PART 2
TWO YEARS LATER
Daksh Dey
‘You’re just showing off,’ I tell her.
‘What?’
‘You’re showing off,’ I repeat, louder this time.
She lifts one side of her headphones and looks at me. ‘You have to be louder.’
‘You have to be slower, Amruta. You’re going to blow out your knees and need a double knee replacement at fifty.’
She looks at me with a hint of exasperation.
‘I’m serious. You will be taking a pony up to Vaishnodevi watching all the fit women jog past you.’
‘Says the guy who’s walking at 6 km per hour like this is a garden.’
‘What’s wrong with walking in a garden?’
She beeps down her speed to a humanly 8 km/hr from the previous 12 km/hr.
Except for Amruta, I have a deep dislike for every person who runs, or sprints, or jogs, or marathons.
They are new cross-fitters, the new vegans, the new Crypto enthusiasts.
They have joined a cult and they want others to follow.
As I inch towards thirty, more of my peers start to gravitate towards this sport of walking briskly every day.
All they talk about now is how they got a new pair of shoes, how negative splits are the gold standard, and about bonks and carb loading and pacing, and how they will have to cancel because they have to wake up for a 4-a.m. run.
And then every few months, they run for countless miles for a cheap medal and bib.
Some don’t even finish and yet take that bib home.
Why would you take a symbol of your humiliation home?
‘Just think of it as cardio, okay?’ says Amruta.
She has tried and now stopped selling me the runner’s high, supposedly a wave of euphoria that washes away all pain and fatigue.
She chases this high every morning when she leaves at 5 a.m. to run around the cracked roads of Delhi with pepper spray and four years of Muay Thai training behind her.
I try to convince her that Delhi goons won’t fight with a referee, they will come with an iron rod, and no amount of punches is going to stop them, but who’s listening?
‘If you’re chasing a cricket ball, fine, I get it, you run. But for cardio?’ I ask Amruta. ‘Anyway, all I want are big muscles, that’s it. Cardio is counter-productive.’
‘Taking care of your heart is counter-productive? Being healthier is counter-productive?’
‘Absolutely. Time’s running out for me. After thirty, it’s game over for any muscle gain. I will have to get testosterone injected right through my eyeballs for any noticeable muscle gain.’
‘You have enough muscles already.’
‘Say that to my body dysmorphia,’ I say. ‘And say that to the guy in blue. To your right, yes, there, the one doing approximately 10,000 ab crunches. He’s, of course, on steroids.’
‘Because of the acne?’
‘No, because he’s bigger and fitter.’
She waves me off. ‘The best part of dating you is that you’re always checking out competition.’
‘That’s a commentary of how secure you make me feel in this relationship.’
She throws a murderous look at me. ‘I make you feel insecure?’
‘In a way, yes. You’re too fit. I think you should let go. I can’t keep up. We should just get healthy paunches.’
‘This is gaslighting.’
‘Aren’t we too old to be using these terms loosely? Or do you want to maintain your rizz? Because no cap, you still want to be mad relevant.’
‘That’s gaslighting again,’ she says. ‘And talk about yourself. Thirty isn’t old.’
‘I’m twenty-eight.’
‘You look older. You should try running.’
And with that, she slaps her headphones back on and starts running at a speed that makes me nauseous and sends tremors of pain through my knees.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m sitting on the mats to do some crunches, but what I’m really doing is scrolling through the comments on my last podcast and waiting for Amruta to wrap up her interminably long workout session.
She always trains till failure. This is at odds with my training philosophy: train till slight discomfort.
She’s holding planks with determination as if the world’s weight rests on her back, not Atlas’s or the mythical Kurma turtle.
Her workouts are a spectacle. They involve dumbbells, kettlebells, all kinds of bars and bands, sweat, blood and sometimes, tears.
They are motivating, but also demotivating.
I try to tell her that gym’s for vanity, it’s to do a double-bicep flex or jut butts and click pictures, but she makes it an extreme sport.
‘That was six minutes,’ she says.
‘That was half my lifetime,’ I correct her.
‘Hey?’ A voice says behind us.
We look up to find a woman standing over us with a look of confusion and hope.
We are used to girls and women walking over and either appreciating Amruta or asking what she eats to keep in shape.
Amruta usually gives some honest but generic advice which no one ends up following.
Unless fitness advice is complex and comes from a neuroscientist who’s also at 4 per cent body fat, no one takes it seriously.
‘I’m Drishti. I have seen you in the gym a few times,’ says the woman. ‘Actually, I just gave birth. Actually, not just. It was about a year ago. But it feels like just.’
‘Congratulations!’ says Amruta brightly. ‘Is it a boy or girl?’
The woman ignores the question. She’s in a hurry. ‘My friend just told me that you’re also a mother. But you don’t look like one at all. I thought you were in college or something.’
The woman tries hard to not stare at Amruta’s tiny waist.
Amruta wipes off her sweat. She rolls her mat. ‘Two of them. Boys. Twins.’
The woman’s eyes flit to Amruta’s waist again.
‘Hmmm. Actually, I’m freaking out. About all these extra folds,’ she says, panic and disappointment in her voice, pointing to her belly area. ‘How did you get rid of the belly?’
Amruta is about to answer her when she rains down more questions.
‘Is there anything specific you did? Something you ate? Or didn’t eat? Did you have a caesarean too?’
With a gentle tap on her arm, Amruta says in a soft tone, ‘You look amazing. Don’t worry about it. Take your time. It will go, sooner or later. There must be already so much running about with a one-year-old. Has your baby started walking?’
The woman’s in no mood for generic responses or body positivity. ‘How later is later? How old are your kids?’
‘They are ten.’
Shocked, the woman takes a moment to recompose.
It happens every time Amruta tells people she’s thirty and mother of two ten-year-old boys.
Amruta’s dedication to living forever, her allegiance to Retinol, sunscreen, and her petite 5’1” frame, her heart-shaped face, delude everyone into believing she’s in her early twenties.
Drishti looks Amruta up and down, then blushes, embarrassed by her action.
I butt in, ‘It’s okay, we all check her out occasionally. A little more than occasionally.’
‘I had my kids early,’ clarifies Amruta.
I seize the moment. ‘But if you want tips on raising kids, you can always listen to our podcast. It’s called Kids Raising Kids. It’s available everywhere. Audible, Spotify. The works.’
‘Daksh!’
‘What? We can’t promote our own podcast?’
The woman looks at me, ‘Your kids are so lucky. Both of you are so fit.’
Clearly, she took none of Amruta’s advice about not worrying about her body seriously.
I correct her, ‘She doesn’t have kids with me. I don’t have kids. That’s the primary reason why I have maintained my fitness.’
An exasperated Amruta turns, glances my way, then shifts her focus back to the new mother and remarks, ‘Ours is a long story.’
‘It’s not that long. You can hear it on our podcast though.’
The woman has lost a little interest in us. I want to dive into her brain, pick apart her neural pathways. I want to know what her assumptions are about us.
An ambitious woman with two kids divorces her husband to date a gym trainer with a middling physique?
A woman flees an abusive marriage and finds a guy who’s not only semi-charming, but hosts a podcast that he pushes aggressively, but doesn’t mind that she has two kids?
Or a woman whose husband died young finds love in a guy who loves children and together they start a podcast about parenting?
She would be right if she picked the third one.
2.
Aanchal Madan
‘I miss this.’
Lajpat Nagar is buzzing around me. A hive of calls from vendors and the steady hum of Delhi traffic. Things I have cribbed about all my life. I didn’t know I needed them in my life, like the background music of a bad TV show, irritating but necessary. Troublesome but home.
‘The question is, do you miss it enough to come back?’ he asks.
‘I missed you and I came back,’ I tell him.
‘As much as I’d like to believe that, you didn’t just come for me.’
I roll my eyes and chuckle. ‘You were a big part.’
‘You had me when you said you missed me,’ he says with a warm smile that’s considerably better in real life than over the phone. ‘Because I missed you, too.’
We don’t say I love you to each other, so this is what we have.
We miss each other. It does the job. For now.
Together, we weave through the crowd of families clutching their children’s hands tightly while simultaneously reminding them that if they get lost, their arms will be cut off and they will beg all their lives, so better stay close.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ asks Saket for the tenth time this evening. ‘We could do something more. . . conventional.’
‘I have craved this.’
‘There’s a very normal way of tackling the craving.’