The fact that Indians prefer light skinned people is well known. Perhaps more so by me than by many others.

You see, my mother was fair. And so were her brother and mother. In her case when she married my father, people consoled themselves saying – so what…I am sure he must be fair…only his profession - a geologist – and his need to spend hours and days in the coal mines made him dark. This color thing was obviously drilled into me almost from birth. Because I distinctly remember that when I asked my mother how come her brother was so fair…she answered…because he studied in Germany and ate a lot of tomatoes.

And I was told of stories about how when my mama was in his cradle (with its white sheets) with his bottle of milk, quite a few times people couldn’t find him…the white of the sheets, the white of the milk were so much like his complexion that he was ‘invisible’.

Needless to say I consumed a lot of tomatoes, drank a lot of milk thereafter and even went to Germany but no tangible change in my complexion resulted.

When I got married, obviously I was weighed on the grey scale as well as on the one that measures weights. He is fat…was an expected conclusion…but what saved our marriage is that my wife was the darkest in her family. Amongst a kin of pale white siblings she stood out as the dark horse and therefore was ‘forced’ to compromise on my color.

Only when my second daughter was born and she had the complexion of her grandparents on both sides did peace rule in the household…and it was as if she was the atonement for all our sins.

Let me at this stage, confess that somewhere along the line I decided that this ‘fair and lovely’ debate was not called for and I was pretty oblivious to the shades between black and white, dark and light. And both in my personal life and professional I have had very decent relationships with people of both categories. In fact I could be called color blind.

Or so I thought.

This morning I woke up from a nightmare. You see, late in the night when I was signing out of all my digital avataars, I saw a post put up by one of my daughter’s friends. He was off to parts of Africa for a few weeks and he was being accompanied by another friend. Their plan – to road trip through Africa…parts of it at least.

Now my nightmare merged the post on Facebook with my theories of coloration where you become dark if you work in coal mines or live in Africa…the dark continent. And in my nightmare I saw these two young gentlemen coming back to Hyderabad a few weeks later and being greeted with a surprised silence…with nobody recognizing them because they had become too dark. Of course the nightmare threw in some extra special effects and their lips had thickened and their hair had curled…but let’s skip the details.

I got up with a start, jumped out of my bed and made a dash to the PC. The plan was to post on these young men’s walls a warning…and in fact a request that they come back immediately if they wanted to avoid a dark future. I hoped they’d get the message whenever they stopped en route…and perhaps respect my judgment enough to ‘about turn’ and return to base.

Luckily the PC takes a while to boot and that was enough time to bring me to my senses…and I didn’t post anything funny or alarmist. But yes, if any of you people out there think there is some truth in my sleepy prophecy, please call these boys…call them back pronto…

because I am still so worried about them turning black…just being Indian you see:-)