselves.

Contributing Editor Priya Ramachandran also blogs at Words on Water

A couple of Fridays ago, I'd just left office only to find out that my train was late by almost an hour. Like every other conscientious worker who can't leave her gadgets alone, I yanked out my laptop and began hacking away at my unfinished tasks to make my wait worthwhile. To my left was a pair of guys - tourists from the look of it, maps in hand, huge pieces of luggage and all.

The louder of the two - a strapping man in an orange t-shirt who really was quite handsome except for the frown and the swearing - was pissed. It was hot, the train was late, the tickets hadn't been bought. "There's no way I'm gonna drag this stuff around," he said, before stomping off in search of the ticket counter.

Great, I thought. A few moments of quiet.

Then suddenly - Boo! came a cry. Slap slap.

I started. It was Orange T, back from his ticket counter hunting expedition, surprising his friend.

"Gotcha dude!" he yelled.

I must've stared/glared/scowled. Because suddenly Orange T leapt, and landed up in front of me.

"Sweetheart," he drawled, obnoxious and sweet all at the same time.

I looked. He was inches away from me.

"I said. Do. You. Speak. English?" He moved closer.

Everyone was looking at us now. Why did he want to know, I thought. If I said yes, would he tell me I was better off returning to whichever impoverished country I was from? If I said no, would I get a lecture on learning to speak the language?

I nodded.

"Then you watch luggage. Ok?"

I croaked out a yes.

"Me my friend here we buy tickets. You watch luggage. Ok? Don't go nowhere."

Yeah right, talk to me in pidgin English, as if I'm an idiot. They left, while I sat with an appropriately imbecilic expression of someone who speaks at all the wrong times, but whose voice had just deserted her. Also looking like I had a sub-zero IQ meant no one would notice my trembing hands.

A voice clucked from behind me.

"How rude."

"Good thing you didn't say anything, he seemed ready to pick a fight," said a young woman.

I said I thought the man ought to be banished to a Miss Manners concentration camp. I smiled when I said it, though deep down I knew it was just to pretend I wasn't fazed. I was still shaking, but sat back in my chair for a few momwnts, took a few deep breaths. I finally put my laptop back in its bag and walked off.

No, I don't want to watch your bags, Orange T, I thought. Especially since your request was so badly put. And yes, I can speak English - three flavours actually. The propah Queen's tongue, a put-on American one and in a musical, lilting Indian way. Wake me up from my sleep, and you'll hear some choice cuss words in the Indian accent. Watch me with my white friends and you'll hear the Rs rolling and the vowels shortening. Which one did you want to hear, sweetheart?

...

I later wondered what it is I'm giving my daughter - an American citizen from the day of her birth. At least I have a fall-back country, my "root" culture that I think I can return to if the need arises. Is this what I'm giving her - does it mean a lifetime of outsiderness? Someone commenting on an entry in my mother's blog said in peace we were who we imagine ourselves to be, but in war and adversity, our true selves came out. Incidents like this remind me that sometimes American eyes cannot see the differences between shades of brown, and all it takes is a few adverse events to rock the (mostly) happy dream that is life in the US.

I wish I could conclude that I had been audacious, hard-as-nails fearless. Maybe I would've regaled you with stories of knockout punches and kickass punchlines had I been a different sort of a person. What I learnt from this incident is that fearlessness is not always a given. Before I could talk about it, I had to understand myself, more than anyone else. I had to get rid of any associated shame. Sugarcoat my acerbity with humor. And oftentimes, fearlessness is just faking it till you get there.

Contributing Editor Priya Ramachandran also blogs at Words on Water

It was a strange procession of shadows. My mother with her bag of vegetables, I holding the old man's hand. A child, maybe five years old, perched on his bony shoulders. Five minutes later, the lights came back on, and the man left, assuring us that he could make it home on his own. I don't know why I remember this, but I often think of the old man and the little boy. Somethings just remain etched in your mind.

This week I've been doing a lot of reading of what I call memory blogs. Blogs that describe days long gone, which transport readers to nostalgic worlds. One of my favorite bloggers is Pakistani Ann-beynaam. Her posts about her childhood in Lahore have that delicious feel of languorous summers in a familiar land, even though hers is Pakistan and mine India.

lahore. it was the place where i first learned to appreciate history, not just in books, but in the buildings in the city. for me the old city was laced with romanticism, particularly the area around the river ravi. that was where the lahore fort was built, and later on the badshahi masjid.

...

my earliest memory of liberty cinema is that it was a reddish colored building, and it used to show both english and urdu language feature films. some of the carry on doctor films were shown there, among others. capri cinema was right next to it, a more recent appearance on the scene.

Time and again, I sit up and notice how new technology, but blogging in particular, is shaping the memory creation process. This article in USA Today says that decline in mental agility or memory skills can be lessened through activities such as blogging. Apart from the capacity of blogs to store our stories, we have indispensable tools like search and tagging that organize our memories from slipping into obscurity.

A post by blogger Martha Burtis tells us about a class she had almost forgotten about:

I had almost forgotten about this class. In particular, I had forgotten about a set of journal entries that I had written for the class. I read over many of them late yesterday.

I was amazed by how much I had forgotten from this class. As I read those journal entries, I might as well have been reading someone else's writing. And while reading them has sort of allowed me to re-connect with the ideas that I had back then, the experience is in no way the same as when I generated those ideas in the first place. The journal entries don't really allow me to re-capture the process by which I got to those ideas.

In other words, blogs help us rediscover ourselves. I wonder though, do we perhaps
rely too much on tools like blogging as memory banks? Could it be possible that there are mundanities best forgotten?

Contributing Editor Priya Ramachandran also blogs at Words on Water