I earned my first-ever paycheck dancing in a music video. I wore a black mini dress, tiny pink gems stuck to my eyelids, an old Biggie song bumping in the back — a desi Maddy Perez, nearly two decades before Euphoria gave us the visual language for the beautiful excess of teenage girlhood. Except I was actually fourteen. And this was my real life.
In today’s money, I made the equivalent of ₹5,000. My father, a lifelong photographer, encouraged me to spend it on my first piece of art. I bought a blue monochrome portrait of a nude woman. I was a young girl, being paid for the first time to be looked at, and the first thing I bought was a picture of a woman I myself wanted to look at. Much of my life has been spent this way: being the observed and the observer. Until motherhood collapsed the distance between them, that is.
In high school, I played competitive high school basketball internationally. I loved being fast and underestimated and I loved beating boys. Over school breaks and on weekends, I modelled. Being a model and athlete at a young age taught me how to inhabit my body and observe it through the imagined eyes of everyone else. My body could be both beautiful and purposeful, feminine and athletic. Subject and object. Then at 34, I got pregnant — that my body could make a body thrilled me. But ten days before my son was born, I dropped a glass of water onto my left foot after a false labour scare. The shattered glass nearly sliced off my pinky toe. It took 17 stitches to fix. A half-inch blue Frankenstein, I nicknamed her ‘Toey’. Levity is the last resort of a woman nine months pregnant and suddenly unable to walk. Then my water broke.
Because of Toey, I arrived at and left the hospital in a wheelchair, cradling my newborn son in my arms. Everyone around me congratulated me on the new life my body had made. I understood it had indeed done something extraordinary. But humiliation is not an intellectual experience. I felt my body had given me the greatest thing I had ever wanted and also failed me at the same time.
I could gaze upon my son, but I could not walk to his bassinet beside my bed. For almost two months, I could not push him in his stroller. My husband and mother-in-law had to bring my baby to me. I could not bear to look at myself. So, for a while, I stopped.
There is an intimacy to rebuilding a body. Women have received enough instruction about what is supposed to happen after our bodies come apart, as though, if we suffer correctly and for long enough, we might emerge improved (even if, by conventional measures, I did). Today, I’m 37 and stronger than I have ever been. I can walk, run, lift my son up and fly him across our kitchen. We recently put up a hoop in our driveway. When I lace up my sneakers, I become a teenager again. I like the way my body looks now — I worked hard for it. Approaching 40 has not liberated me from my own gaze, nor do I think a woman has to renounce her desire to be seen a certain way in order to prove she has depth, but strength means something different to me now because I can remember exactly what powerlessness felt like.
Once my body had recovered, I went looking for signs of the girl I had once been. Push-ups, burpees, jump rope. The kinds of exercises I, an admittedly deranged person, have always enjoyed. Only I could do none of them. Around six months postpartum, I got down on a mat at my gym and put my hands on the floor to attempt a push-up. I could not push myself into a plank, even from my knees. I remained in tabletop position. I hoped no one would see me crying.
