Mirror Mirror on the Wall

When I was little, I spent several holidays a year in my father’s family home in Jaipur. The house was always full and I was always happily tailing someone as they went about their routines. Depending on the season, these routines would vary. For instance, in the lead-up to winter you would find my grandmother and grand-aunts knitting, and various family members being made to stand up so their shoulders and torsos could be measured for sweaters. In the warmer months, this activity was replaced by stitching and mending of clothes. Being everyone’s dutiful little helper, I would fetch and replace scissors, needles and threads from and to their respective shelves and boxes.

An item of clothing that was frequently in need of attention was the sari blouse - an unforgiving garment that many Indian women (including myself) love to wear, which reports on every layer of fat that your body acquires or loses. Once while working on someone’s sari blouse, a grand-aunt said to me “hum aurton ka yahi kaam hai zindagi bhar, mote ho gaye to blouse dheela kiya, patle ho gaye to phir sil diya” (we women do this all our lives, if you put on some weight you loosen your blouse, and if you lose some, you stitch it up again).

At the time I remember finding it funny. But looking back, maybe it was rather poignant. Our bodies change and fluctuate with time, and that’s life. An important lesson to learn early, I suppose. I’m 35 years old now and I think I’m only starting to understand this.

I’ve probably never been completely happy with any present-day version of how I look. Looking in the mirror has always involved some kind of flaw-detection. When I was 14 or 15, I became very ill with typhoid and I lost close to 10kg of weight. Although being ill was no fun, I remember being super excited to find how skinny I was afterward. I don’t remember ever being told directly that I needed to be very thin, but it felt like some kind of an accomplishment. I could have equally been devastated that I had lost my “wholesome” figure, but I wasn’t. I clearly believed being skinny was better. And privately, I still do.

Women in most parts of the world carry around unhealthy ideas regarding their own appearance. I can only speak to my early influences in India. I’ve found that it’s very common for friends and family in India to comment on how you look. I would wager that girls and women receive unsolicited opinion about their weight, hair and complexion far more than boys or men do. Often it’s intended as an expression of affection or care and not necessarily judgment. But I think it can instil constrained ideas about what is acceptable. And maybe this seems absurd but the film industry, particularly the Hindi film industry with its narrow scope of what constitutes beauty, doesn’t help much either. The imagery definitely got into my head. I don’t ever remember thinking that I wanted to be fit or strong or healthy, but I certainly wanted to look slim, and not too dark.

I don’t know if this desire will ever truly go away, but I’d like to do some things differently. I’d like to watch whether I perpetuate ideas that I don’t want to. Do I also comment on others’ appearance and if so, what words do I use? Importantly, I’d like to stop inflicting negative commentary on myself. Specially if I’m around someone I could influence. And I’d like to be amused when I discover I’ve put on weight, instead of feeling disappointed or guilty. I hope to just keep moving (on).