Black eyes

I snapped at Sean when he was trying to compliment my beautiful brown eyes at the start of our courtship.

“My eyes are not brown! They are black.”

“I think they are deep brown.” He stammered after being rudely interrupted in his attempts to be romantic.

“NO! They are black!”

He did not contradict.

You have to remember that the standard of beauty in India lies in your fair skin, which my skin was not, blue black hair, which my hair was, and black, doe like eyes. While my eyes were not doe like, they were indeed black (or so I thought). I was not going to give up even one characteristic from the standard that I held myself to. No siree, my eyes were not brown, no matter how deeply you look into them.

Our bard, Rabindranath Tagore has immortalized black eyes in his song, ‘Kalo? Ta she jotoi Kalo hok/ Dekhechi tar Kalo horin chokh.” (Dark? No matter how dark she is, I have seen her black doe like eyes)

Recently, I was listening to popular Hindi songs from my teen years on Spotify when the famous song from the movie Baazigar came on – “Yeh kaali, kaali aankhen, yeh gore gore gaal…’ (these black, black eyes/ these fair, fair cheeks) and I remembered my insistence on the color of my eyes and poor Sean’s thwarted romanticism over them.

Later, I have come to accept that my eyes are indeed deep brown and they complement my brown skin quite well. I have looked quite intently into the mirror to truly see my eye color and conceded a win to Sean. Now I put brown on paper when I have to write the color of my eyes and smile at my husband when he looks at me with loving eyes as we listen to Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl on the radio.