Growing Older Is Fine, It’s Growing A Tummy That Worries

It is the week of my birthday and my friends, their husbands and some aunts have been asking me rather un-politely: ‘So, how old are you turning?” I am inching towards the big frightful number, but not just yet. “Not yet 40,” I reply coolly. “But what difference?”

There is a difference. I cannot tuck my shirt in my jeans anymore. I have never been afraid of growing older. I never stopped a child from calling me “aunty”, not even some of my eight-year-old’s teenage squash buddies.

I have not yet dyed my hair, I can hold out another year by assiduous hand-plucking. I may have a laughline or two, but I haven’t noticed. When school friends meet for a reunion, some of them say I look just as I did in school. “I hope not,” I show off, but it does make my head swell.

The thing is, I have always been a thin girl. My weighing scale has blitzed more or less the same number for the last two decades. But this year, I weighed 60 kilos. I am shattered. The last and only time I weighed 60 kilos was when I was six months pregnant.

Age is nothing but a number, but size is moot.

Any regular reader of this column will note that I am a savage ‘lookist’. I am a ‘size-ist’ too. Just a few weeks ago I wrote how unsettling Parineeti Chopra’s swivelling arms made me feel when I watched her last film. I am absolutely judgmental about how people look and how they wear their clothes. If you protest too much, I will throw you off with a “professional hazard”. But really, it is not.

We live in a world that emphasizes on being lean. It isn’t just actors/ models/ socialites from whom thinness is expected, but any thinking human being. Not being slim or toned is equated with being a slob. Political correctness and feminists please to excuse, you are what you weigh.

What began innocently as ‘winter weight’ last December (or so I thought) has stayed on for the next 12 months. I failed to swim it off. I tried to eat less carbohydrate, but ended making it up with sugar.

Then the fashion crisis ensued. I couldn’t fit into any of my jeans. I had only just thanked the lord for the serendipitous discovery of an utterly chic pair of Plein Sud jeans on sale, but I did not get to wear them even once. I suddenly didn’t need to wear a belt with my decade-faithful loosened-by-washes favourite Gap shorts. I missed the whole crop-top trend even though I did not want to. I cannot wear my prized pencil skirts. I have discovered I am most at ease in kurtas. And that my thighs want to occupy the seat next to me.

I have not yet turned into a self-loathing creature, I am actually happier than I have been in the last few years. I have come to the realisation that I don’t own my body anymore, my age does. If I want to return to my old wardrobe, I will have to exercise much harder. If I don’t return to my old wardrobe, I’m still willing to exercise harder.

Muffin tops, mummy-tummy and Mrs Roo’s pouch read lovely on Huffington Post. But I’d like some Spanx for my birthday please.