The first time I realized that I didn’t want to be brown, I was seven.

My second grade class was sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the maroon carpet of our school’s library. I looked down at my legs, at my ashy knees that were the way they were from playing outside, scraped and scabbed. Accompanying these scrapes and scabs were little brown hairs, shooting out of my limbs like blades of grass. I looked to my left, at the blonde girl next to me wearing lime green shorts with a matching tank top. As my eyes traveled past her green shorts, I didn’t see the same things that I saw on my legs. I couldn’t even see the hair on hers’ unless the light hit it at the right angle. The girl on my right didn’t have any hair on her legs at all.

As the news cut to commercial break the next morning, a woman’s bare leg appeared on the screen. She laid a pink Gillette razor to it, stroking upwards, from the front of her ankle to her knee. Her leg was still bare when she finished. It wasn’t just Gillette, though. It was Schick, it was Nair, it was Bic, it was Sally Hansen, it was even that weird “Yes!” contraption that promised to get rid of your hair by rolling a 99 dollar machine over it.

So when I finally asked my mom why I had hair on my legs, and why it was so dark, she plainly said, “Because we’re Indian.”

That night, I went to the bathroom, flipped open the cabinet under the sink, and took out a pink razor, just like the one in the commercial. I sat on the tiled floor, laid the razor to my leg, stroked upwards, from the front of my ankle to my knee. I kept doing that. Without any water, shaving cream, or even soap. Unfortunately, the commercials didn’t tell me I was supposed to use those. By the time I was done, lines of red, some streaming blood like teardrops, covered the body parts I was so embarrassed of not even an hour ago.

Band-aids and hydrogen peroxide were my best friends for the next week, but now, when I looked down at my legs, they looked a little more like the girls’ legs who sat next to me in the library. I was one step closer to being what was perfect, what I saw in the commercials, the movies, the TV shows, and essentially in everything that surrounded me.

When I turned twelve, my best (blonde) friend tried to put foundation on me after finishing my eyeshadow. She put some of the liquid on her finger, making polka dots on my face. She clutched my face, using her hands to rub the foundation in, squinting her eyes. Once she finished, I looked at the mirror in the cheap eyeshadow palette from Claire’s. On my face, the white liquid that perfectly matched my friend’s face, made me look like you could throw a red ball on my nose and call me clown. “You’re too dark,” she said softly as tears welled in my eyes, and eventually fell to remove the foundation.

The next time she did my makeup, I told her not to put foundation on me. While she put pink lipstick on me, she giggled, “You look like you have a mustache!”

I giggled with her.

When she went home, though, I grabbed a roll of scotch tape from the kitchen drawer, and locked the door to the bathroom. I ripped a piece of tape from the roll and placed it above my lip. “One, two, three,” I counted in my head while the words, “it’s because I’m Indian,” played over and over again. I ripped the tape off, and in a second, every follicle of hair above my lip was gone. But I still didn’t feel like the blonde girls.

In my freshman math class, I stared at the long, dark brown hair of the girl who sat in front of me. Her name was Anaya. On the first day of class when the teacher mispronounced both of our names, she turned to me, smiled, and whispered, “I get it.”

When we had a substitute, she turned her chair around to face me.

“Have you seen Dangal? Amir Khan is in it,” she asked, with light in her eyes. I furrowed my eyebrow for a second, confused that she was talking to me about a Hindi Bollywood movie.

Then, I took a breath in from my nose, and hesitated, “Yeah. It was really good, I watched it with my dad and we loved it.”

As that conversation continued for the next forty five minutes, I figured out that it wasn’t me who didn’t want to be brown. It was society, and all it’s commercials, TV shows, movies, and picture books that wanted me to be white. However, my culture, my passions, my (true) friends did not want me to be those blonde girls I sat next to in the library, or the friend who used to do my makeup. They wanted me to be who I was, and I wanted to be brown.