I have been a slave to my weighing scale since the tender age of 14 when I stepped on it (soon after my Class X board exams) and discovered that I weighed enough to get an MBBS seat without donation. It even alarmed my usually easygoing parents, who until then had dismissed my growing girth as “big bones” and “puppy fat”.
I was immediately enrolled in a gym and instructed to lose 10 kilos (at least). I was also put on a diet, one I never completely got off: like Notting Hill ’s Anna Scott, I have been hungry for a decade (actually more. Don’t rough-calculate my age, now, it’s rude).
The problem with fatness is that you never stop being fat in your head. And to be honest, I’m not exactly unfat in body either. Though, thankfully, I have managed to lose and keep off a fair amount of weight (distinction rather than topper type numbers, if you must ask), I am still carrying 10 kilos of extra adipose tissue that refuses to go away, despite my best attempts.
Call me vain, but if some fairy-like apparition ever appeared before me offering to grant me three wishes, this would be the top one: thinness. I want to know what thinness feels like—where you have a body with “absolutely beautiful collar bones” like Arundhati Roy’s Rahel and a back like Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus.
A brief spell in my mid-20s was perhaps my only brush with slenderness. It was heartbreak-induced I must admit, where I did a Miss Havisham-style hibernation of sorts, shutting myself in my bedroom, refusing to eat. By the time I emerged, I was slim, almost skinny , shimmying into a dress size I have never gotten into before or since.
Unhappiness is the easiest weight-loss pill. But the thing is, it’s really hard to stay unhappy. Especially since the year of that breakup (and unprecedented weight loss) turned out to be my salad days as far as dating was concerned. Though admittedly, when you eat Mississippi mud pie and berry compote instead of the aforesaid salad, that sort of slimness cannot last. And it didn’t.
Going back to my weighing scale, with its innocuous surface and heart of darkness, that measures my world. It is a ritual as sacred as brushing my teeth after breakfast (I brush them before too, don’t worry) and slathering on crimson lipstick. Step on the scale, one foot on it, the other slightly off (you lose two kilos this way, I checked) and wait for that sacred number to flash, praying for a miracle that unfortunately never comes. And in a way, I’m glad. I can’t think of a life not defined by how much I weigh in the morning.
