Plump & Strong

By: Satarupa Mishra

Image source: Internet

Carrots come, and ladyfingers go     

Tall, slender colours of theirs

Fail to please the taste buds though

Unless comes the...

Oh-so-awesome

Oh-so-yum

Oh-so-must

Our lovely, fat potatoes!

Growing up, being addressed as a ‘potato’ wasn’t easy. Even worse was when that handsome crush in school giggled at his friends’ whispers of ‘alu alu’ thrown at me. Yes, the one thing at which we Indians stand together is our love of calling fat people ‘alu’, i.e. POTATO. Anyways, that most disenchanted, disappointing, disturbing, and disoriented day was marked in the history of my adolescence as HBD – the Heart Break Day. The dream boy whom, I believed, possessed a pair of most powerful eyes that could pierce through the thick layers of my fats and fall in love with my beautiful soul, turned out to be blind like the rest. Alas! My Fairy Tale died!

(Damn! I am still searching for the legend who coined the phrase ‘Sweet 16’; I would recite to him my realistic poem of ‘Fat 16’).

“When will I get the shape of a Barbie Doll!” I wondered with wholehearted sadness of adolescence.

“How long do I need to hold my breath for tucking my prospering belly?” I asked God, who seemed to me like a zombie.

I kept crying and praying. I almost gave up all food, until the day when God slapped me hard and threw me on bed, severely sick, for over a month. Medical reason? Drastic degeneration of the levels of hemoglobin and vitamins in the body due to intense crash dieting. I looked at myself into the mirror. Gosh! The reflection could be easily compared to a lizard – stark thin, dry, dark, scaly skin, and a lifeless pair of eyes. Where was I! In the rat race to fit myself into the most accepted and most loved image of a young woman in the society, I had lost my trek.

So what did I do next? Of course, I had to get my blood back. I began to do what I loved doing the most second to dreaming of a stupid Fairy Tale – EAT (potatoes included). In that one month in bed, I realized that the body I was trying to customize as per the whims and fancies of friends, relatives and prospective boyfriends was my own foremost responsibility. It craved for my love; it screamed for my acceptance. When I ignored it, the body depressed itself into serious illness. But not anymore!

God chooses different vehicles for the journey from ignorance to enlightenment; from weakness to strength. My vehicle has been a cute anti-social brat, called FAT. It’s astonishing to witness the emotional trials and tribulations a fat woman is made to go through, only to emerge as a body of steel none can break!

Image source: Internet

If my romantic dreams in adolescence cried in the tunes of Salma Agha’s dil ke armaan aasoon mein beh gaye (“all desires of my heart have been washed away by tears”), my new rejuvenated self, basked in the warm lyrics of Mariah Carey’s Hero lies in you. The hero of my life is not any anticipated rich, strong man, who’d love and protect me in return for looking the way he wants me to look. Potential grooms might not see me as a suitable bride due to my inadequacy of physical desirability on their own erotic scales. But I am much more than a symbol of erotica and fertility. I am the builder, nurturer and savior of my own life and destiny. The fat damsel in distress has finally discovered the hero in ME.

Young boys and girls once chose friends based on popularity and attractiveness. The fat woman was neither popular, nor attractive. She looked for the meaning of friendship only in the mirror until one fine day when God sent her real friends, who loved her despite her plumpness. She realized that friendship is not about having ‘good times’ with glamorous people, who could pull up her own desirability quotient among the socialites. Friendship is the buoyant name for LOVE. From standing as a lonely silhouette, this fat woman, today, boasts of being a protagonist in some real stories of friendship, which the fake friends would ever envy.

A plump woman is naturally well-endowed, which again makes for a hot topic of discussion, both among men and women, for different reasons, of course. While women take pride to compare their own lean features with the ‘vulgar looking’ assets of a curvy woman, men take delight in foolishly conjecturing the number of times she’s been fondled that resulted in her rather ‘large and loose’ feminine features. Imagine the kind of mortification and pain I felt on learning about those shrill judgments on my poor body!

Judgments are still passed; men and women still talk behind the back. But I no more care, for I know that the confidence of my own self-grown character, conduct, intellect and will-power has the strength to thrash those words of gossip into lifeless dust. In the quest to make up for the socially unacceptable physicality, this fat woman has made sure to grow qualities which command acceptance and RESPECT from this very society.

  

No, I am not here to glorify fatness. Neither am I here to promote the latest trends of being curvy. From being an obese teenager to a curvy woman, I keep fighting the challenges to stay fit for the sake of my own body’s delicate expectations from me. But that can no more make me a pawn in the hands of stereotypical norms of beauty. It’s only after facing the social angst of being a heavy woman that I have realized the essence and glory of being MYSELF. So if you are facing similar taunts and torments from people and peers for being ‘too fat’ or ‘too thin’, don’t worry. This is only God’s process of making you strong. Just hold on; don’t lose heart; and look within yourself instead of looking at others for an approval. You will eventually discover the treasure of gold in there, soon!