You weigh fifty-three kilograms. Meera you’re lucky, your father tells you, quite a fix we would be in to find someone suitable if you were, say, a heavyweight! You don’t pay any attention to what he says. He laughs: A heavyweight, can you imagine! You wish you were anything but fifty-three today, never mind being a heavyweight. But the day’s measurements have been noted down and now there is nothing else to do.

Meera come help your father with the cleaning, he says, can you please come lend a hand, at least today! They will be here to see you in a few hours…

Your father has been running around the entire morning. He has called the grocer to complain about missing items in the delivery box; he has pleaded with your mother to clean the gunk off the container lids and asked your cousin to bring the pastries from Shashi’s bakery.  No one seems to be in an answering mood today.

Back when my family went to see your father, your mother shouts from downstairs, such simpler times they were! We didn’t fuss over a kilo here and there, my family. That’s the blood you come from. Nowadays, we can’t even exchange greetings if the child is missing an ounce.

You block them out, your parents, and hope to kill some time learning about the new supplements. Your father has got you them from his friend, your Akram Uncle, who runs a dispensary beside the City Corporation Bazaar. Your father says it is their duty to God and to the Mission as parents to oversee this. The capsules will help you steady, Meera, he says, but it does the opposite really. You have rashes and acute pain in your lower abdomen. Your weight does not steady, as it had been advertised. You worry it will jump up perilously close to a different class.

You have never had a lasting friend from a different weight-class. Perhaps during the start of college, you can count Rimi and Shourav, as having been trusted acquaintances. The three of you had spent precious hours each week at the library, studying business cases and listening to pop music. But Rimi never bothered to keep in touch after she ate her way into lightweight to marry her high school sweetheart. Shourav, too, had his own supplements and soon he was so large that it felt immodest to hit up a conversation.

You will watch clips on the internet. Testimonies of others like you who had to try this medication. Perhaps you will study the names in the ingredient box and worry about an allergic reaction you might have from them. Only when the guests arrive will you go downstairs and smile. You might even bring the boy or girl to your room and have a talk but you are not really interested. No matter how excited your father gets, and since Jui’s death he has been in a particularly good mood, you will not let yourself get carried away into this marriage talk.

You still have Jui’s last letter with you. You keep it under your mattress. You actually don’t know if this is the last letter she has written before passing away—just that it is her last one you possess. Jui sounds like she always does. She misses you, she says. She hopes she gets to see you soon, but you know why you did not meet her. You were scared, scared of the imbalance, of going against your parents’ wishes. You were scared that she was forty-five, barely an atomweight. Too small for you.


Meera, her letter continues, I am doing all I can, believe me. You will be happy to hear that I convinced Baba to buy me the supplements the dietitian had suggested. I thank the Mission every day for sending them along. I eat rice breakfast, lunch, and dinner (As if that has ever worked for me!). In no time, will we be meeting again. All this letter-writing bores me. I’m a natural talker, you know. Baba has been helping me with the exercise and meditations. He understands how important this is for me. He himself had gone through this for Ma, he told me the other day. He was two weight classes above her! So he sympathizes. I’m glad he does. Our situation will be resolved soon. The scales inch rightward, though slower than I want, but I do get heavier each day. That's good news, right? Soon, I’ll gain enough to call you on the phone. It won’t be awkward, I promise.  I love you.



You did not love her as much, or you would have gone down for her. It was easier for you. Jui, for all her optimism, was never a risk-taker. You hear stories even now. Legendary romances of extreme weight-cuts. A person had once gone from weighing 120 kilos all the way to 70 (this is after the medications have steadied them near-permanently) to be with their beloved. How he did this has been a matter of considerable debate. Some maintained he had a mythical bariatric surgery, others thought he ran on the highway continuously for years. Rimi from your college days would say that by only eating celery every day and stopping at a particular time can get you to a lower weight of your wish.

You never resorted to any of this. Meera you’re so heartless, Rimi would say, you’d rather never talk to your lover again than lose a few grams. Romantic pursuit never propelled you into cutting.

Your father nudges you awake. Let me sleep, you say, you promised I’ll get to sleep in this week. But you are not facing the cold of a new morning. It is the same old day. Evening dotted with electric light and braying car horns outside. 

The guests are already here, Meera, get dressed in a jiffy and come on down, he says. You rinse your face with glycerin and comb your hair backwards. You wear clothes that won’t make you appear heavier (or lighter).

Come down already, Meera, your father says, fuming at your lack of urgency. 

The living room is alive with laughter and anxiety. The guests take great care to taste your mother’s sweetmeats. They slurp in the syrup from the cups and roll up flat-breads into their mouths like cigars. A smell of smoke and magnolia envelop the room thanks to an incense burning languidly at a corner.

Here she is, they cry out, dear come sit beside me.

You take in their eyes as naturally as you can. You let them leer and gauge you. You wonder how necessary this is. Though indecorous to ask outright, they have been informed of your dimensions in the morning by telephone.

And you are done with school? They ask, tea-cups in hand.

Yes, you say, I got my degree last month. Bachelor in Management Studies.

There are murmurs of approval. And our daughter has finished her schooling in English, they say, isn’t that right, Bina?

Bina nods with a pursed smile. You notice she looks more uninterested than you wish to appear. She sits crammed in-between her mother and her auntie, her parrot-green salwar-kameez shining through embroidered beads.  They ask her to name a few of her favorite poets, which embarrasses her. I don’t know, Ma, she says, we read a lot of Auden and Eliot in class.

But of course, the mother bellows, in our time it was unthinkable to say anything but Rabindranath. I personally enjoyed Jibanananda as a young girl. We encouraged her to take English because she was such a voracious reader as a child!

Bina does not answer. Her unease is momentary. Clearly, she has been to several of these visits.

Your neighbors begin to loudly play songs from a film on their TV. The cacophony stops short any further reflections on literary tastes. Your father and your mother join the guests for good, leaving your cousin to lay out the polao, the roasted chicken, tomato chutney and sautéed carrots and peppers on the dining table.

Forgive me if I appear a little frank, your father says (he prefixes all his statements with this), but I personally consider bantamweight to be the most favorable.

He shifts in his chair, awkwardly crossing his legs. I am one myself, he says, laughing nervously, though looking at me you would not believe, ha!

The guests meekly nod.

Bina’s mother says, both my daughters are, too. Their father and I are featherweights but I agree with your general point. We middles have so many options to choose from! My sister’s son, she has only one boy: the poor kid shot up to seven feet in height by tenth standard. The capsules can only steady him so much, you know, and he had to end up as a cruiserweight. I saw with my own eyes how much she struggled to get him a match. She never had a daughter, my sister. She had hoped he’d marry a girl, but it’s all boys up there these days.

Your mother nods, rare to find a girl that heavy, she says.

You wonder if Bina is religious. You wish to take her to your room and finish the customary talk of potential partners. She won’t be your partner. She probably detests this arrangement just as you. But talk you must. Your cousin peeks through the curtains, her face blossoming out of the drapes like the flowers on the cloth’s floral print. Her eyes signal to your mother. The table has been set, the eyes said.

Please, your mother requests the guests, come with us. It’s not much. You all must be famished from the journey.

Your father adds, Meera why don’t you show Bina around the house? 

︎

It turns out Bina really is religious. You show her the crevices of the house where you keep stacks of pamphlets from the Mission and she spends minutes flipping through them. Your father collects them, you tell her, he reads them every Sunday. You lead her through the messy kitchen and past the balcony where your mother takes her afternoon naps. You show her the serpentine staircase that leads to your room above, cramped and small, smelling of menthol.

I think we should weigh ourselves before we begin talking, she says, it is the proper way.

You make a show of discomfort. We usually use the scales in the living room, you say. I have to get mine out of the cupboard. Wait a minute.

It’s okay, you tell her nevertheless, my dad is like this too. Honestly speaking, so am I, not like I’m overly religious or anything. I find it is comfortable for both parties to do away with this in the beginning.

You smile at her as you lay down the scales, an old digital, still dusty and molding on the edges.  Her feet wobble on top of the rickety instrument. She pauses, keeping as still as she can, waiting for the read-out to bleep in.

Fifty-three kilograms. On the dot. She smiles back.

Your turn, she says, confident now that her interactions with you won’t verge on the unnatural.

You hike up your pants and place your feet on the altar, breathing in as you wait.

Fifty.

Fifty.

Is this machine working? She asks calmly, but you don’t miss a slowly rushing hint of alarm in her tone.

It has to be faulty, you say. I’m sorry, we should have weighed downstairs before coming up.

Bina sits on the edge of your bed and asks you to get on it again. Maybe it glitched then, she tries to reason.

The read-out says fifty once more. What could have gone wrong? You have never heard of a fluctuation this radical in nature. Perhaps, this machine really is broken. You wonder if it’s the medication. Did you forget to take your dose in the morning?

Bina stares at the display screen.

I’m sorry, you tell her again, I swear this morning I had checked out as fifty-three! I have been fifty-three for years now—its batteries are dead, I’m sure of it…

It is not appropriate, Bina says, her eyes on the floor now, refusing to look up even for a moment, that we converse, let alone be alone like this.

We’ll go down in a minute and weigh in properly, don’t worry. We wouldn’t be lying, of course! 

You realize you are blocking the path to the door. You are scaring her even more.

I need to go back to my family, she says.

You nod at her face, gone so pale all of a sudden, and step aside. Nausea cloaks you. Your mouth feels dry, bitter. You don’t believe the machine is faulty and that frightens you. These devices rarely, if ever, break down. But how could it be, you wonder. You have been taking the capsules as instructed. Any adverse effects that may have resulted in this, then, is surely the medication’s fault.



Soon, you return to the living room.  By now Bina has whispered of her shock to her parents. If this was any other circumstance, an argument would have broken out, if not a fight out-right. But they are distant friends of your father so they do not make a scene. Thank you for your kindness, they say without a sliver of a smile. We must get going, long journey ahead. And your parents, confused at the uncharacteristic rush, struggle to keep a calm face themselves. Please stay, they say, is everything alright? But they are already putting back on their shoes and fishing for their fob key. Your father looks at you and mutters, what did you say to her? I told you to be agreeable.

︎

The next morning you weigh forty-seven kilograms during official measurements.

Am I dying? You ask your father.

Don’t be dramatic, he says, we must take you to the doctor and perhaps to the Mission, too. This should not be happening. Six kilos in a day?

Your father cannot believe it. You lost six kilos through what, sleeping most of the day? I haven’t lost half a kilo since I was ten years old!

In moments like this you really detest your father. Baba it’s your damn capsules, you tell him.

But he says everyone in the country has these. I had them when I was your age too, he reminds you, we all had them, it’s the Mission’s directive. We never lost a gram! And why would we? The capsule’s job is to cement us to our identity. It’s supposed to help us harmonize our relations!

Baba, please stop lecturing, you say, maybe your beloved Mission is now doling out suspect medication, I don’t know. What am I even supposed to do now?


The morning has been too sunny, undesirably light. Your mother reads a newspaper on the balcony. She has refused to talk to you since the weighing; she has been too shaken. Your father, who refuses to stop talking to you, sits face-palming on the kitchen-table. In what calamity have I got myself in? He repeats to himself.

You hate that you have been forced to sit through this. It is not your fault you are losing weight at a spectacular rate. You had no special desire to be a Bantamweight. It was what you were naturally. Now it seems you will be something else and yet it does not feel any different.

Meera we already had you registered as a Bantamweight! Your father wails.

You shrug. Perhaps everyone is overreacting. That’s how your family has always been. It is entirely possible that you just have an infection which is causing this—nothing that cannot be fixed after a visit to a clinic or the Mission. You wish your father is as supportive as Jui’s father had been. It is eerie, how you are almost her weight now. She never expected you to be.


I don’t believe that life is inherently unjust to us, she had written in that last letter. It is what it is, Meera. You think I fault myself for being small but I don’t. Nothing is perfect but as the Mission says, happiness can only come from equal footing. Harmony is sharing the intensity of the world’s pull on you. And if we cannot share, if we are too ill-suited, we must work hard to become alike. I’m climbing the ladder… I’ll be with you shortly.

Jui could not, in the end. Tumors and auto-immune diseases brought out her end. The Mission discourages this sort of thing for a reason. Though one can never understand how our bodies truly work, how can you explain the ease with which you have transferred into something else? You don’t even feel any different physically. You miss Jui too. You wish you had loved her. You rise out of your chair and leave your father to mope alone. In your head you imagine yourself shrinking, diminishing until you can levitate to your room. Until you are soft as air and without worry. Weightless. You wish to be a dot in the expanse and then nothing.

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