I knew that today or tomorrow, literally, I would have to tell them all about my plans for the future, and about the man in my life of whom they would wholeheartedly disapprove. But for now Ammamma was hugging me the way she always did and it was enough.

My aunt gave me a perfunctory hug. Lata and I never got along, to a great extent because of the cold war between Ma and her. I didn’t have any feelings toward her, good or bad-I just thought of her as my very beautiful aunt about whom I didn’t feel one way or the other. I remember, when I was around fourteen years old, my uncle Jayant got married and I had showed off to all my friends that I was getting a very beautiful aunt.

I was not wrong; Lata was beautiful. She was tall and walked like a “graceful deer”-so everyone said-and she was fair. Unlike me, she was very fair. Fair somehow always meant beautiful and having darker skin was a flaw. I got my father’s dark color, my mother always said, clicking her tongue disapprovingly, and Nate got her fairer skin. According to Ma, that was my bad karma. A boy could get a good wife irrespective of how he looked if he was financially viable; for a woman, however, physical appearance was important. My dark skin color, Ma felt, could pose a problem when the time came to find me a suitable husband.

Nick was heartily amused when I told him how my own mother had discriminated against me because I was dark. He couldn’t see the subtle differences between the various shades of Indian dark, which made the situation even more preposterous to him.

“All Indians are dark,” Nick pointed out. “Compared to say a Scandinavian… what chance does your mother have of being called fair?”

But my mother was fair, fairer than most, and everyone including her talked about how beautiful she had been when she was young.