Potiya

He was always that cute cherubic kid who made all the aunties go awww and reach for his rosy, chubby cheeks, much to his annoyance. He also had that cute little tushy that everyone liked to pinch, back when it was not looked upon as inappropriate. He was called Potiya, for his cute chubby ness, and Bun Pav, for his love of buns, or maybe because his tushy reminded people of buns. He was the apple of his parents eyes, someone who drew attention to himself not just by being cute and chubby. He could draw people to him, right from telling jokes to being friendly to all.

Life was good, but then growing up happened to him. He began to go through physical changes, his body transformed. He didn’t quite loose his cuteness, cause what he couldn’t shake off was that stubborn chubbiness. Born and bought up around a lot of esterogen, it was difficult for him to adjust to all the testosterone that surrounded him, he found it difficult to cope with it. He felt out of place, an anomaly. To top it all he was grappling with an identity issue, trying to figure out who he was, where exactly did he fit in the larger scheme of things, what was his preference.

He stood out like a sore thumb, an oddity, that made him an outcast. The world can be cruel place, never making any attempt to try and understand him. Nobody could quite understand him or even try to get to know him. They just made fun of him, the butt of their cruel jokes. His sexuality was the subject of their salacious gossips and malicious rumours, filling him with insecurities, always wondering if people were talk about him. He always felt like an outsider, something he wasn’t used, a big change from his childhood.

He felt low and depressed, and quite often had the unthinkable cross his mind. But he didn’t have the courage to go through it, and he thanked God for that. What gave him hope was something that his mother once told him, you are always better than what people who talk about you. Now he wasn’t an ugly duckling but he knew he wouldn’t metamorphosis into a swan. He wanted to stay fit and that got him through and gave him some amount of confidence.

In a need to meet people like himself, ab attempt to find someone to connect with, he signed up on a site. But when he read some profiles it made him wonder how superficial people could get when they mentioned their preferences, especially when it mentioned that fatty need not ping. It felt like these people were seeking out supermodels, wondering if they were supermodels themselves? He laughed at the expectation of people, but at same time he was also aware that he too fell into the same slot. Sometimes he wondered how these beauty queens and models represented a country when mass majority of the country weren’t Reed thin or had a six pack.

At times he found it difficult to understand the attention he now seemed to be getting, all the compliments, now that he had mademoiselle commitment towards fitness. From his past experience he found it difficult to take it, but at the same time he knew that these people were attracted to what they saw and not the person, without taking the trouble to know him. 

He marvelled at the fact how life kept changing and turning with every ebb and flow, and how far he had come, how much he had to change, how much life changed him, from blissful ignorance to unshakable  despair to finding hope. He sure had come a long way and he knew he had a long way to go. He knew that life would try to melt and mould him, but no matter it tried he swore that he wouldn’t be lost in all this change, he wouldn’t loose his what his belief that what made him uniquely human, who he truly was, that little Potiya.