Fat
I think about food and weight differently here—it’s impossible not to. People always serve us more food, more food. I wonder if I look thin to them (for a foreigner, that is) or plump. Either way, in reality, I don’t need to eat so much. I’m not in danger of future hunger. When I think about it, I realize that it would be nearly impossible to for me to starve. Even if my parents went completely bankrupt, and everyone in my extended family died, and I became crippled and unable to work, I still cannot imagine a situation short of nuclear war in which I would have so completely lost my social network that no one would help me survive on a basic level.
But I find it difficult to refuse food when our cook stands next to the table and stares at us when we eat. One woman just ignored Katherine’s repeated declines and served her chicken anyway. Probably they cannot imagine why we wouldn’t eat, when we so clearly can afford to. Today I saw a group of little kids, their stretched skin illustrating their ribcages, their distended stomachs rounding out the same way I nag my father about. I thought about the granola bar sitting in my backpack, calling to me hours after breakfast ended, and I left it there.
Our guidebook says that paintings of famous Bollywood stars portray them as fatter than they actually look because Bengalis don’t see thinness as desirable. It seems ridiculous from this distance, America’s hysteria to be skinny, skinny, skinny, when over here a woman works 6 days a week to put a little extra fat on her daughter’s hips, and not for aesthetic purposes. I live in a land of excess, but I don’t know how to fight that when eating in a land of scarcity.
But I find it difficult to refuse food when our cook stands next to the table and stares at us when we eat. One woman just ignored Katherine’s repeated declines and served her chicken anyway. Probably they cannot imagine why we wouldn’t eat, when we so clearly can afford to. Today I saw a group of little kids, their stretched skin illustrating their ribcages, their distended stomachs rounding out the same way I nag my father about. I thought about the granola bar sitting in my backpack, calling to me hours after breakfast ended, and I left it there.
Our guidebook says that paintings of famous Bollywood stars portray them as fatter than they actually look because Bengalis don’t see thinness as desirable. It seems ridiculous from this distance, America’s hysteria to be skinny, skinny, skinny, when over here a woman works 6 days a week to put a little extra fat on her daughter’s hips, and not for aesthetic purposes. I live in a land of excess, but I don’t know how to fight that when eating in a land of scarcity.
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