Motey and the Fat Dichotomy
Agay Dotila sits on a chair unsteadily in a balcony overlooking the Memorial Chorten. Donned in skintight jeans his granddaughter squats down across. She throws a glance at his face. Her eyes quickly run through the furrows, and she asks him, rather insensitively: “Agay, why is it inauspicious to die at 84?” (As if death is auspicious). Agay scans her, disapproves of her posture but smiles – unperturbed. “I had heaved a sigh of relief on losar (14 February 2010), as it was the last day I was 84,” answered Agay. Born in March 1926, he is still 84 to her even as they speak on this March morning. As he tells her why he’d feared death at 84 more, a fat man walks clumsily past their house.
“Look at him, Cheychey, chubby and cute, jato rere and zanglhamlham.” “And look at yourself – you are like a bamboo cane,” Agay Dotila said. As if he has been itching to say this he goes on much to his granddaughter’s chagrin. “Fleshy meant richly fed. Fat was identified with wealth. Fat was charm. A portly figure stood majestic. It was pride.” That was then she thought. This is still so in some far-flung rural communities. Good news for some, bad for many, some elderlies still carry this mindset irrespective of their whereabouts. A corresponding rural-urban migration in mindset hasn’t accompanied the unrelenting physical rural-urban migration. But there has certainly been a shift in the mindset of the young.
She is 20-something. Like any woman of any age, she is concerned about putting on any pound that will alter her desirable BMI. Today it’s calorie-counting. What you eat describes how you look. How you eat and how much you eat are as critical as having anything to eat. Earlier everything you shoved down your throat literally went into your stomach. Stomach was the endpoint of paramount importance. Once it was filled nobody had cared what happened until the next meal. As long as one’s belly was full, nobody knew anything about balanced diet. Nobody cared if the three-meal menu of the day read the same. Who would have known or cared about anabolism, catabolism and metabolism! These were just unheard-of and irrelevant isms. Yes, they were there in biology textbooks. That was in classrooms only. It was big everywhere. It was gorgeous.
Today what goes into the stomach has specific roles and responsibilities insofar as it determines how much goes where – bust, boobs, waist, bumps, thighs, biceps, triceps, etc. And what’s more, it’s measured. It’s big in the right places at all times.
Extremely fat is obese, and obesity is shameful. Worse still, it’s more than proportionally conspicuous. Cheychey is health-conscious to be in sync with her age. For Agay Dotila, his granddaughter is not well-fed. Fat is ugly for her. So there is this dichotomy between fat then and fat now and fat in rural areas and urban. This is the generation gap. Chechey’s question about 84 fell into the gap. So did this adage: your face speaks of your sustenance. Today your face speaks of your deception.
