A Love Story of the Bengali Waist-Size

Love makes the world go round. But fish-curry rice makes it fly. And butter chicken, says Partho Ganguly.

The Bengali’s love for fish is well known. A fishmonger in Kolkata displays his catch of the day. (Photo: Reuters)

Inside every fat man there is a thin one struggling to come out. Mine outed sometime circa 1999. But with a twenty-six inch waist, it kind of resembled a woman. I could fit into my friend’s sister’s pedal-pushers. The parents tried to figure out how to go about introducing their son who had started looking like their daughter. Hollow cheeks and all, they felt she / he was also a junkie. But it was the look that season on the Paris ramps. “It’s called Heroin Chic,” I explained.

Sixteen Years Later…

As I write this on a full stomach, the heroin chick has been long been flushed away, and I’ve come to realise that a big stomach indicates an appetite for life.

It’s all because our body hasn’t kept pace with our mind. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, you didn’t know where your next meal was coming from, if at all. So when you ate, you ate like a bastard. The body stored the excess calories as fat, to help cope with a food crisis. Since a fatter person had a higher chance of survival, and hence a better chance of passing on his genes, he was much desired as a mate. Fat boys like me ran wild with naked dreadlocked cave-chicks. Give me back those broken nights, my mirrored room, my secret life…

So much for evolutionary biology. There’s also geography and kaalchaar (culture). Bengal is watery country, full of rivers, lakes and ponds. Fat cells are also 90 per cent water. This is no coincidence. It is as if the land itself is inside us. Naturally, Bong men feel some fat is a must for glamour.

When two Bongs sit across the table to eat, they cannot see each other at first — it is only after they’ve eaten through their mounds of rice that they can say Nomoshkar. For proof, check out the amount of rice served to the hero in Bengali films, whose idea of murmuring sweet nothings is softly burping into his beloved’s hair.

The Bong Stud

Uttam Kumar (L). (Courtesy : Wikimedia Commons)

The Bong stud’s benchmark is Uttam Kumar, he of the shoulders soft as a pillow, which women could lean, and fall asleep. Bong men are totally cool with this, contrary to the rest of the world, where it is the man’s business to fall asleep on women. In my Calcutta vyamshala (gym), dudes even used to do weights with their cheeks filled with water, lest those become hollow with all the exercise.

The Bong and his food is a love story, with lots of love songs. Like Amar Prem. Or Devdas (expat Bongs, brimming with unrequited longing). But this story is real, for here the lovers actually grow old and fat. Sure, cultural conditioning does play Cupid in this great romance. But there is also primordial recall. Let’s take a couple of atypical case-studies. Our school-going daughters are Tangal. Not as in the place in Bangladesh famous for its sarees, but Tangal as in Tamil + Bangal*. They have never set foot in Cal. We have no family in Bombay. Yet, they react to fish like Gujjus to jewellery. Theirs is an atavistic response.

As for me, I feel inadequate unless the freezer is stuffed, streaked with blood, trembling with flesh. Maybe this is racial memory: there was the Bengal Famine, and in ’70-‘71, Bangladeshi refugees like me starved on Calcutta’s streets.

Khabar, Prem, Biplob (Food, Love, Revolution)

Anadi Cabin, a Calcutta institution that specialises in the city’s quintessential fast food Moglai Porota. (Courtesy : Wikimedia Commons)

In Bengal, even revolutions have been fought with food. During the Bengal Renaissance, the upper class, influenced by Western Thought, waged war against the many ills of Hindu society, such as sati and hyper-polygamy. As a call to arms, many intellectuals ate beef. The most celebrated of these was the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. That revolution rages on. Punching cow-belt, Deobandi Hindutva in the face, Bengal is one of those rare states which permits cow slaughter.

Among Calcutta’s cultural icons then are Shiraz, Jimmy’s Kitchen, Bancharam, Cookie Jar and Mocambo. They are our Pather Panchali, they are our Gitobitan**. As with a good book or film, this is food that moves you, brings a lump to your throat, fills your eyes with tears. This is high art, worthy of being framed on walls and housed in galleries. This is food that deserves a Nobel.

Thus my lard is made of love, made of food made of love, the love of loved ones and strangers, over forty years. This shit is sentimental. This fat is that winter when we had poached fish and wine and kissed and went to sleep, our bellies full of our first baby. Why the fuck would I want to lose that?

Food for Love

But I must. Being fat is a bad career move, especially in today’s telegenic world, where squillion dollar fat-cats are the epitome of fitmess. You read it right, that ain’t no typo. Diet and exercise can mess up your head. Ask any model whose piss has turned orange from drinking carrot juice. Heroin chic is a look among models because they can’t eat or drink. Therefore drugs — something that helps enjoy what remains of their lives.

Winds are now blowing through my heart. I smell meat, I smell music, I smell malt. Let us eat, drink, dance, and romance the crap out of our lives. And when our time is finally up, ride fast, hard into the bend, and be gone in a whiff of smoke…

...to that restaurant at the end of the universe.

* Bangal is a person from Bangladesh (erstwhile East Bengal)

** Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitobitan and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali are seminal works in literature and film.