Fair and Handsome presents six concrete poems within six lightboxes along Cinema Lane in Boronia, and these poems relate to the concerns of a young boy walking down Cinema Lane with a bottle of skin lightener, and raise questions about race, belonging and career possibilities for an Australian with an Indian heritage.
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Raj’s mouth salivated for a Twix but his hands were bound to a tube of Fair and Handsome. The face on the label glowed from one side and was half dark on the other, and since Raj had never applied methylparaben to his face, he guessed that he belonged to the other.
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Raj asked Google to define handsome and it built him a wall of fair-skinned answers.
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Blue for the eyes, yellow for the hair were the colouring book hints from between his Nani’s lips.
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Engineer to taxi driver. Nurse to pamphleteer. No matter what his parents said, Raj couldn’t see how studying a² + b² = c² would help him deliver people or their mail.
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Cousins on bicycles weaving between trucks. Chickens dangling from handlebars. Raj compared his pedalling cousins to those in Pyrenean Lycra. The last three Tours de France Raj had stayed up, waiting for Indian sweat in peloton, and he always managed to stay awake to see at least three cows.
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Raj flicked the lid and squeezed some Fair and Handsome on his palm. The cream was white, picket-fence white, and smelt like his Nani’s perfume. Could this cream bleach all his problems? Could it advance his Australia Fair? Raj blinked and turning to the wall he smeared a hand across bricks. Feet took him to the end of the lane. A hand threw the tube in the bin.
