Inspiration: Gustave Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) This one is a long but is also a poignant and beautiful tale.
Over to A from Mumbai

“hips
mouth
thigh bone
your heavy breasts- long and pomelo shaped
brown-tipped
Your neat nails, and
the stubble on the back of your calf
it always grows there first
the darkness inside your elbow
the tiny v of hair at the nape of your neck
………………………………………………………………
I loved my body so much, I wrote poems to it as a teenager. I was always most comfortable when I was naked. Drifted from room to room in little more than a bathrobe most of the day, slept naked in the summer, curled up in thin white sheets with the fan whirring incessantly overhead. My mother scolded me for answering the door without a bra, and I felt guilty because my brother and I shared a room for so many years, and he was so constantly confronted with my general distaste for clothing of any kind. I liked to look at myself in full-length mirrors, trace the sweat that collected beneath my breasts on a hot afternoon,count the moles on my skin.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
your hands so long, so white, so faded
scrubbed
with open cuticles and bluing veins
tiny pink pimples on the top of your leg
red spots of capillaries burst on your shoulder
the natural arch at the end of your eyebrow
the unnatural thinness of the beginning
your sun-peeled nose
your mouth your ears
pierced clean
your heart-
steady.
warm.
knocking, like the pulse at your wrist
licking, at the base of your throat
scratching your chest
a throb at your temple
hidden in the redness of your when I press your toes
…………………………………………………………………………
I discovered masturbation quite by accident, when I was eleven, maybe twelve, fooling around with a shower hose- that unique feature of all urban Indian bathrooms. I didn’t know what it was that I was feeling, except that it felt unlike anything I’d ever felt before. As far as I was concerned, my body was a wonderful, magical cocoon of desire and pleasure and all things fun. I couldn’t imagine that anyone else loved their body as much as i did. I wrote poems to my body, fanciful, self-indulgent trifles, obsessions that spilled over into the bodies
of my lovers when I finally discovered sex for the first time. I now have a book with longer poems on my early loves, and little vignettes on casual encounters I’ve had over the years, a
memoir of every body my body has touched.
………………………………………………………………
Your body is like sweet dough
That I can press, knead, sculpt
Into several shapes
Bake you
Like a pie in an oven
Roll your face into o-shaped circles on the floor
Put your floury fingers into a child’s wet mouth
To suck on
………………………………………………………………
About a year ago I started putting on weight. Eight kilos in six months. I’ve fluctuated on the weighing scales for years and always been ambivalent about it, confident that without much intervention by way of exercise or diet on my part, my body found its way back to a homeostasis-esque equilibrium. This time that didn’t happen. I watched my dimple disappear in the mirror, watched stretch marks wend their way across my thighs and shoulders as my breasts grew softer, larger, sagged. Nothing fit. New things I bought lasted a month, maybe two, and then ripped. My body wouldn’t stop. I’ve never exercised, never dieted, I didn’t know how. For the first time in my life, at the age of twenty-five, I didn’t feel desirable any more.
………………………………………………………………
Your body is like sweet dough
That I can crumble in the heart of my palm
Casually
As I stir the custard or boil the milk
Dough with too little water
Too much water
Too white
Too oily
Too flat
Too plain
Too dough-y

Sugary dough I can taste on my tongue
That sticks to my hair and my chin
Gets underneath my nails
And between my breasts
That are heavy with sweat
Dough that locks its stretchy arms around my fingers
Dough that crawls its sick-sweet way into my nostrils
And my head
Settling like an ache at the temples of my brain
………………………………………………………………
The scale at the doctors clinic has a colourful sign above it to calculate your BMI. I trace my finger along the dotted lines till I reach… Pre-Obese. Right. Ok then.

A friend offers me office-wear hand-me-downs to save me another trip to the mall, for another set of work wear that actually fits. Fourth set in less than a year. I order a kilo of chocolate cake at the local bakery, eat it for dinner, tell myself it’s just to make me feel better. At work I eat lunch in the ground floor canteen, then slip upstairs to the third floor outlet for a second helping of dessert. I have more casual sex because strangers don’t want to eat with you or talk to you about your size, most men are just thrilled you’ve looked at
them twice and offered nonchalantly to let them have a go. It seems simpler. When I wake up feeling bloated and pale, I just log on to Tinder and pretend that the balm of that validation has really vanquished the hatred I feel towards my body, for betraying me, for being difficult, demanding, uncooperative, displeasing- fat. I touch my knees and they feel alien to me, pulpy and full of flesh. When my arms don’t fit through the sleeves of a blouse I want to snip away at the extra skin, loose and dangling, ‘thal-thal arms’, as my brother says.

Sometimes, in the evening, when it’s completely dark out, I switch off the house lights and strip down to my skin. Open the windows. As the moonlight and the glow of faraway street-lamps filter in, I stand in front of the full-length mirror and look at my body. At one particular angle, straight-up, no profile, I can just about make out the shape of my former self. I look at the silhouette of my curves and remember the hips that were so beautifully angular they would bruise every time I brushed past a door. I remember a breast that you could cup in the palm of one hand (the perfect size, like they’re made to fit in my palm, an old boyfriend had once casually remarked). In the shadows, I whisper to myself, it’s ok, all is not lost, this is still me, it still can be. This is temporary.

Then I dress myself. Switch on the lights. Gently caress the foreign fabric that struggles to contain my skin. Alien flesh. They say you should love your body no matter what shape or size or form, but here’s the thing, I did. I really really did. It wasn’t perfect, but it was fit and lithe and mine. Now my body is a local train, home to many passengers that pass but none
will stay. I feel like an overworked driver, busy, indifferent, mildly apologetic for the peeling paint and paan-stained corners. Wheeling wildly around the next bend, dead tired and with a belly-full of wine, almost asleep- if this is it, this is it. What more is there to say?”

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