Diary of a Thin Girl

Casting directors find her ideal to play domestic-abuse victim. But cabbies carry her luggage to the door. Always.

The minute view of the world is increasingly privileged. The slimmer and lighter the gadget, the greater its charisma. The more minute a particle gets to the human view, the more powerful a voice science has. In the world of technological minutiae, bombs get smaller, as do microphones and cellphones and tablets.

But human smallness still conveys frailty. Hardly any of the chic, brutal cleverness of the iPhone for the smaller of the species. Some feel-good celebration in literature and movies—as long as the small-sized being can bat eyelids, hold a long trail of smoke with considerable ease, and feel sorry that there is sorrow in the world as she traipses lightly along the sidewalks of mythical cities. An old human craving for delicacy—defined in numbers.

The American medical establishment was unnerved by my numbers. I was alive, somewhat kicking, and below the WHO standards of bodily indicators. In your country, women don’t have eating disorders, right? I guess a nation of hunger, conflict and desperation can’t really bother about eating problems. I was told ‘eating problem’ in America meant something specific. Chicks who keep food intake at a bare minimum to remain gawky and hot are named victims of ‘eating problems’. No, I said, I don’t starve myself. I have weighed pretty much this number since I was 14. And I am not one of the ever-youthful-and-agile who say, ‘‘I eat everything under the sun and don’t ever seem to put on weight’’. I eat what a friend of mine would call a ‘sub-optimal’ amount. And I can’t help it.

Anyway, so I am put on a protein-shake and a high-calorie diet regime. The granola bar begins to play the role of Vinod Khanna in my life—silently nourishing. The kind of man you only find in Technicolor these days. And I am told if I can’t get my weight up, they would have to take some tough decisions. I wasn’t sure what these decisions might be. ‘‘If this number shocks you, it is not my problem,’’ I mutter to the doctor. At the time I was preparing to move to the East Coast, I recollect my father had warned me that they might hold me up at immigration on the suspicion I could be an instrument of biological warfare. Well, I am now another chapter of Western medical curiosity about the Third World. As also another story of the weirdly female. Meagre, but resilient. Possibly threatening.

The American size for me is sub-zero. Imagine zero as the stuff of athletic and broad-boned Kareena. The Asia-friendly lines of clothing in America target my superiors—the vain, high-heeled, East Asian nymphets. Think Lucy Liu of the TV show Ally Mcbeal—compact and ferocious. I lack their statuesque symmetry, but share their proportions. As the diktat of zero-zero-petite goes, small must be predictably feminine. Like the Chihuahua peeping out of Louis Vuitton environs.

No factory shirts for the zero-zero-petite. The zero-zero-petite don’t get to be awkwardly androgynous. One can, of course, make it to the section titled ‘8–12’ at the supermarket. Which works. Often. Until one realises the whole neighbourhood is talking about one’s bubblegum sweatshirt. In my rebel days in college in Bangalore, I had taken to oversize flannel shirts and jeans that my roommates would call ‘the Oliver Twist collection’. Some corners had whispered, ‘‘she must be a dyke’’. FabIndia kurtas had looked like pillow-covers on me. The arrogant New Market tailors of Kolkata had scoffed at my delayed foray into early youth, recommending that I could get blouses stitched out of leftover material that they had lying around in their workshop. College divas had smirked at the sponged-bras I carried around for a while, pretending they were boobs. Boys’ mothers surveyed me with a pitiful sigh that said ‘raw material is okay, but childbirth seems difficult.’ In the time of butt-crack fashion, my mother had begun to point to the shapely diva at the mall, saying, “If only you tried a bit harder, you could look like her.’’ Low-rise jeans are meant for buttocks like those. It’s true. I must smile in bittersweet resignation. And return the disappointments of online-shopping experiments to the mailbox. Because the armpit-holes are too big.

We live at a time when Scarlett O’Hara is racist. Wynona Ryder, post-Black Swan, isn’t poster-worthy. Rani Mukherjee has steadily grown into an angsty old hag. Jaya Bachchan is too middle-class to be cool. Hepburn is dead. The Hollywood stereotype of the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl will never be an astronaut, an FBI agent or run about inserting ideas in people’s heads. She is doomed to remain a slightly frazzled café-waitress, a doped-out songwriter or doe-eyed suicidal ballet-dancer. So, not sexy enough, can’t reach the top-shelf and can’t join the army. That’s a pretty hard life there. And all the world’s sympathies lie with fat women and short men.

But the good things, yeah? I can hang out in a handkerchief. Cut cost on clothing, and wear hand-me-downs from friends who don’t get into their stuff anymore. Wear something from the 1980s. Fold into a mussel-like formation on a janata-class plane seat. And watch the fat guy in the next seat breathe out of his belly-button and curse me silently. My books, my laundry, my computer and I sleep together comfortably at night. Closer to deadlines, we grow intimate.

I am ideal to be cast as a child-abuse-victim on stage. If I keep shut long enough, men find me endearing on a date. I maintain a Third World level of consumption and waste-emission. The cabbie takes my luggage out of the boot up to my door. Always. Sometimes, women offer to give me “a hand’’ with cargo. Not sure if they mean something else with that. Sometimes, strangers hug me a bit too tightly. Which is weird.

As an intrepid adolescent, I had taught myself to be confidently oblivious to the reactions I evoke. I am not as intrepid anymore. But I continue to be oblivious, even as Bengali matriarchs look at me in feline condescension. Spectres of the famous voluptuous Bankim heroines haunt these quarters. Kareena’s feats with zero-tolerance mean nothing at a Bengali wedding. What is a woman without some flesh? I snap out of reverie. This is America. With a little airbrush, happiness here is a guarantee. As long as the sweatshirts from the 1980s are still in good shape, and the fat women get the worse hit from the ‘body issues’ industry.

Atreyee Majumder is working towards a PhD in anthropology at Yale. Thanks to her super-skinny profile, she doesn’t need to work out at all

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