Heavy Going

Weighing the Alternatives

(This was published in TheTimes of India in 2001 and is one of my favourite articles,..)

MIDDLE
Heavy Going

By SUNITA KRIPALANI

WHEN my husband pointed out that he was not legally married to 15 kilos of me, I thought it was time to do something about it. I'd spent half my life gaining weight. Would I be spending the other half trying to lose it?

My first reaction however was that of indignant disbelief. Fat? Who, me? No, no, I'd always referred to myself as cuddly, plump, prosperous, healthy, or maybe just slightly overweight, but certainly not that F-word! 

Since I didn't want to give up an ounce of what belonged to me, I made excuses and blamed it on heredity and genes, steroids and toxicants, but was gently reminded time and again that if I managed to lose some weight, it would only be for my own good.

So I took a deep breath and consulted some books on the subject. Eat less, eat healthy, exercise more, said all of them. Easier said than done... for all I had to do was to look at food to put on weight. I pressed the ’hunger spot' diligently to curb appetite, but nothing happened. Mine remained an unhealthy body supporting an unhealthy mind.

While others might see it as a weight problem, I thought differently. I perceived it as a height problem: according to the height-weight chart, I should have been at least 8 ft 3 inches tall! But nobody quite saw it from my point of view and I suffered in silence my anguish and angst.

More diets start in dress shops than in doctors' clinics, I read somewhere. So I went to smart boutiques to see what could inspire me. Oooh, what a lovely pair of jeans... only they were two sizes too large! The sales assistant volunteered to have them altered for me. Never mind, no problem, I told him, I'll just put on some more weight and they'll fit me fine. And they did, they did, trust me, they did.

Who wants to punish the body by subjecting it to such torture as brisk walking, exercise, yoga, running up stairs, aerobics and jogging? Since I didn't want to actually become thinner this way, I decided to find ways and means of at least looking trimmer.

The fashion magazines suggested vertical stripes for a slimmer silhouette. I therefore invested in a brand-new wardrobe: my salwar-kameez suits, my saris, my kaftans, my nightgowns all now had vertical stripes in different hues. "Yes, I definitely look thinner, I am slimmer," I told myself thrice a day before meals, like Alice in Wonderland, sure that if I affirmed it three times, it must be true. 

"If you want to look thinner, stay around fatter people,'' quipped a cousin. So I chose my friends with care. I hovered around the real heavy-weights, feeling wonderfully slender and delicate in comparison, and I delighted in the company I now kept, but felt a little insecure that they might abandon me for other supersized cronies.

I wanted distorting mirrors installed in every room, to make me look anorexic and cadaverous, but the family would hear none of it. Disappointed at their lack of cooperation, I thought of getting a one-way ticket to the moon, where I'd be sure to weigh only a sixth of what I do here on Mother Earth.

When a neighbour contracted typhoid, I exclaimed, “Wow! You've lost so much weight!” The insensitive remark alienated me from all those nice people, but certainly gave me an idea. During the monsoons, I drank tap water, ate roadside junk and guzzled sugarcane juice by the gallons. But unfortunately, I remained fit as a fiddle.

As a final desperate resort, I've made a list of those organs that my body can do without - a lung, a kidney, ovaries, an eye, spleen, uterus, gall bladder, large chunks of intestines, teeth, my appendix... All I have to do now is to con some quack surgeon into operating upon me and removing all of the above in one shot. Or, should I just settle for a haircut and trim my fingernails instead?