HOW NOT TO TALK TO US, FAT PEOPLE

I am fat without apologies. Roughly six years ago, I gained twenty kilos within a period of two months. Nobody prepares for that. There is little or no time to adjust. Twenty kilos, boom! And you are there wondering if your body has just been inflated like a Dunlop Tyre.

You see, you never reset oneself from weight gain in the manner you hard-reset a phone whose keypad has jammed and has been messaging your ex-girlfriend a colony of poop emoticons and pictures of naked women on your church group. That is not how it works. It is a gradual and painful way back.

Come to think of it, twenty kilos can make one sizable goat. Such a goat could effect a commotion in my neighborhood. One would pull pee-stinking kids, cannabis-smoking blokes, elephantine boobs and the rotund butts of my vicinity into one place with a barbeque of such a goat. Knowing my locality, trust that the next morning you would need a lawyer to get out a couple of suckers from a police station. If you can imagine such form of commotion, you can imagine the madness this goat caused when it decided not to be eaten but to settle in me and shot my weight to a mindboggling high.

When you gain weight snappishly, as I did, there are too many things you have to learn very fast. Failure which, you find yourself elbowing another man’s testicles because you cannot take the insensitiveness of fat jokes. You have to learn to be patient with people who don’t know what you are going through.
The thing with weight gain, there is a physical fight — yes. But, also, there is a huge emotional fight all together that twists your soul and robs the blue from your sky (Man! I have always wanted to say that, the blue-from-the-sky thingy). No one sees it but you. It wakes you in the night. It spoils your taste for food. You eat with a mixture of guilt and caution. It is not a pleasant feeling.

I met a friend once by Lilongwe Bridge, just below the small space below Wulian. There is a spot right there which kids are slowly turning it into a car wash. That is how everything works in L-City now — you find a space, you know you have no title to the land; but you go ahead endeavor a business at it and pray the City Council doesn’t stop you. You know what? No one will stop you because the Council is run by a bunch of sleeping old men. So after months you erect a structure and formalize the enterprise.

This friend was coming from the Flea Market direction and I was coming from the opposite. Immediately he saw me, he circled around me with a surprised face as if he was regarding a statue of Mandela at Sandton Square or examining a goat meant for mating. Just before I began to imagine that he was behaving like a traffic officer inspecting the tyres of a car, he stood in front of you, erected an akimbo pose, breathed a thick sigh and said, “Man, you are gaining weight.” Let’s take a pause. Who the hell says that? I can take, “Man, you have gained weight.” That would be honest, at least from the person’s eyes. You-are-gaining-weight is progressive. It’s like was, literally, ‘inflating’ right before this person’s eyes and, this dude, was screaming about it in the middle of town about it.

No life needs not to be bogged down in the sloth of such embarrassment. One kid on a minibus had the audacity to tell the conductor that he could not take the seat with me and two other chubby women because the backseat was covered with ‘people who eat a lot.’ I assumed it was meant to be a joke but it was a joke he would have kept in his heart and shared with his siblings back home. You see, this kid was as thin as a kebab stick, he would have fitted just okay but, at that moment, the devil had paid him a visit in a special way. And us too were forced to demonstrate the distinct relationship we had cultivated with lucifer. We told the conductor either the kid drops off or the three of us find a more ‘roomy’ minibus to accommodate both our humanity and fat — in peace. The kid ‘excused himself’ from the minibus.

That day I felt like Fredrick Douglass casting off the chains of my slavery. I was Nelson Mandela in that minibus preaching the evils of segregation. Indeed, I was a Martin Luther of fatness.

Now, I’ve learnt to take fat jokes and make jokes about my weight struggles. It has been gradual but worthwhile. As I strive to shed off weight daily I have learnt to be fat without owing anyone an apology.

(If you struggle with weight issues and you want to share your story hit me at andrewsimwimba@gmail.com or+265 881 089 609)