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Insha Juneja Books

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“But had we become so awfully used to this love because it was the only kind of love we thought existed? What if love was supposed to be easier and not only be about 'fighting through the hard times and the dark clouds'? And what if there weren't supposed to be this many dark clouds and what if love was not supposed to be this hard?”

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“I waited for her outside her house and saw her approaching in the aqua-blue dress I had gifted her on her last birthday. She obviously remembered my love for that colour on her and how I always told her that it complimented her skin beautifully. My heartbeat increased just a little as she sat in my car and the scent of her signature perfume- Chanel No 5- diffused in the air of my car. Her sleek-straight hair fell on her face. "Hi Neel. How have you been?" I thought about the first month of sleepless nights, crying, sulking and overthinking and said, "I've been okay.”

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“I love you, Ayesha. What would I do without you?" Zorawar said in the platonic way he'd always told her that he loved her. "I love you too, Zorawar. Always have always will." she said ambiguously.”

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“And handsome Zorawar! No one feature made him so striking, though his eyes came close. From them came a passion, an honesty, a gentleness. He was handsome from the depth of his eyes to the tender expression of his voice. He was fetching from his generous opinions to the touch of his hand. His voice quickened when he sparkled with a new idea or when he was so enjoying one of Ayesha’s that he lost himself for a moment and quite forgot the mask he wore for others.”

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“That was when I realized I had no control over my actions anymore. All I knew was that though no one knew what hell felt like, my life had become a version of fire and brimstone. My restrictive anorexia was completely and inexorably interfering with my ability to live like a normal human being.”

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“Soon, everyone around me had come to terms with my peculiar eating habits and started accepting me for who I was. It felt peculiar at first, but when someone said things like, “I wish I could resist eating all that,” in whatever parallel universe I existed, I felt powerful.”

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“He helped me sit up on my bed and tried to force-feed me glucose dissolved in water and a biscuit he’d grabbed from my roommate’s bedside. But I spat it right out, still thinking about calories and numbers. “That’s enough, Amira. I’m literally trying to feed you water. It’s not going to hurt you!” he screamed.”

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“The better question is: Do you want to recover?” I didn’t have an answer; I wasn’t sure. Recovery sounded great on paper and in the calm and casual way he said it. But why did the very thought of recovery seem like the most excruciating and difficult thing? What if I started hating myself after a few months of making conscious efforts to be a healthy person again? What if recovery meant being fat all over again? What if I wasn’t ready? “I’m not sure,” I said.”

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“It was haunting to be entangled in this obnoxious cycle. I want to get out of this viciousness. That pizza is staring at me. I think that slice of pie might hurt me. Thirty-five calories for an Oreo cookie; 75caloriesfor a slice of bread; 285 for a slice of pizza; 350for a plate of pasta. You know, maybe I’ll just study the digits of eggs, wheat, vegetables, apples, oranges. Ugh! Stop. It all hurts so much. That’s it. Make it stop. Please, I beg you. Just make it stop. I felt like the walking and living encyclopedia of numbers and digits.”

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“The scars of my anorexia, perfectly hand-drawn in red, immaculately colouring one-fourth of my left arm. It had hurt like hell, but it still wasn’t as painful as the last two years of my life. The mental, excruciating pain within the depths of my brain had managed to surpass the aching pain of the pointed edge of the object I’d used on my arm. I’d thought that overshadowing the pain I already felt with a much harsher form and intensity would make the emotional pain disappear. I was wrong. The latter pain always remains stronger; that is something I realized.”

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“Days and weeks passed by with changes in seasons and the phases of the moon. But the one thing that remained unmoved and constant was something I told myself every single day, "Amira Kashyap, you are fat!”

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“My life was now determined by the number on the scale or the digits behind food containers. But I was completely okay with it as long as my 24” waist size never felt even a tad tighter. But if it ever did, hell would freeze over, resulting in 21-day fasts until I felt thin enough.”

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“I remembered all those times when the people around me believed that I had spent the last two years of my life faking an eating disorder for the sole purpose of attention. For that reason, every day I would read a thousand articles and watch a hundred videos on real survivors who’d battled anorexia. Then I would question myself. My ribs aren’t popping out of my stomach, so maybe it’s actually just in my mind. Then after a few days of surviving on nothing at all, I would look at myself, see my ribs popping out and ask myself, Am I now?”

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“I asked myself this question every single day: Is it possible to break free? To break free from myself? It wasn’t by choice that I became this awfully unhappy. Something, I don’t know what, came upon me and my happiness was snatched away from me in a jiffy. Everything started to feel different. Something didn’t feel right when I woke up every morning and went to bed every night. Something didn’t feel right when I looked at myself in the mirror every 15minutes.Something didn’t feel right when my favourite doughnut became my worst enemy. Something didn’t feel right when all my mind was surrounded by was the pathetic, established standards of bikini bodies and skinny models.”

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“It wasn’t like I had started magically eating two entire meals in a day. I would still survive the day with black coffee and apples, but it just seemed like I’d taken one step heavenwards. The mirror felt a little less frightening with each passing day. It was refreshing to talk to someone who was fully convinced that my eating disorder was as real as I thought.”

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“Everything was going perfectly well until Dr. Roy paused for a long minute to stare at me with utter shock and revelation. I knew I had messed up. I should have just worn my black, full-sleeved dress instead. But again, I thought that the scars had lightened to an unnoticeable extent. But I guess I was wrong. That was when I realized that scars never went away entirely. “Did you do that to yourself?” he asked.”

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“I wanted to be normal again. I wanted to be genuinely happy again and not just pretend. I didn’t want distorted mirror images to destroy and define my life any longer. I wished to breathe in the customary air, instead of the suffocating one people like me had accustomed themselves to breathe. I just wanted to break through these metal rods that I’d been caged behind for the last two years of my life. I wanted to feel plain, simple, genuine contentment again. I wanted to; I needed to.”

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“I looked at my reflection in the glass door at the entrance of the house. For the millionth time, I saw something entirely different from what I desperately wished to see. But to be fair, what I wished to see was a replica of the skeletons I had come to worship. I often wondered as to why my eyes couldn't see what the world around me could. Why did my eyes see differently than others?”

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“Every day, I saw this new distorted reflection of myself, and everyday, I despised it a little more than the day before. It was uncanny and delusional, my reflection, and I felt this urge to change everything about myself. 'What is happening to me', was a question that remained unanswered for a great amount of time because I was as unaware about it as every other person around me.”

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“Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, I always saw a morbidly obese reflection, while in truth I was achingly underweight. My obsession of looking good corresponded to wanting to look the way skinny models looked in television ads and fashion magazines, the personification of being attractive as described by the world around me.”

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“So Amira Kashyap, what’s your story?” he asked as he set the big display stopwatch to a designated period of 59 minutes and 59 seconds. The perfectly tranquil way in which he asked me the question made me slightly nervous, even though I had spent the last few years of my life having imaginary conversations with an imaginary therapist. There were a lot of things I wished to tell him. From wanting to tell him about my first triggers to the very thought of me standing in front of a mirror haunting the living daylights out of me.These were just a couple out of the many thoughts in the archives of my brain. However, my mind went completely blank. I stammered and hesitated and managed to utter a total of seven words.“I don’t know where to start.” “Just say the first thing that crosses your mind,” he said. “I’m scared of food,” I blurted.”

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“But although my body constantly reminded me that it was starving, the voices inside my mind never gave me permission to satisfy my hunger. At times, I would get affected when people passed statements like, “Why can’t you just eat?” However, I convinced myself that the only person who could understand anorexia was someone who had been through the eating disorder. I chose to remain quiet.”

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Book:Imperfect Mortals : A Collection of Short Stories
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