My Pantless Life
It's been 8 years since I wore pants. And there's a story behind it.
It was that twilight zone of the year: between winter and spring, dormant and emergent, death and revival, sleeping and waking up.
Around this season eight years ago, I stuffed my jeans into that top shelf in my almirah. They're still where they were all those years ago, but I've come such a long way since I threw them up there.
The winter had begun to thaw, and I was going through what I can now safely say was the toughest period of my life. I was two years into motherhood. These two years had been the longest in my life, stuffed to the brim with the never-ending, back-breaking fatigue of raising a small person. These years were also the most collapsible; when I tried to recollect them, they whooshed past into a short haze of giggles, cuddles and the incessantly delightful quirks of my child.
But on that spring morning, all I knew was that I had no idea who I was. That I was rock-bottom unhappy, my relationships wrecked, self-respect at an unbelievably all-time low. When I looked in the mirror, it felt like I was looking at someone else, from a great distance. I had to pull myself apart and put the pieces back together again, but I didn't know where to start. Everything was hazy, complicated, a total mess.
So I started from that point where I remembered myself at the start of a great morning: in front of my wardrobe, choosing my favourite mix-n-match outfit of the day. I realised that I did not enjoy that anymore; I didn't love my body, I didn't love myself, I didn't get crazy pleasure out of dressing up now. My wardrobe was overflowing with clothes hoarded over the decades, but there was nothing to wear. Every item of clothing reminded me of my flaws: too baggy, too tight, too maternity-ish, too skimpy-young, too boring-proper, too muffin-top-creating.
I had to pause and ask myself at that moment: how did I get here? When did I stop loving this body — this body that bloomed, swelled, tore, bled and knew how to create an entire other person? During pregnancy I had been amazed at the way my body had revealed to me all that I am capable of. When did I stop loving this terrifyingly beautiful self?
****
In the decades spent learning Odissi, the one thing I have most relished is the feminine body. The gajagamini chaali from Heeramandi that we’ve all been going gaga over recently, is but tip of the nail when it comes to how Odissi has showed me a body can move, express, cajole, evoke. Little had I known before I began dancing, about how much pleasure and enjoyment there is, in both its fierceness and sweetness. Until dance found me, I had spent such a long time hiding my body - not just behind clothing and silhouettes, but also in smaller movements, tentative walks, collapsed postures. I was afraid to take up space in the world.
When we dance, what we really become aware of, is our body in relationship to the space around it. We begin to understand perspective, from the inside out. As I danced, I fell in love with the ways my body took up space — in the classroom, on stage, and in the world.
As a woman, all my life I had been taught that the body is a piece of nothing - a shell, a trap, a degenerating asset. It was my mind — I was told — that I needed to cultivate: my intellect, my knowledge, my powers of reason and analysis. This was my superpower, my individual worth, my chance at equity in a man’s world — the promise of control over anything in the future. The body was something I needed to improve, chisel, or hide: it was merely a puppet animated by my mind.
How gracefully and confidently dance broke this notion down to its hollow core. It took its time, but I learnt the most valuable lesson: the body has a mind of its own. It speaks sophisticated wisdom gathered over millennia, in a language and tenor of its own — even my mere intellect knows now that this is a universe beyond its limited understanding. You do not learn to dance with your intellect; the body just knows, all you have to do is forget yourself. It was a similar surrender I gave into, when I delivered a child with guttural screams; none of the What to Expect manuals had been useful as I had lain in the labour room, heaving as my body imploded with insane pain, a part of me wondering, ‘Is this what dying feels like?’
Standing there in front of my avalanching wardrobe, remembering the felt sense of dance’s wisdom while also trying to imagine myself in each of the clothes I could see, I wondered: what part of my body feels most vulnerable right now?
It was my belly.
My belly had never an object of my affection --- I was always embarrassed by it, resentful of it, unhappy with its roundness, its refusal to flatten, its wide, love-handled appearance. I hated that it won’t to get into a golden ratio with my slim arms and legs. It downright revolted against waist-cinching bodycon dresses. It stayed soft, relaxed and balloony, no matter how much I tried to convince it to ‘look sharp!’.
The world had successfully brainwashed me into looking at myself in bits and parts – fragments and never whole, flawed and never up to the beauty standards fed to me by social osmosis. I realised this truth not through my intellect (despite having read seminal books about it) but through my senses, while spending year upon year looking at sculptures to emulate in Odissi. I wanted to know what that world was like, which the confident, multitudinous women of Odissi belonged to — what were they being fed by social osmosis?
At first, I could see the sculptures only with my intellect. My intellect is sharp in the way my stomach definitely doesn’t want to be. It is a carving knife of impressive artistry, but its range is kinda limited, I’d say.
“Small waists + globular breasts = objectification of women”.
“Of course these women look happy, they’re a size 6!”
“Beautiful, but what impossible projections. Those vital stats are humanly impossible; just a male fantasy”.
But as I kept dancing and observing bodies around me, I found myself returning to the dancing sculptures — only to realise that they weren’t all the same. Yes, they didn’t look like my body in the mirror, but amidst the sea of gravity-defying breasts and tapering waists, I also began to notice some wide torsos, discreet bulges, thundering thighs. I particularly loved some small, unexplained details. Three ripples of flesh running around the deep-navelled abdomen of Chola bronze Parvatis. The flaccid ‘tyre’ around the waist of the mysterious lotus-headed Lajja Gauri. The skeletal abdomen of the Hirapur Yogini, Chamunda. The ‘bellyrolls’ that added to the beauty of the Didarganj Yakshi. Over time, little by little, I began seeing my body reflected in some of these ‘impossible projections’.
Total reckoning finally happened one day in art theory class during my Masters’ degree, when the professor’s slideshow clicked onwards and I saw a life-size projection of my love handles on the wall. “I’m not out of shape,” I said to myself, “I’m just a mutated gene of the Mathura Yakshini,” almost placing my hands over the sudden bulge of my sides.
*****
“What our eyes can perceive, is limited. Temples have a lot more sculptures than what we see on their walls today,” my Guru said to me, when I low-key complained about there being only one body-type of Odissi’s muse nayikas. “My father told me that before the Konark temple was filled with sand so that it wouldn’t collapse on itself, he went inside, and climbed up the stairs to the higher levels. There he saw huge, powerful sculptures of women with all kinds of bodies: strong, thick, stout. Maybe that’s why among the many types of nayikas (heroines) described in his dances, he also made sure to include vartula, She Who is in the Round.”
There was a strange pleasure in imagining that a replica of my body could be among those heroines enshrined on the Konark temple walls. Was I a part of them, or had they always been a part of me? Could I really learn from these carefree, dont-give-a-damn, lost-in-my-reveries women, how to love the unloved parts of me? Come to think of it, I reasoned, I had been through several sizes from my 20s to my mid 30s — pregnancy included — and that never stopped my body from looking like a sculpture in dance. Odissi never made me hate my stomach, it welcomed all the shapes and sizes it came in.
A stomach — especially a woman’s — is a moon-like thing. It is ever-changing. We see only the bloating, the flab, the rolls, the paunch — and all the abstractions of sloth and ugliness attributed to them — but a stomach is by itself, a positive thing: a sheath that expresses nourishment, that separates the food outside from the food inside of us. A place where our energy, our desire to live is created every day. Even in sculpture carved from stone, this one part of the body doesn’t always look the same. On different days, from different angles, under the influence of different moods, its curvature makes it shift and change countenance.
I had forgetten that behind the unchanging facade of celebrity abs and fitness goals, the perfect stomach — and the perfect me — is a temporary milestone. We’re not meant to be the same forever. Life is too long to not change many times over. Yes, I will take care of my body — like the beautiful damsels on Konark walls screaming self-love — but I will also not expect myself to be set in stone. I am allowed to change — my worldview, my opinions, my beliefs, my needs — and that is such a powerful thing to feel. Perhaps so powerful that a fake social standard of monolithic perfection had to be created in order to contain this freedom.
*****
That day, standing in front of my open wardrobe, I decided I wouldn't wear anything that didn't make me feel good about my body. I threw away any piece of clothing I couldn't remember wearing last. I chucked all the clothes I had been hoarding for sentimental reasons (namely "oh but s/he will feel so bad that I didn't wear what s/he got me" or "perhaps I'll fit into it some day").
I gathered all the clothes that made me feel like I was the ‘wrong’ shape or size, and realised they were all the same type: Pants. Jeans. Trousers. Stupid backs of theirs, riding down always, making me worry about pulling my shirt hemlines down. Waistbands digging into my waist, reminding me that I had eaten. Folds of stiff cloth bunching up around my groin, constricting it. They were like unpleasant people, forever nagging, taunting, bringing you down. I didn't need that kind of negativity in my life. And yet, I had been wearing them every time I had to face the world.
That day I packed away all my pants and jeans. I made a beautiful, small pile of the clothes that made me feel good about myself: Skirts that swished and swirled around my hips. Dresses that did not dig into my love handles, or remind me when I'd last eaten. Saris that wrapped my body like an embrace, always the right size. These would be what I would wear.
Let this be an experiment, I thought. Can curating the outside really bring about a change on the inside? Can a year spent pantlessly make me love myself more? Can the superficial, epidermal things really affect those deep, unconscious folds of the inner self?
A pantless year later, I was stunned to realise the power of the superficial. That year was the most transformative in my life, and a very big part of it had to do with how I learnt to love my body. For the first time in my life, I began exercising not to lose weight, but to become stronger. I stopped looking for approval; I stopped hiding; I stopped pleasing others. I began speaking my mind, even if that didn't make me 'look nice'. I stopped looking at myself in bits and parts when I looked in the mirror: no longer was I looking for missing thigh gaps, neat tummies, tapering waists, pert boobs, not-so-wide hips. In my new choice of clothing, I saw the shape of me, clear and apparent. The one who shouldn't fit - because there's only one of her.
It was too good to be true, I thought. All through this year, I kept waiting to relapse into my old self. I kept thinking, one day I would give in and wear the goddamn jeans. Especially when winter descends and freezes the positivity out of my irrational experiment.
But I did survive to tell the tale, albeit with the help of some lycra cotton tights, the wonder called fleece-lined leggings, my first pair of boots, and a set of the miniest mini skirts I have ever owned. I wore these day in and day out: to the nukkad shop, the party, the office, the 10-minute errand zone. I wore these despite the January rain, the windy Delhi Metro platforms, the freezing auto rides. My rants about the winter reduced considerably; my ability to laugh at myself grew manifold. The further I went from my ideas of bodily perfection, the easier it became to stay with my thoughts. The more inwards I went, the more my desire to connect with the world grew.
Eight years on, I still have to wade through days when I'm swimming in a sea of conflicting emotions But none of that conflict is because I can't reconcile how-I-view & how-I'm-viewed. From time to time, I look at the jeans on the top shelf, and wonder if there will be a day when I will pull them down, and slip them on again. That day might be round the corner, or never again, but one thing is for certain: they will have to fit me rather than have me fitting into them.
You know what they say about life being short and all that. Sometimes I feel like it’s quite the opposite.
Life is long. Too long to not change many sizes and many opinions. The ladies of Odissi and my pantless life have taught me that much.
*****
(This is the fifth essay in a series I’m writing about my body, in continuation with the essay on breasts that I wrote for Immortal For a Moment by Natasha Badhwar (you can read the second about feet, the third one about hands and the fourth one about hair here). The essays from this series explore the crossroads between dance, culture and memory — which is my favourite place to rest, and which was the point of this substack after all.)
Wah! Bhai wah! What a journey you took us on. And I’m chuffed s as you wrote this at the huddle. I feel I was next to you.
You are revolutionizing the way I see my body, Swaati. I could come up with a 1000 ways to compare mine with yours and keep sulking and yet, you make me work otherwise. You make me watch my body with love and tenderness. And power. Thank you!