Midnight Raid

When all else fails, there is always food! First written with friends in the Ochre Sky writing community.

The playground is empty except for a few children playing on the merry-go-round. They are wearing sweaters and socks and shoes, and their faces are flushed from playing in the winter sun. There are four boys of the same size and one little girl, smaller than all the others. The boys get on and off the merry-go-round, shouting and laughing, pushing it faster and faster, round and round. They don’t let the little girl get on. They say she is too small - she will fall off. She pushes them out of her way, but they push her back. She walks off. Tears are streaming down her face, and she does not want the boys to see her cry. She goes and sits on the seesaw - right in the middle. Not astride, but with both her legs on the same side, her hands on either side of her, palms flat against the bright red paint. The seesaw starts to bob up and down, but she knows how to balance it so that it is perfectly straight, parallel to the ground. She can keep the seesaw still with her palms - she has learned to do this with practice. She is calm now and her tears have stopped.

I think perhaps I never got off that seesaw. All my life, I have sat in the middle of things. The two sides of an argument. Quarrelling family members. Friends having a tiff. Hope and despair. Joy and sorrow. And the mother of all conflicts - family and career. My natural response is to absorb some energy from both sides and get on quietly with life. Most of the time this works fine. But sometimes there is a side effect – an internal tsunami that rises like madness from within and demands all my attention. These episodes have reduced with age and don’t happen so frequently now, but I remember a time…!

Unable to sleep at night, I would raid the fridge looking for leftovers from dinner. I would eat in the dark until there was nothing left and go back to bed feeling more miserable than before. Once, when we were living in Kolkata, there was a box of basket chaat in the fridge – a spicy mixture of some sort filled in tart shells. I ate six of them before sitting down to some work on our desktop computer while the rest of the family slept. My daughter was around two at that time and the only work I had managed to find was transcribing market research interviews from audio cassettes to Word documents. I spent the whole night throwing up.

Turning to food when low became a terrible pattern in my life and started a vicious spiral that goes on till date. I eat to feel better, get fatter, feel worse and eat more. Food is my biggest comforter, my best friend, and my worst enemy. It brings me joy and misery in equal measure. Just when I am thinking I have won the battle of the binge, I will polish off two plates of biryani or an entire box of garlic bread. It's almost as if I want to perpetuate this endless cycle of weight gain, misery, and more weight gain. Like a curse I don't want to let go.

Only at rare moments do I feel hopeful. When the sun comes out after weeks of continuous rain. When the house is quiet, a fresh breeze is blowing, and squirrels are playing in the trees. When I am chatting with my daughter, and she shares her young adult world view that makes me think that she is ready to fly on her own now - my life's work is done.

But then the curse comes back and reminds me of everything that is wrong with my life. And again, I turn to food.

Image generated on Microsoft Bing.