Here are some things I would rather do in public than write about my body and, specifically, my struggle for self-esteem: punch my cat in the face, eat a leech, have sex with an impolite wolf, allow someone to watch me try to pluck an ingrown hair from the most tender part of my groin while hunched over myself and squeezing a little pustule until it pops and mixes with blood and turns pink and I groan, satisfied, “Oh, gross,” while pulling out a follicle the length of a cucumber. In fact, I would far rather present to you all naked, in this exact body, in public, than actually talk about my body. I’d prefer to show you so I can avoid acknowledging this vessel, which I’ve worked so hard to hide.
All indelible memories are rooted in trauma, like trees grown in a dumpster, all crooked and ugly and covered in leaves made of used diapers and stretched-out Fashion Nova tops. Naturally, some of my most vivid memories are those where I discovered in what unique and particular ways my body was wrong. By the time I was nine, I was well aware that I was too hairy, too brown, and too big. It’s unimportant whether any of those factors were true; they were true to me, and true to my white, hairless, skinny classmates and friends.
Tiny and I were friends through our moms, both Indians who knew each other in the community. I never knew if Tiny and I were all that compatible as friends, or if we knew that our moms would let us hang out because we were shaded the same way. Sleepovers were an easy thing to sell to our Indian moms, who seemed reassured that the other would rest in a safe place. I spent weekend after weekend at Tiny’s. Her place had a big front courtyard where we played basketball poorly, a cuckoo clock that was disruptive and ugly – something that fun would never exist in my parents’ home – and a desktop computer in a dark room where we could google pornography and flirt on MSN Messenger with Tiny’s non-blood-related cousins. A rite of passage for South Asian girls everywhere.
Tiny and I bonded over our bodies. Before we were old enough to know the words “sexual exploration,” we looked at each other’s vaginas and compared notes. Ours were similar in shape and colour, which felt like valuable data points. We spent one sleepover balancing Barbie teacups on our completely nonexistent breasts. When we got older, we talked about how much we resented the ever-darkening hairs on our arms.
But unlike me, Tiny was skinny. She operated with a kind of ease among other girls our age that I always credited to her weight, though we never discussed it, of course. I felt my body was growing too fast and too wide, stretch marks lining my legs and gut, but bringing it up would mean recognizing it as true, which I couldn’t bear to do. I admired Tina’s rawboned legs and arms, her square, flat torso, her collarbone protruding when she laughed. She looked like a little girl, age-appropriate in her smallness, and I felt like I looked like an old woman, with a cafeteria-lady ass. Maybe that’s why boys were so unkind to me; prepubescent, I gave off the energy of a divorced woman in her late forties. (My destiny.)
Sometimes, Tiny would invite one of her white friends over. We went to different schools, and the white girls I was friends with were clumsy, dorky, sweet, and friendly. Her white friends were tall and lean, popular and blonde. Their mothers had jobs, and they took the city bus home from school on their own. Mine wouldn’t let me cross the street without a chaperone. They were the meanest girls I had ever met in my life and their hair smelled like strawberries. I’d walk behind them, sniffing, my body lifting in the air like I’m Yogi Bear and they’re a pic-a-nic basket made just for me.
One Saturday after yet another cosmically humiliating swim class, my mom dropped me off at Tiny’s house while she was hanging out with one of those mean, beautiful girls. We walked around her sleepy neighbourhood, lazed in the sun in the backyard, fussed around with Barbies we felt too old to be playing with. I was still in the fifth grade, but Tiny and her friend were two full years older than me. They were grown. They had seen the world.
I never really knew how to bond with girls – I still don’t, which means I generally offer to buy a round and then ask everyone about their skincare routine – but making fun of our moms was a win. I knew how to imitate my immigrant mother, to make fun of her lilting accent and her penchant for dropping the definite articles in her sentences. I could put a hand on my hip and swivel myself in an invisible sari to the pleasure of little racists all over suburban Calgary. (My mother never wore saris to lounge around at home; I was only ever appealing to the lowest common denominator.) At the time, I wasn’t bothered by dehumanizing myself or my mom, who surely would’ve popped me clean in my front teeth had she ever seen me mimic her as if she was an Indian Mrs. Roper. But I was worried about being seen too closely by girls like these, and making a joke of the person who loved me the most in the world was good deflection.
“Oh my god, my mom’s crazy too,” Tiny’s friend told me. Tiny had gone inside to sneak us a few Cokes, drinks that were restricted from us unless at dinner parties filled with drunk Indians who weren’t paying attention. Left alone with Tiny’s friend, I felt wired by the blush of her attention, her full eye contact, which I received because there wasn’t anyone else around. “You know the old saying that you get one roll on your stomach for every kid you have? Well, my mom has had three kids, and she only has one roll. But she’s always talking about being fat! Isn’t that so crazy?” She motioned to her midsection when she talked about rolls, drawing big semi-circles with her hands over her stomach.
I had, simply put, no fucking idea what she was talking about. I was eleven. What “old saying” would I have known about body fat at eleven? It was the year I got my period, the year I started touching myself over my underwear, and the year I got a computer. I had other things to worry about than old wives’ tales about how many stomach rolls an adult woman should or shouldn’t have based on how many kids she poops out. (Incidentally, at eleven, I still thought babies came out anally.)
But the comment was enduring: here I am twenty years later, still thinking about it. Her words climbed up and down the walls of my head for the rest of the day at Tiny’s house, like a spider with a sac full of eggs that would soon crack and infest. When her mom made us cucumber sandwiches, I considered the Amul butter she used. When we went to Tiny’s room to dress ourselves up in her clothes and put bindis on her white friend (we were experts, after all), I suddenly didn’t want to take my shirt off in front of a girl I had known since I was three. And later, when I came home and took a bath, I inspected my midsection in the reflection of the faucet. There, distorted in the metal, were my budding breasts and three perfectly identical tummy rolls. I ran my hand up and down the terrain of my body. I was craggy and bouldered, like a street lousy with speed bumps.
Excerpted with permission from Sucker Punch, Scaachi Koul, Penguin Random House.
