Until I was fourteen years old, I wanted blue eyes.
     

It is an unfortunate fact that most children and teenaged girls want to change something about their appearance, but amidst the yearning for less acne and a thinner physique, I had another desire. I harbored this desire for fourteen years, outlasting the wish for sleek hair and an even complexion. I wanted blue eyes. Ever since I could remember, I felt a twinge in my stomach every time I looked in the mirror, unless it was from a distance. But up close, I cringed at the sight of my eyes. They were an even brown. They did not have flecks of gold and they certainly didn’t glow when hit with light.
     

Sky blue eyes, just like after it rains. Maybe with more greenish tones, like that of a limpid pond. Like a placid sea, or a stormy one, or like the ocean surrounding a desert island. By the time I was fourteen, I had exhausted all the blue-soaked similes. It took fourteen years for my expectations to erode.
     

When I was seven years old, my friends and I huddled at the edge of the playground. We planned out detailed make-believe games, assigning fantasy roles (vampires, werewolves, other monsters) and our attributes. Naturally, I wanted to be a vampire with blue eyes. My friends, who already had blue or grey or green eyes, opted to be witches and werewolves with the more fantastical eye colors of pink and purple. I decided that day that I, somehow, at some point, would have blue eyes.
   

 When I brought up this idea to my mother, she looked at me for a few long seconds.
   

 “Well,” she said. “I guess you could always get colored contacts. Your aunty wears colored contacts, did you know that?”
     

I recalled my mother’s friend. Now that I knew this piece of information, I saw a pair of eyes, hazel with light-blue overtones. I imagined my own boring brown eyes, suddenly overlaid with an exciting shade of gray-blue. To think that I could have eyes like that, instead of a boring brown! I asked her when I could get contacts.
   

 She sentenced me with the age-old unsatisfying answer: “When you’re older.”
     

Unfulfilled, my dream lingered on for another day.
     

When I was nine years old, I read The Giver. It’s a highly acclaimed classic, a Newbery medal-winner extolling the importance of individualism and independence and emotional depth.  But that wasn’t what stood out to me.

Under the weight of the Sameness that plagues the book’s community, almost all citizens — who are doomed to conform and think alike and are narratively presented as ignorant— have dark eyes, brown eyes. But the “clear-eyed” (read: blue-eyed) protagonist and an innocent light-eyed baby are the only ones in the community who have the capacity to feel and see in color and experience the fullness of the human experience. My own brown eyes squinted at the text. I felt the same tugging in my stomach that I felt when I looked at myself in the mirror.
     

When I was twelve, I visited India with my family. One sweltering day, I sat on the fraying sofa next to my grandmother, swaddled in mosquito-proof clothing. We were watching an Indian TV drama on a popular network, waiting impatiently for the commercials to end. The ceiling fan kicked into overdrive and I reached for the volume button on the remote. A commercial that I had never seen before blared on, proclaiming a whole new line of “Fair and Lovely” face cream for only 500 rupees! The fast-talking announcer continued, explaining how the product showed results in under two weeks. A handful of cut-out images fanned across the screen, images of a woman’s face in lightening shades of brown, starting with a brown tone similar to mine and ending with a pale glow. My grandmother frowned slightly, reaching for the remote herself. I wondered why people would want to change their skin color. In retrospect, I was agonizingly close to the edge of a realization, of an epiphany, on the verge of uncovering a cultural conspiracy. But my twelve year old self didn’t conceptualize the bigger picture that day. That came later.
     

When I was fourteen, I was trawling the internet, searching for an image about the legacy of British colonialism for an assignment, and I found such an image indeed. I found a grainy photo of a picture book from an Indian publishing company. There was an illustration of a brown-skinned Indian girl with almost black eyes next to a fair skinned girl, complete with blue-gray eyes. The first girl was labelled “ugly” and the second girl was labelled beautiful. My hands hovered over the keyboard. I started typing, trying to find out more about this image and why it fit horribly in with the image I previously thought I had single-handedly woven for myself. The image was from a book published a few years after Indian independence. The caption described how Eurocentric beauty standards was still influencing Indian thought and beauty standards today.
     

It was that moment that connected my life — from that day on the playground up until then— full circle. Over the next few weeks, I noticed my thought process change when it came to my appearance — more specifically, the more ethnic aspects of my appearance. I looked at my skin in the mirror, especially tanned and brown. When my first impulse was to hope that my tan would fade soon, I could no longer write off my unease as a concern for my skincare. Not only did I regularly apply sunscreen, but I was also newly equipped with knowledge about the colonial legacy. When I looked at my eyes in the mirror, I realized that they were not that boring, really. Why did I ever think that? They did have depth, just as much as any other eye color. The “ugly” girl in the picture book was pretty. If I thought that other girls who looked similar to me were pretty with brown eyes, why would having brown eyes make me not beautiful? Take that, Lois Lowry. Take that, Great Britain.
   

 All of this isn’t to say that my struggles with self-image are more severe or tragic than those that other people of color face. In fact, I would say that in terms of cultural baggage, I’ve been blessed with only a few suitcases to deal with, with only some skeletons to stash away. The more I learn about my inherited culture and the forces that shaped it, I am able to shine a light on the skeletons, letting them disintegrate until only what I want to keep of this culture remains. I form my own culture.
     

I don’t want blue eyes. I have brown eyes. My hair can be an inconvenience. It’s not straight, and no matter how long I narrowly avoid burning my ears with a straightening iron, it will never be. When I look in the mirror now, I may see uneven skin, but my eyes are no longer a source of shame. My eyes are brown and most importantly, they are mine.