LIFE
The Lonely World Of A Fat Child
Reflections on growing up fat
This essay is inspired by Counter Art’s July prompt — Bodies
“The bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.” ― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
“I am scared to go to India. I have regained my weight.”
Smrithi texted me a few weeks back. We hadn’t been in touch in a while; an ocean came in the way. We don’t talk or text nearly as much as we used to since I moved to a different continent. But we still don’t need warm-ups at times of need.
On my 11th birthday, I realized I was helplessly fat.
I was in my red midi dress with golden buttons, feeling beautiful. The sucker I am for red, I had successfully persuaded my mom that yet another one in my trunk wasn’t a bad idea. It was the beginning of our summer vacation, and my cousins were visiting.
After a few hours of playing in the yard, I came inside for water and, with it, grabbed a handful of banana chips to snack on. My grandpa stood in a corner, trying to break a betelnut for his pan.
He pointed to my skinny cousin and said, “Don’t eat so much. Look at you and look at her; it doesn’t look good to see you running when fat.” I left the chips back in the bowl and quietly walked out.
I must have always known I was fat without someone overtly mentioning it. It stung momentarily when my super-skinny best friend found my arm too heavy for her feeble shoulders.
When other girls on the school bus made fun of how big my thighs were, I felt ashamed. But they all quickly passed. We moved on to the next topic, the next game, and the next gossip very quickly.
At that age, no adult was yet interested in shaming me. I had yet to experience fatphobia. But hearing it from my grandpa was the moment I realized I was ugly.
I cared about my grandpa’s opinions. So, it hurt when he said I didn’t look good. But I also didn’t know what to do about it. What do you do when you’re hungry?
So, I internalized the criticism without knowing how to act on it. It doesn’t look good when fat. I don’t look good because I’m fat. I don’t look good. It became the termite that ate away my confidence.
A year later, I came home with my report card with stellar grades. My class teacher, Pauly sir, had remarked, ‘Brilliant girl, very shrewd!’ Instead of jumping with joy over the results, I stayed reluctant to show the card to anyone. I prayed hard that the home be empty.
My aunt, who was visiting my grandpa, asked for my card. I could feel my gut knotting itself in dreadful anticipation. Without any remarks on my exam results, or my overall performance, she looked at my weight on the last page of the card and said, ‘A girl your age shouldn’t be this heavy.’ I was 65kg.
I knew I shouldn’t be this heavy. My grandpa had already revealed that to me. But how could stop being this heavy?
In the years to come, my aunt’s comments would repeat in Goldberg variations. Even during occasions completely unrelated to the body, there would be some relative nasty enough to comment how grades won’t help me get married. My fatness and dark skin would get in the way.
My grandpa’s words echoed. ‘It doesn’t look good when fat.’
“My father believes hunger is in the mind. I know differently. I know that hunger is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Fatness is a lonely experience. People around you might sympathize, but they won’t begin to understand what it feels like to be trapped in a body that you don’t know how to file down. It’s lonelier if the experience came to you as a child. I didn’t even have the words to express what that hurt felt like.
It only became worse as I stepped into adolescence. The white noise of anguish begins to feel like a permanent fixture — the color of a canvas you can’t paint over.
The judgments of the people rock the psyche that’s already turbulent by the upsurge of hormones. At an age when everyone looks pretty and every girl has a crush on someone, I ate away my mind feeling ugly and unlikeable.
“Mom, why am I fat?”
“Don’t worry, my dear, everything will be alright.”
Not later, mom, now. I want to be not-fat now.
My lovely mom wasn’t ignoring my hurt. She genuinely believed everything would be alright and was clueless about how to help. Most of non-urban India has no exercise culture.
Either your lifestyle gives you the exercise you need, such as drawing water from a well or walking miles to buy the grains. Or you’re stuck with what you had. You ran around the block only if chased by a dog. So, my mom, whose cross to bear was skinniness, had no idea how to help.
She was also oblivious of how much I wanted to fit in. I wanted people to like me for who I was as well as for how I looked. I wanted to look like my cousin — the one my grandpa pointed at — who parried boys who were after her and revelled with girls who were with her.
But I could not tell that to my mom. I actively resisted that awareness even within myself, willing myself to believe that I needed no one’s approval.
To my dad, I was a kid, not a fat kid — one that suffered from debilitating headaches every day, with the fatness, a side-effect of the migraine medication. If he had a magic wand to fix things, he would have wiped the migraine away before even considering how the fatness was affecting my self-esteem.
My relatives commented on how I’d grown shy without realizing that I was hiding my body, which I was increasingly ashamed of. My body had expanded further hitting 83kg on the scales.
It took me another five years after my grandpa’s comment to lose weight. My dad, unlike my grandpa, had concrete actions instead of criticism to offer. Stop the sugar, halve the carbs, and walk every day, he instructed. I followed them to the letter and lost 15 kg in six months.
Emerging out of my cave in my newly shrunk body and with a newfound confidence, those same relatives commented about how smart I now was — no longer shy, no longer fat.
That baby fat might have left me, but the criticism and fatphobia never did.
“I am weary of all our sad stories — not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, that there are so many.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Years later, when I met my husband, I had years of experience being a normal-sized person. So, he could never understand why I would feel nervous if I didn’t work out after eating a slice of cake. Or why would I starve myself until I lost any excess weight?
Even with his infinite capacity to empathize, fatness wasn’t something his skinny psyche was capable of understanding. It was like watching a foreign language film with subtitles; you get the gist right, but a lot is lost in translation.
In that lonely universe, Smrithi came to me with an extended hand.
She was my cousin’s chubby new bride. My aunt had let her know how fat I had been as a kid, and we broke our ice with that weight. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to explain what that experience was or how I felt; we both knew.
Over that shared experience, we bonded with each other. She could talk to me about her depression, or I could talk about my mom’s sickness, expecting support. Without even spending an entire day together, we understood each other. The foundation for that understanding was our shared agony of being called fat, dark, and undesired.
When Smrithi moved to the US after marriage, she had to sacrifice her career to the visa bureaucracy. Until my cousin got a Green Card eight years later, she had no work permit. But despite the career break, Smrithi had sprung back. She had found a competitive job and got herself promoted within a year.
So, her visit to India should have felt triumphant. Instead, weighing heavily on her mind was the weight gain, a natural side effect of a demanding job.
When well-meaning relatives comment on how I look healthier, I instantly know that it’s a thinly veiled remark on my weight. That’s enough to push down on an unhealthy obsession. It’s enough to make me feel like a failure. But her relatives weren’t into nuances. They were ruthless in commenting on how she had become fat.
We knew the problem was in our minds. We let the judgments have a free reign and control our actions. We couldn’t change the society, but we could change something else.
Unable to offer any solutions to her situation, I asked, ‘Do you want to lose weight or change your mind?’
‘Can I first lose weight and then change my mind?’
“There is an anxiety in being yourself, though. There is the haunting question of “What if?” always lingering. What if who I am will never be enough? What if I will never be right enough for someone?”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
My fat childhood is water under the bridge. I have since learned to live a healthy life. For the most part, I retain control over my self-esteem.
However, my irrecoverable loss in growing up fat is in the lost chance for normal teenage years. I had wished, without having the courage to confess, to be physically desired in those days. The undesirability had affected my self-esteem for so long that I give full credit for its growth to my husband.
When my husband and I met for the first time, it had been several years since someone commented on my weight. But I was going through an acute phase of acne in those days. After work, I washed my face to freshen up and walked into the restaurant we had agreed on. He liked that I didn’t bother to conceal my acne or hide anything else. He liked me for who I was.
For a long time after our marriage, I found it unbelievable that someone like him would feel a desire for me. I kept wondering why he would agree to marry me. Often that wonder came out aloud, at which my husband just laughed out loud.
Over the years, he understood my neurotic obsession with weight. He did his best to help me overcome it and reshape my perspectives on a healthy body. Instead of appreciating my anorexic 56 kg, he encouraged me to strengthen myself and build muscles.
Looking back, being desired by him was the strongest factor in offsetting the impacts of childhood body shaming. I saw myself for who I was through him. I could finally detach myself from my childhood experience.
It still stings when I gain a kilo or two. But it’s no longer debilitating. 25 years after that red dress and betelnut, I’m no longer enslaved to my grandpa’s words.
