In the old days some of us considered dark skin very attractive,” said my sometime friend at the Club. I gave him what Bertie Wooster might describe as my half-hyena laugh. We were sitting at the Club Bar exchanging light banter. Being a long-term member, he was upholding the tradition of being the club bore. “Do you know how the Tommies, as we referred to the British soldiers back then described people like you?” I tried my intensely irritated hyena laugh. It only spurred him on. “Blacker the blackberry, sweeter the taste!” And he slapped his thigh failing to find mine close enough for comfort. “Why do you say people like me?” I asked falling into the trap.
“Ah, I heard that you were one of them,” he said pointing to the row of bottles behind the Barman’s head. All I could see were bottles of Scotch. “You are from North Malabar, aren’t you?” he named the prominent towns in the area. “Yes, certainly, my mother’s family came from what used to be a British cantonment town, my father’s family, from the other one. They were all highly educated professionals. My paternal grandmother was a famous writer in Malayalam.” I had an idea where this conversation was leading. I was getting ready for the put-down.
“I’ll tell you a story about my grandmother. She belonged to a well-known Tharawad (or matrilineal Kerala household)” said the club bore. When I was studying to be a doctor at Madras, I had a number of African student friends. I would take them to my grandmother’s house during our vacations. It may have been an imposition to her but she never said so in front of my African friends.” “The moment they left I noticed that she would take great precautions to wipe the stain of their visit. She would wash the steps of the household with milk.
Pure fresh cow’s milk that she poured down herself.” There was a moment of silence on both sides. How could our fears about other races and peoples be so entrenched as to manifest itself in such obscene acts of purification? And then the club bore revealed the true meaning behind the story. “If you had come to my house, my grandmother would have done the same. To her you would always be a Thiya, traditionally the toddy-tappers of North Malabar—a low caste person.” Now that we are once again obsessed with questions of purity, I can only ask, paraphrasing Shakespeare: Would all the cows’ milk of Hindustan cleanse the dark blot of caste from our minds?