Begums Built For Comfort (But Not For Speed)

M. STAGGERED through my front door, his belly heaving through the gaps in his shirt-front where the buttons had been ripped off.

“Jannatein ladkhadaaein”, he said, reaching for the bottle of Glen Garioch, 1958, I keep for such occasions, filled of course with watered-down turpentine, “the heavens thundered”.

It took me a moment to work out just what he meant. My cryptanalytic skills are, like my powers of deduction, legendary, but it was past two in the morning and the doorbell was still ringing inside my head.

Wisely, I’d taken my time before opening the door. First, in my sleep-induced haze, I’d imagined that the Pathans were at the gates and then that it might be local Habshis in search of my loot. But as I thought through the situation carefully, I realised the Habshis would have kicked the door in instead of ringing the bell and Pathans don’t know what door bells are. And so, putting away the fine assault rifle I’ve taken to stowing under my bed, I opened the door—only to be confronted by the sight of a drunk, sweating Punjabi low-life Lala from Hoshiarpur which, as you will understand, is far more frightening than any Afghan or habshi could possibly be.

Khair, the salient fact was this: after many, many, many years, M.’s penis had been put to work for purposes other than making pee-pee.

Despite the abundance of fuddi in Jesustan, M.’s pursuit of happiness had run into an aesthetic problem. He felt that there is too much haddi on the local kababs and not enough charbi. He would turn away with a shudder when those hoor-like undergraduates jogged by the Ravi Kabab House, clad only in very very nikki chaddian—the very sight which thousands of illegal immigrants from sadda wattan risk their lives to witness, crossing borders stowed away inside container-trucks.

“Built for speed”, he would mutter, “not for comfort”.

Last week, someone put M. out of his misery by pointing him in the direction of a preparatory workshop for the upcoming Los Angeles convention of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. NAAFA believes that the drive to get fat people to shed kilograms, so pervasive in Jesustan, is the outcome of a weight-loss industry conspiracy. In NAAFA’s view, although “95-98% of diets fail over three years, our thin-obsessed society continues to believe that fat people are at fault for their size”.

NAAFA’s convention draws lots of men who like King-Size women, not all of them from Hoshiarpur. Some, like M., just like banging fat Begums—and at the convention, there are plenty in search of men who like to be cosseted in lard, reliving that primal memory of being smothered by their Mummy-ji’s mammas. Others have more complex motives. The convention attracts numbers of Feeders—men who, like Punjabi Mummy-jis, find pleasure feeding their loved ones enormous amounts of food while at once ensuring they remains immobile in bed to avoid burning any more calories than are absolutely necessary.

Every Feeder aspires to get his creations into the 900 Club, which celebrates the world’s fattest people. Carol Yager, who made it to the infamous Jerry Springer Show, weighed an astounding 725 kilograms at the time of her death in 1994. Roselie Bradford of Sellersville measured eight feet wide at her peak, and took up two reinforced king-size beds. When she fell out of bed, rescue workers used an inflatable cushion designed to right overturned cars to get her back into place. Her breasts, if they could be called that, measured over 2.5 meters—which, if word had got around in Punjab, would have brought her thousands of suitors—and her hips carried 90 kilogram bags that hung down her thighs as far as her knees.

Now, it did strike me that this could indeed be a brilliant strategic manoeuvre that even Moriarty would have been hard pressed to come up with—you know, “here darling, have another tub of ice-cream”, and off you go to frolic with the undergraduates while the Head Bitch poisons herself quietly; there’s no kerosene or nylon sari purchase to give away the game.

However, it turns out some folk are genuinely turned on by fat, witness the success of Dimensions magazine. And, of course, the harkatein of M.

In Jesustan, the natives have odd attitudes to fat. You cannot make derogatory remarks about women and the lower race, even Bengalis. You may not praise bride-burning or pederasty. So suffused are the Jesustanis in political correctness that if a leper sat next to them on a train, I suspect they would choke down their nausea and, from sheer shame, stay put.

But there are two sets of people it is safe to mock: the poor and the fat, who in Jesustan, unlike at home, are much of a safeness. Being fat is almost a crime—a crime against a society that valorises the Protestant ethic around which Jesustan is built. If some people in the Mississippi House has its way, the fat will soon be exactly like lepers, shunned by society. In February, Representative W.T. Mayhall, Jr., introduced House Bill 282, which seeks to prohibit restaurants from serving people who are determined to be obese by standards set forth by the Department of Health. Others have demanded that the fat be barred from squeezing themselves into economy-class airline seats; still others that the obese be denied public health services.

All this is a long, long way from home, where the non-English-medium tabka are still proud of the lard that coats their bellies, cardiac risk be damned. In the Pacific Islands, where more people are clinically obese than in any other part of the world, vigorous efforts to stamp out obesity have come to naught. Fat was always considered beautiful in the Islands: a nineteenth century visitor noted that Nauruans “admired big, fat people and put girls on a diet to fatten them and so make them more attractive”. Post second world war canned-food imports made it possible for more people to go on such special diets than ever before. In Mauritania, they even have special fat-farms, where the Moor Arab population employs instructors plumps up prospective bribes and bring them up to the standards of rotundity that are considered desirable.

Fucking Fat or Fucking Thin has been—and ought to be—a simple aesthetic choice. Like everything else in Jesustan, though, it has become a fraught moral and ideological issue.