Indian Thadka

We’re playing around with some poetry today!

I am a woman of colour.
Dusky, sun-soaked skin,
Coal-black eyes,
Windswept Coramandel beach hair,
Years of oppression buried in the lines of my palms,
Full kokum lips bursting with the words those before me failed to say,
Ears that wait patiently for snide, hurtful remarks.

A sindoor red epiphany lays nestled within me.
Why hypocritically call my country a land of ‘darkness’ when you sit on beds of rich cotton baking under the sun of Cabo,
Why claim that we are made to serve when the search engine that you use to find answers is run by an Indian,
Why make lude jokes about how I blend in with the bark of a Banyan tree when your complexion matches that of a dead ash-wood tree,
Why call me exotic when supposedly I don’t have enough money to leave my own country to travel to the ‘exotic’ Caribbean.

We are not the colour of our complexion. We are not chips of colour awaiting passing judgement. We are not colours on a palette that are said to be ‘misplaced on the canvas of the world.’

We are bursting with colour, years of struggle, suppression, the feistiness of the Kashmiri chilli and the sheer power to rise.

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