

What would you expect if you were waiting to meet someone who has an

Indian mother and an Anglo-Scandinavian father? I’d put money on you looking around for the dark-skinned woman, and not giving a second glance to the redhead with pale skin and green eyes. In your shoes I’d be doing the same, and I too would do a double-take when the redhead claimed to be the woman you’re after. Except, well, that redhead is me.

Like many mixed-race people, I grew up knowing I looked more like one parent than the other. And, indeed, a surprising number of us look more ‘white’ than ‘black’ or ‘Asian’. But even as a child in a family where nobody talked about colour, I was uncomfortably aware that I was right at the end of the whiteness scale – far paler than lots of people who can trace their Anglo-Saxon heritage back several centuries, and whiter than my younger sister, who is also pale-skinned but has dark hair and eyes.



Plenty of people we met while growing up had no qualms about wanting to know just why I looked like this, or indeed whether my sister and I were the product of an earlier marriage of my father’s, to a white woman. I don’t think they ever stopped to think how offensive this must be to the whole family.

Coming from a mixed-race family makes me uncomfortably aware that I am right at the end of the whiteness scale

Obviously appearing ‘white’ has its benefits – I’m not so naive as to think that pale skin isn’t a huge advantage in a society where racism against non-white people is still rife; and in my childhood I lived in a city where black people were scarce and the National Front was popular. My mother was subjected to some intolerable harassment and I am genuinely scared, looking back, by the thought of how my life might have been if I’d looked the way I was ‘meant’ to.



Overall, though, my skin colour is not something I would have chosen. None of my mixed-race friends – even the ones nobody can quite place – look as monochrome as I do. But even if they don’t look much like their darker-skinned relatives, they still occupy a middle ground, where nothing is completely fixed. Whereas, unless I spell out my origins, there’s absolutely no reason to assume I’m anything but English. And even then I have to go through endless hoops of explanation because, although my sister’s darker colouring is often accepted without further comment, mine very rarely is.

Should I bother at all? Aren’t we all just people, whatever our colour? Well, it matters to me that I don’t look like what, frankly, I am. I don’t seem to belong in

the growing communities of mixed-race people, and I look very unlike my Indian friends and relatives. There’s a gulf between us – a gulf of other people’s perceptions, of our own experiences.



And, in truth, I also mind on a very basic level. My Indian mother was a stunning beauty in her time – and a lot of people’s questioning has had a distinct note of ‘how on earth did someone as lovely as you give birth to a child who looks like that?’



It’s a question that I’ve wondered about myself. I’ve no definite answers. I do know, from a few conversations with geneticists, that there’s actually no reason why white genes – or even red hair – shouldn’t prevail in a mixed-race child; the idea of a uniformly beige mixing just isn’t scientifically accurate. It’s more likely, though, that somewhere in the past there already was, so to speak, a touch

of the whitewash. Go back a couple of centuries into India’s complicated history and you’ll find arranged marriages, love marriages, liaisons of all interracial kinds.

Indeed, it’s my own relationship that has made it possible for me to start exploring the issue myself, as my partner is half Bangladeshi. In reality, the reasons why our house has its fair share of Asian pictures and ornaments, and that our dinner’s as likely to be rice and kheema as spaghetti bolognese, are more because of me than because of him. But I don’t mind people assuming that he’s behind these Asian influences – as long as I can take them up on their assumptions and explain that there’s more to our story than might meet the eye.