The Discovery of the body
It was the year 2002; my mother and I were living with my grandparents in Kalyani for six months. I woke up one morning, went to the bathroom to pee, and saw my yellow frock stained with blood. I thought I was dying. I screamed for my mother, who came rushing, saw what had happened, and told me to come outside the bathroom. I remember kindness and humour in her voice. I think I felt reassured that I wasn’t dying. I went to school that day wearing a pad. I had learnt about periods the previous year when I had a long bout of mysterious stomach aches with no other symptoms. My mother told me how young girls bleed every month after a certain age. I was not told the why or how of it, but simply that it happened to every girl. For school, I had an extra pad wrapped in newspaper in my school bag, and firm instructions to keep mum about this new event in my life. It came with painful cramps and aches in my stomach and thighs. But I felt special. Like I had this secret which made me different from others, better than the girls who didn’t know what a pad looks like or the sight of blood on your fingers in the toilet bowl. I couldn’t help showing off a bit. I have a vague memory of telling a couple of my classmates in the girls’ bathroom—something along the lines of big changes they wouldn’t understand, and that it needed to be kept secret.
I was both disgusted and fascinated by this new change in my body.
I could feel something leave my warm body, and often I would check for menstrual blood, almost like seeking confirmation of this new thing that had come to live in my body. It was also unpredictable now. I didn’t understand the cyclical nature of menstruation; neither did I understand why my body seemed bigger and heavier than before. I was 9 years old at the time.
But I had always been a big kid. The fat-bullying began when I was 6 years old, which mostly involved being left out of games during lunch break, other kids taking an intense dislike to me and throwing words like “moti”, “gendi”, and not wanting to be friends with me. Throughout my school life, I have felt stares on my body, seen my classmates sniggering at me from the corner of my eye, been told by my teachers how I shouldn’t be this fat for a young girl, and been at the receiving end of fat jokes when a plastic chair or an old sofa has collapsed under my weight.
The body grows, unrestrained
When I was 10 years old, we moved to Pune. That year, my mother took me to buy my first bra. I hated wearing bras. They felt suffocating, and one evening, when we were visiting neighbours, when I had had too much of that feeling of being bound and strapped down, I took it off and dumped it in their washing machine. The next day, a polythene packet lay on the table. Inside it was that godforsaken garment. I asked Ma what it was; she said, “You tell me.” We did not discuss it further.
My body was changing its shape and size at an alarming rate, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
My hunger grew as my body grew. The bullying continued. Eating around others felt shameful. During lunch breaks, I’d find a corner of the playground or the shade of a distant tree to eat my tiffin. I didn’t have friends. I resented kids my age for having friends. Sometimes I included myself in their plans, forcefully. They did their best to avoid me. I ate more. I began asking for money. A rupee or two or five. But it was never enough. From buying flavoured iced lollies in long cylindrical packets, which we called pepsi, that cost 50 paise to 1 rupee, I graduated to bhelpuri, samosas, and pastries. I was hungry all the time.
I began stealing money. On Mondays and Wednesdays, there would be film screenings in the open-air theatre. There was a couple who made bhelpuri. Recalling the taste of that delectable snack makes the insides of my mouth tingle even today. My parents gave me money to buy food during the interval—one plate of bhelpuri or a packet of popcorn. One of anything I wanted. But I wanted more. I wanted two plates of bhelpuri with extra meethi and teekhi chutney, a packet of popcorn, sometimes a bread pakora too. I wanted to eat and eat and eat. It felt wrong and pleasurable.
These foods made my mouth salivate; they filled the friend-shaped empty spaces for a little while.
The body desires
It was also around this time that I realised I looked attractive to much older men. We lived in a cantonment with no dearth of young, handsome officers. I looked more “mature” for my age. This one time, I stood by the pool in a navy blue frock and noticed two officers, from the corner of my eye, looking up at my legs. I was thrilled. I knew something forbidden was happening. The knowledge felt like power but also something I knew I had to keep secret.
My sexuality was beginning to unfold. I was obsessed with an older girl at my school. She took a liking to me, and I behaved like an excited puppy around her. But I also yearned for her to reciprocate my feelings; she treated me like any other kid and had friends her age. I was jealous of one particular friend of hers because she went on and on about her from the day she met her. The days I didn’t see her on the school bus, or when she wasn’t paying attention to me, I felt small, rejected, in pain.
The body plays: between visible/invisible
Meanwhile, my parents’ marriage changed too. The fights grew louder, more graphic. Their actions in fits of rage and disappointment took on enormous proportions. Multiple times, my mother walked out of the home with me, in search of a new job, a new home, a different school, a better life. I was torn between the fear of leaving my father behind and worrying about my mother’s safety in new places. But every time, we came back. Eventually, these incidents turned into adventures for me. They meant not having to go to school for a few days, not having to study or abide by routines, and usually a trip to my grandparents’ home.
We moved to Kolkata when I was 13; new school, new city, new home, new people. I couldn’t make friends. I was an outsider; most of my classmates had been to that school, growing up together since they were little. I got accustomed to isolating myself. Lunch breaks by myself, buying and eating greasy biryani and deviled eggs from the canteen; sitting on a desk all by myself, my belongings sprawled over it, but never seated comfortably because the bench dug into the soft flesh of my thighs, with the table wedging into my stomach rolls; never bunking school because there was no one to go on escapades with; never making friends with boys from the neighbouring boys’ school because no young boy would be attracted to a fat girl.
My body took up space everywhere, but I wanted to shrink myself to the point of disappearance.
The hunger demanded more food, more junk, more money, more body weight, more of everything from me. I began stealing more money to buy food. I craved the snacks hawkers sold outside the school gates—churmur, phuchka, achar, chowmein—after school hours; I wanted to devour KFC burgers and fried chicken. Sometimes, on my way back from school, I would buy spring rolls and fish cutlets from the shop inside our residential complex, and eat them all in the safety of my room, latched from the inside, where no one could see this gluttonous demon. I could be fat, invisible, hungry, and devouring in my room.
This food often tasted horrible—stale, deep-fried, carelessly prepared with unappetizing flavours. I would throw up at home. I would get the occasional heartburn. I would feel sick after my early morning meal of a glass of milk and a slice of bread, and by the time I reached school, I was ready to vomit. There used to be a shaded waiting area and a tap with running water just inside the school gates. I found a grassy spot around there where I would vomit all the milk, wash up at the tap, and walk into school. It became a routine.
My parents’ relationship grew worse. By then I understood a lot of things but not everything—like how two people who hurl accusations of abuse at one another on a certain evening share kisses and make love to each other.
As their conflict became bigger, I felt smaller, more invisible.
Now there were friend-and parent-shaped holes. When I was 14, I met a man on Orkut. I called him Dadabhai. He was 26 then and introduced me to music that I grew to love. He gave me CDs by Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, and other musicians that I continue to listen to today. He also told me to kiss his penis over our online chats. It scared and repulsed me, but I couldn’t say no; I did not know how to, or why I should have, said no. Around the time I turned 15, I fell in love with a man, N, who was 10 years older than me. N read poetry to me, told me how wonderful and special I was. My days and nights were consumed by thoughts of him and our conversations. A year later, he left. It couldn’t go on, he said. Unsustainable. Exhausting. I was invisible again.
During my teenage years, I wore T-shirts and knee-length shorts that I shopped from the men’s section. I never shopped from the women’s section, and nothing from the kids’ section fit me. I would either wear clothes that stripped me of my femininity because I was convinced I was ugly and undeserving of beauty, or I’d wear some of my mother’s clothing, which made me look odd because I had the face of a child and the body of a woman.
The body-being learning, becoming
In my 20s, I had to seek psychiatric treatment. I could no longer push through all the hurt accumulated inside me with brute force. I was diagnosed with a particular mental illness after one year into treatment; the kind of illness that makes the whole medical community of psychiatrists and psychologists look at you with disdain and be generous with labels of manipulative, attention-seeking, and emotionally unstable. Incurable, they say. The psychiatric medication resulted in me becoming fatter than I had ever been. I gained 50 kilos within two to three years after the medication started. Somewhere in my medical notes is the word bulimia followed by a question mark. How could I not have had an ugly relationship with my body? I had been hiding and eating for a long time.
The more I wanted to hide my body, the more visible I became.
I couldn’t see any value to my personhood beyond the extent of my body. I thought I deserved all the hurt I received. I was too much, emotionally and physically, for everyone, including myself. I didn’t just eat to fill the gaping voids inside me; I ate to obliterate myself.
The diagnoses reflected none of the complexities of my life; the labels only point towards my own culpability in my condition.
In my early 30s now, I find myself looking at that young girl who ate and ate in secret, stealing money for the sole purpose of buying food that would temporarily fill the widening black holes inside her. I mourn a young girl who was lonely, terrified, surrounded by unpredictability. I feel pity for her. How does a child become so unhappy? I haven’t been able to draw the complete map of how she became that person, but there are some clues. I understand now that the weight I carry is my doing, but its origins lie elsewhere, and that I have to undo this fortress I have built around my body, irrespective of how the foundations were laid. I still cannot feel love for myself, but I do feel responsible for it. On some days, I even feel beautiful in my skin. I don’t always look for appreciation from others.
Happiness is not my aim; I am learning to tolerate this body, this person. For now, that is enough.
Trijita
Trijita (she/her) is a queer woman with disability, living in Kalyani, West Bengal. Her work has appeared in Muse India, In Plainspeak (by TARSHI), Sunflower Station Press, Dillinama: A Film and Poetry Journal, Plato's Caves Online, and others. She lives the slow-paced life of a small town and works as an independent researcher.