Shaking hands with a new colleague, I saw her glance at my name badge, a confused expression on her face.
‘Sheetal?’ she said. ‘That’s an unusual name.’ I knew what she was thinking – my name didn’t match my appearance as a white woman. ‘My parents went through a hippy stage and gave me an Indian name,’ I smiled. It was a lie.
My parents Mina, 69, and Anil, 72, are Indian, but you’d never know from looking at me, because a condition called universal vitiligo has stripped the brown pigmentation from my skin.
It was 1987 and I was seven when my big sister Tejal, then 10, noticed a patch of white skin behind my ear the size of a penny. She pointed it out to my
