Morphing Flashbacks

It is sometime in 2002, my sister and I are in the car with my parents, a white Maruti Suzuki my dad proudly cleans every morning. He jerks the gears and brakes suddenly as we hit our heads on the soft cushions in front of us as my mother turns to check on us from the front. My sister is sitting with her knees hugged to her stomach, and her feet on the seat, she peers at my mother from in-between her knees. I am more prim, even though I am scared of my father’s driving, I sit stoically at the back with a contorted, sideways smile. “Scaredy cat,”  my mother says to me and everyone laughs, except my father and I. We hate car banter, we always will. As we drive through the city, we cross a large shop with an M sign outside. I realise it is a restaurant, and there is a statue of a smiling clown under the sign, which is coloured in red and yellow. I have never seen these plastic colours before.“Mac-Dees!” my sister shouts from her window, calling McDonalds by the name she uses even today. She is right, it is a McDonalds, one of the first and only in our city. Even though the first Delhi branch of the chain opened many years ago, we live too far away from the city centre to have seen one. 

But we have heard stories, mythical tales of birthday parties where the clown comes to shake hands with children. Tales of bright, slushy drinks filled with crushed ice.  As we cross the restaurant, we see kids like us standing outside holding yellow and red balloons, eating pink ice-cream cones. My sister begins to sob dramatically and my mother turns back again, this time with a stern look on her face. “Your hair will fall off if you eat there!” she says to her. “Is that what you want?” We drive past, leaving the McDonalds behind, my sister whispers stories into my ear. She tells me about salty French Fries and little boxes of meals - one for each person, so no one needed to share. “Like in Amrika”, she says, this time loudly, wanting my parents to hear. I was quieter about my desire, even though deep inside, I wanted the same thing as her. To go to this strange place with its uncanny colours and unlimited American snacks. We had eaten French fries before, in another restaurant close to our house. But ice-cream cones, never! And milk-shakes! My sister would scream at my mother later when we were home. Milkshakes, Ma! Please, I need a milk-shakes!” she would say as if she knew what it meant.

My sister becomes obsessed with the idea of pink ice cream, which someone tells us are called Softies. “Softies, you dumbs,” they say to us, in the way that kids around us always used English adjectives in plurals as insults. My sister flips her hair over her shoulder. “I knew that,” she says and I memorise the word so I never make a mistake again.  “Do you think they’re made of clouds?” she asks me one day from the bottom bunk of our bunk-bed as I read my book above her. “Don’t be ridiculous”, I reply. But who knows, maybe they are made of clouds, I think to myself.  Despite my sister’s theatrics, and my solemn requests, my mother remains unfazed. She knows better, she says. Fallen hair, wasted money, no one would be let into this American utopia that had suddenly come to take over our lives. By the middle of the 2000s, the chain had cultivated an audience in the subcontinent. The menu was bait; burgers like McAloo Tikki, named after a popular Indian street food dish and the playfully named Maharaja Mac, which sucked in even critical, concerned parents to succumb to this alien thing that had come to fill their children’s hearts and souls. It was cheap. There is a twenty-rupee burger, my father insisted one day. “Papa loves Mac-Dees” my sister informed me, this time climbing up on the top bunk, as she overheard my parents arguing in the room next to ours. Soon, more branches opened. One was near our house, in the suburbs outside where we lived. It is huge, we hear. And there is a pit with red and yellow plastic balls where kids jump around… 

Even my mother’s resolution has no strength against this development. One day, we are sent to our first McDonalds party hosted by one of the younger kids, my sister’s age. At almost thirteen years old, I will be one of the oldest there my mother tells me. On the day of the party, my sister wears a skirt printed with orange flowers, her hair is in two ponytails on the sides of her face with a manic smile of triumph to match. I wear a pair of blue jeans and an orange Harry Potter T-shirt my uncle sent me from the United States. My hair is short and cropped. “Are you a boy?” my sister says to me as we sit in the car, and I slap her arm. “Shut up!” I say and she chuckles. I laugh too. This is the best day of our lives, I think. At the birthday party, my sister goes on little plastic slides and jumps around in the plastic-ball pit with other athletic kids, while I sit in a corner drinking milkshakes and eating fries that come with a tissue paper embossed with the birthday girl’s name. In the end, the big clown comes to shake hands with us and some kids sit on his shoulder. “Rohan Uncle!” they scream in chorus, an affectionate Indian name for Ronald McDonald, the funny foreign clown, who does a dance. When we get back home, our grandparents ask about the party.“It was okay,” my sister says as she flops on the floor. I can’t believe her, she is already unimpressed, already bored. My mother looks at me knowingly, aware that it was I who had been enraptured by this place she loathed. 

By the time I am fifteen, I begin to sneak inside the same McDonalds that had disquieted me only two years earlier. I am attending an after-school Science class near it, after which some other kids and I walk to it brazenly, sitting outside smoking cheap cigarettes and eating their newest invention– the Pizza McPuff. When we get there, we count the change in our pockets together, the anxiety of having one or two rupees short is always too much.  Sometimes, I go alone to another new branch, a Drive-Through. I become besotted with the Chicken McGrill, a burger with an orange patty made with Indian spices and topped with mint sauce. I eat quickly before my mother comes to pick me up, wiping each trace off my face and hiding my paper tissues. Sometimes I push my luck when I ask her to buy me more. Whenever she finds out, my mother is enraged.  “It’s just Food, Ma,” I tell her every time she takes it up. “That it is not, food it is not,” she says to me in Tamil, always repeating herself. 

As the McDonalds become a regularity in our lives, I see my body change, as I do everybody else’s. We are bound to become different looking, teachers at school tell us, as dumpy teenagers did everywhere in the world. But I am aghast at the way I morph, extending in places I didn’t expect. I become heavier, and the other girls don’t. My hair does begin to fall, which I think would have happened anyway, but my mother blames McDonalds. I become helpless and I begin to eat without control. I buy synthetic cheese from the market, another new entrance into our lives and eat it out of the box. Other things, like fudgy squares called “brownies”, begin to pop up in some of the shops in our neighborhood. I steal money from my mother’s bag and run to the market to eat those. This continues till I am sixteen when I am diagnosed with a combination of Dengue Fever and Malaria. I blackout in the kitchen. I am rushed to the hospital, fixed onto drips and put into a room with another teenager. 

While I have little comprehension of what exactly is happening, I know I am sickly.  That it would take a long time for me to recover. My mother sits near me as I sleep or text my friends, my father worries about bills. My sister comes into the room and bursts into tears now and then. Because of all the tubes attached to me, she is sure I am going to die. After ten days, I am let go, and I change out of my hospital clothes to what I wore before. I look in the bathroom mirror as my mother helps me. I notice my cheeks are sucked in, my stomach flat, my shoulders suddenly smaller. I look like some of the other girls at school. “Ma look! I’m thin!” I say to her, ecstatic about this development. She raises her arm to slap me. I have never seen her look so angry before. I duck her and run out to another mirror. It’s true, I am flattened, bean-pole-like from each side. My body has changed drastically, in a way I didn’t expect. And then the dysmorphia began.

**

When my body began to return to its real shape after my illness subsided, I wept for hours instead of celebrating any sign of health. By my late teens, I realised that what my mothers’ friends called my “fluctuating weight” was among the things that had caused me to live outside my body as a teenager. I hated it, the way I appeared on glass surfaces as I passed. Every sight of myself made me squirm. So I treated it badly, always disassociating from it, never joining myself within my own body. I shouted at my parents when they tried to get me to eat better. I was angry when my sister asked me if I wanted to go shopping for a new shirt for an interview with a university in London. I threw up on some days, stayed hungry on others... Because of how much I resented my body, I decided to treat it with solid detachment, as if it belonged to somebody else. And so it did, belong to other people. I never stood up for it, resisted any imposition or abuse that came its way. 

***

It is sometime in late 2010, the song “Teenage Dream” plays around us. My sister and I are in Delhi’s first Zara store, a brightly lit room with creamy shirts and tall mannequins modelled on straight-backed white women. I walk quietly among the shirts as my sister grimaces at some of the clothes. She looks at me and makes a vomiting face, to which I laugh. “Shut up!” I say to her, and she sticks her tongue out at me, puts her hands on her hips and moves from side to side, dancing to Katy Perry.  “Stop it!” I say to her again, without realizing I am lip-syncing my words. The white tube lights, the sounds of the cashier typing on his machine and the quietness of the shop – filled with otherwise loud Delhi people, now in a quiet trance – fills me with a mixture of fortune and complete terror.  “Hey you!” my sister says to me from behind one of the racks which hold jeans, completely unaware of the store’s etiquette, oblivious to the mannequins, who are all around us like a silent monarchy. “Why are you whis-per-ing? This is not sk-oo-l!” she enunciates the words in all their syllables, as she continues dancing and twirling around the shop. I have only recently outgrown being a teenager, but my sister is still one, strong-willed and popular. Even this flush of White-Western capitalism in the country doesn’t faze her.  

I walk around the store in a kind of trance, looking at the photographs of lanky white girls that are everywhere and denim jackets that cost more than most people in the country make in a month. My mother walks into the store with a funny look on her face as if she has unwarrantedly entered a foreign country. She stops to look up at one of the mannequins and picks up some of its blonde hair in her fist, which I gesture at her to drop. She joins my sister in dancing and they both decide to gang up on me. Because they know I am trying to behave according to what this situation demands. They have always been less caring of the expectations of the world, whereas I have talked myself into adapting and succumbing to every oppression that has come my way. Their dancing is a joke at my expense, but also their reminder to me that this is not important — these clothes, this store, this is not the end of the world. I take a few clothes to the dressing room and they fall funnily on me. The shirts get stuck on my shoulders, the pants crumple up on my knees. I see other women like me emerge from the locker room, all equally confused. 

One girl, who I know is wealthier than most of us, looks at herself in the mirror and cries, pointing at the white girl in the poster. “I want that jacket!” she says to the shop worker in charge of the changing room in Hindi. “Kahaan hai woh?” she orders her. “Where is that one?” The rest of us roll our eyes as her mother comes to soothe her, looks at the price tag and gasps. Her daughter glares at her and the mother concedes. “Please get her the right jacket,” she says to the shop worker, who nods in resignation. “It’s the same one madam, that’s the jacket the girl is wearing”, she points to the poster. I notice that the white woman in it is on the beach, her hair is flying in the photogenic wind. “It’s the same one, madam, the same one”, the shop worker repeats herself.  The girl throws a fit, the rest of us roll our eyes, but what she said is true, the jacket she wore looked nothing like the woman in the poster. I go back into the changing room and take the clothes off, the silkiness of the shirts falls down my arm, but the pants come off with as much difficulty as I put them on. I pry open metal buttons with some difficulty, I scrutinise myself in the mirror wearing silhouettes that I have never known before. When I come back outside, I notice that my mother and sister have already left. I leave the clothes on the counter and thank the cashier, who doesn’t look away from his computer screen. I run out of the shop, white lights blinding in my head to search for the exit of the mall. 

**

In the 1990s, after economic liberalisation, as writer and anthropologist Meher Varma notes in her piece in Vittles, the Indian woman “arrived on the world stage”. The country saw its women win international beauty pageants., and in the 1990s, “Indian looks”, Varma states, became a commodity, which had to be merged with Westernised standards. Varma writes about how “Heinz ketchup was as easily available as spicy namkeens, and even McDonalds. The unforgiving beast had to indigenize its menu, offering up beloved hybrids like the McAloo Tikki Burger and Maharaja Mac. However, glossed by the new market euphoria was an important contradiction: for the Indian woman to liberalise, she had to occupy a new body while safeguarding imagined Indian traditions.” With this then, came new standards of beauty for Indian women: dark-haired, doe-eyed, but also thin, fair-skinned and tall; a right bridge between tradition and modernity; as Varma notes — “Indian, but not-too Indian”, and also Western, but always one post below the aspirational mode of whiteness that they would never attain.

With the opening of India’s economy to the world in the 90’s, women had access to new modes of clothes, and make-up, which they considered to be channels of liberty and a way to engage with the world. While new standards emerged, already present racial colourism was heightened to new limits. In the time following the coming of foreign brands, all the girls I know began to search out these modules. Malls flooded with anxious young women ready to buy slinky new shirts and skirts in funny fabrics. New shapes to describe ourselves  — pears, hourglasses, flattened bodies — became molds in which we fit ourselves into global, capitalist standards, ready to present ourselves to the world. 

**

I am at a party in Antwerp, and everyone, except my friend Emi and I, is wearing black. We have taken the train from Brussels, where we live. “This is going to be wiiiiiild, man” she had drawled to me as she rolled a cigarette in the train. “Can’t believe I’m finally going to one of these, '' she said. Emi is of the opinion that Antwerp parties, especially “fashion parties” are ridiculous. An opinion that I probably share, but I am curious to find out for myself. I am also going, because of a guy, a man, I have been in love with for some months. He is going to this party too. Emi hates him, she lets me know on the train. “I wish I had remote-controlled your friendships when you got here” she always says when she sees some of the people, especially the white men that I have befriended during my eight months in Europe. I have two groups of friends, one of them is formed around this person that Emi hates. The other is the group I will later come to call my “real friends”. They are the ones who, though often tired of me, give me the benefit of doubt. They grew up here, I didn’t. This continent confuses me. They understand. 

When Emi and I enter the party, we hear someone say that Antwerp is the “fashion capital of Europe'', at which we both laugh. “Imagine just making up facts because you can’t be fucked with the rest of the world,” I say. “And a fact nobody cares about, at that'' Emi responds. 

This sets our mood for this party, we pick up drinks and go to the side where we observe – me curiously, her disdainfully - everyone that passes us. People look at us with intrigue and come to talk to us, a consequence of the fact that neither of us is white. People ask Emi where she is from and she replies in French that she is from Brussels. More times than not, people laugh. We make a drinking game out of it. Sometimes, when she trusts them, she tells them that her mother is Japanese. The people in concern, if they are men, ask her questions about sex kinks, tell her about Asian porn stars they like. She suggests we make a drinking game out of this as well. “No way, it’s too sad,” I say. A group of tall white women pass me by and touch my arm, asking me how I was so dark in winter. “That’s much, much sadder”, Emi says when they are out of ear-shot. I disagree with her, and both of us, already tired within an hour of this party, decide to walk around. Because we are both young -I am twenty-three, Emi is even younger- our guards soon drop. Three drinks in, we start making party-friends, engaging in pointless banter. It is cold, and chatting keeps us warm. Emi stops glaring at people who ask her to confirm her origins, I explain my dark skin and dark-hair. “It’s not dye” I keep saying to gangs of beautiful girls, again and again and they are thrilled with this revelation every time. They tell me with wide-open eyes, that I am beautiful. I smile and nod. They keep saying it. It starts to make me sweat on the forehead. “Please stop,” I think to myself, and look for Emi over my shoulder but she has been captured by another throng.  

My body feels different in Europe. Sometimes people gawk at it and ask me the same questions, other times I am invisible, mistaken for someone else. At the bar where I work, I am routinely spoken to by people who think I am the French-Sri Lankan woman who is the manager. She is at least fifteen years older and a foot shorter than me. When I tell her this, “Can you believe them?” I say, she tuts at me in French. “Ca va, no? C'est normal, no?” she responds, always posing questions, probably to herself. Eventually, she asks me to wear cologne to mask my natural smell at work. “I did it too”, she says to me, nodding sagely. I refuse, and she fires me from my job at the bar. 

As I talk to these women at the party, the man I am in love with texts me about where I am. “Centre-left” I write to him. “Next to the speakers?” he says, with the instructional, know-it-all air that I would soon come to resent. “You’re going to turn deaf in no time.” 

When I find him, he is on the balcony with his friends, many of whom I know. Some people hug me, others wave to me because they are mid-conversation. I take a cigarette from someone I like. He puts an arm around me and pulls me into a circle that he is talking to. Like him, they are all older than me. I listen to as much Dutch I can follow, and soon everyone switches to English. “You don’t have to,” I say, like I always do. Because it’s true, I’d rather not know what they are talking about. “Having fun?” he asks me now, eyebrows raised. “Yeah, actually, I am,” I say, and he keeps his eyebrows raised in a sign he doesn’t believe me. “For the most of it” I laugh, to entertain him. and he relaxes. This is my function to him, I think: I am a bit of irony in this setting. This is all I am. “Look around us, so many beautiful people,” he says emptily when we go to the railings of the balcony and I balance my arms on the cold metal, in an attempt to feel anything that brings my body back to myself, which by now is floating outside me within my grasp.  “It’ll be good for you,” he says, now looking at the gang of thin beautiful girls that I was speaking to earlier, who touched my skin and hair at whim. He leaves me to go to talk to them and pats my head like I am a prize puppy. “Maybe you’ll learn something,” he says, as if he’s known me my whole life. “It’s about time.”

**

Later, when I moved back home, I was asked by a therapist to learn to look at my body for a long time. To touch the tips of my fingers, look at my feet, look at a photograph of myself for ten minutes without looking away.  I was thankful for the small scale of these actions she asked of me. Otherwise, women friends would try to tell me in large gestural ways to like myself, or the cursed “love myself” too often, and I would fail even before I began. They would tell me about men who asked about me, and throw gifts, clothes, jewellery my way which I refused to accept. How do you overcome a habit you have cultivated with such dedication over time? Slowly, it would get better: swimming helped, as did being around people I trust. As I got older, I would learn, at least for fleeting periods to join myself up in my body, feel grateful for the way it moved. I would close my eyes when my calves tightened pleasurably when I walked to the metro station. Every time I got into a new body of water, I felt thankful for the way I felt there, snug and strong. 

When I was twenty-six years old, my mother decided to take me to her darzi, or seamster to make my clothes. This was Liaquat Saab, a quiet man with intelligent eyes and a steady gaze, he would stitch my shirts, alter my pants for me so we never had to go to the mall. He used my mother’s saris to cut up and make things for me. Wearing a part of her made me feel better. I know she enjoyed her beauty immensely, it felt like I could borrow that for a while. As Liaqat Saab measured my shoulders, he told me that I didn’t need to fit into a preempted size, I wasn’t a medium going on large, a large going on a size the shop didn’t have. I was only my own size, he would say to me when I asked if a design would fit me if he could make me a jacket for the winters with black wool. “Of course I can” he would say gently, holding up a piece of garment. “This needs to fit you, not the other way”.  “Theek hai aap” he told me, as he measured me and I shivered under the long pink tape. “Just relax, you’re all right.”