No, this isn’t a tell-all memoir. Nor am I in a confess-all mood. I had a realisation. And it happened at the men’s casuals section of Pantaloons in South City mall.
I went to the store recently with my friends looking for t-shirts. As I was rummaging through the UMM collection, a store attendant came along.
‘What’s your size, sir?’ he asked, smiling.
‘Eh... XL,’ I whispered and took a quick look around. Thank God, no one heard me.
‘XL? Are you sure?’ he asked doubtfully, his gaze fixated on my ever-protruding paunch.
I threw him a scowl and stomped towards the trial room, trying hard to push in my tummy by chocking my breath.
I was wrong. And embarrassingly cocky. The t-shirt didn’t fit me. Nor the next half a dozens (yes, you read it correctly) that I tried out. Each of them got obstructed at my misshapen potbelly. I thought I wouldn’t grow larger than the ‘extra-large’ tag. But then I forgot that nothing is constant in the world. Not even my paunch. As I kept gorging on ice creams, chocolates, biriyani and KFC chicken buckets, my body kept on expanding in all directions turning me into a fat ki factory.
Coming out of the trial room I spotted the attendant again, still smiling — though his smile now looked more like a ‘see-I-told-you-it-will-not-fit’ smirk.
Finally I had to give up, and give in. I bought an XXL t-shirt, quite ashamed at my burgeoning size. My friends ‘advised’ me to have a look at the ALL section — specially designed clothes for oversized people (a sweetened way to say ‘you are fat, so stay away from the fashionable stuff’). They even consoled me by calling me a ‘size zero’ figure. ‘After all, you look like a perfect zero — round from all angles. Puro football!’ chuckled one of them.
Round is also a shape, I want to protest. But it’s not easy for my feeble voice to cut across the layers of fat treasured over the years and still be heard. I’ve been christened by my friends quite a few times — fatso, mota, haathi, paunch potato, ‘sumo wrestler in the making’, chhoto-khato monster and a host of other names.
Girls believe I personify nerdiness. I once went to a model-hunt competition (as a spectator, of course). Watching the hour-glass girls and trapezoid-shaped guys walk the ramp, I understood why I was such a turn-off for girls. Whenever I try to hit on a girl, it’s my peeping paunch that catches her attention first. After all, why settle for a Saurabh Shukla when you have lots of John Abrahams and Ranbir Kapoors roaming around?
My mom religiously believes I’m just a little ‘healthy’, and not ‘fat’ per se. ‘It shows you’re well fed and not like those anexoric hungry-looking guys on the streets,’ she argues. But then you know moms are always your worst critic. Desperate to lose weight, I immersed myself in such pain-inflicting activities as doing yoga regularly, following a strict diet chart, avoiding all sorts of carbs, and the most painful of all, saying ‘no’ to mutton biriyani, chocolates, pizzas and other junk foods. I even started hitting the gym. But all these sacrifices failed to reduce my waistline from 38 inches to 36. Whenever I go for shopping jeans, I get to listen to the same apologetic statement: ‘Sorry Sir, but this jeans doesn’t come in your size.’ Phew!
I know my image doesn’t fit in the mirror often. I know I incur my fellow passengers’ wrath whenever I share an auto seat and almost make them fall off. I know I might very soon score a century when it comes to my body weight. And I know I’ve by now crushed out all chances of getting a girlfriend. But I’ve also realised that I simply can’t stay away from all those things that make your weight shoot up faster than the country’s population. Being fat and being a foodie after all go hand in hand. So no matter how hard I try to achieve the ‘sexy hunk’ persona, I end up being the one I always am. Fatso.
Image courtesy: Anindya Kundu
