Body Watching

It might sound completely improbable to a foreigner, but the first time in mylife that I looked at my body, as in really looked, was at the age of 35, when Ivisited Europe. On reflection, I must concede, it sounds improbable even to me.Briefly, I am a journalist, I've trekked in the Sikkim Himalayas at 15,000 ft,gazed at the earth from a hot air balloon, and gadded about Europe alone. Inshort, I'm an outgoing sort, not reserved or radical conservative; justordinary-nice, not wildly ugly or small poxy or ashamed of my body for anyreason.

So it was quite odd that I should never have looked at it before. Lookingback, I can trace some pretty underwhelming reasons for it. First of all, ourhouse has never had a full-length mirror in which to gaze at the body. In theold house where I grew up, the only mirror we had was a cheap, hand-held mirror,which Amma used when placing her bindi on her forehead after her bath. And Iremember monkeying around with it a couple of times, directing a shaft ofsunlight into the eyes of a nasty boy in the next building, who started it fir.In our present home, my mirror is a small square above the bathroom washbasin.The family's only other mirror is a dressing table looking glass in my parent'sbedroom, which I rarely visit. Anyway, it is full of stupid, wavy lines. Myparents must have noticed this when they bought it 30 years ago, but I supposeit was never replace because no one in the family has ever taken mirrorsseriously. That's why I've never seen my own body.

Besides, my dress sense is relatively conservative, covering most of my body.Minis and plunging necklines are mostly in the realm of what I call `boyfriendclothes' -- clothes best worn with a boyfriend attached: a single woman wearingthem draws so much unpleasant attention from the men in the streets, it issimply not worth the bother.

What? Of course, I bathe every day. But when bathing, I look at my body onlytechnically, if you know what I mean, never gaze at it. And, now, afterrelishing languorous bubble baths in Europe, it saddens me to think of all theyears I saw my body only as an object to be scrubbed while bathing. What a wasteof beauty and a source of wonder -- I wish I'd stolen more time with it.

But then for most Indians, baths have always been strictly functional affairs-- they are for the business of getting clean. You stand upright in abathroom-cum-toilet, and use a bucket and mug to pour water over yourself. Onlythe upper crust use showers, and of those, only top crumbs use bathtubs. Fromthe viewpoints of both aesthetics and pleasure, this upright bathing businessengenders practical disadvantages on several counts. First, both the eyes andhands are too busy with stupid things like mugs and buckets and soaps, to lingerand caress. Second, the vertical perspective of the human body is notnecessarily flattering, unless you have a particular eye for beauty, inwhichever form it comes. Third, it is not comfortable gazing at anything, aslong as you are wet and standing. Fourth, nothing cuts shorts lingering, assharing the same space as a commode bristlebrush.

So, one day, when I was travelling around Europe, I found myself in the flatof a friend in London, alone, cold and exhausted --  and discovered she hada bathtub. As I gingerly lowered myself into that invention for the first timein my life, I had a complete shock. This, despite being somewhat prepared tomeet my body, since I had been taking flamenco lessons at the Marais in Paris. Ihad never been accosted by a reflection of my body in full-length, wall-to-wallmirror, until I had enrolled in the class.

Indian women, particularly those living in crowded cities such as Bombay, andespecially those commuting in packed trains, have forward-stopping shouldersthat close the body in on itself, contouring their defensive attitude towardsthe ogling and furtive pawing of men. (as a second line of defence, I alwayscarry a huge bag, but that's digressing.) So I was deeply embarrassed when ourflamenco teacher insisted that I dance with my spine erect, shoulders thrownback and chin in the air, as I stamped my feet to its rhythms. The posture meantthrusting my breasts and buttocks out, and it went against an entire lifetime ofconditioning as an Indian woman. Nevertheless, I felt a tingle at the base of myspine as I danced. Once I got over my acute embarrassment, I found itexhilarating because I felt attractive and self-assured at the same time,qualities I had never acknowledged in myself.

And so, in the bathtub, I unfurled some more. Alone in the dead of winter,thousands of miles from home, I gazed at my nude body for the first time. Itseemed so strange -- and rather idiotic -- that I should discover my body afterthree decades of living with it. I was as stunned by its unfamiliarity as itsbeauty. Merely changing my viewpoint from the vertical to the horizontaldramatically altered my perspective.

I lowered myself into the warm tub with a soft plop, and watched the wavestravel to the far end of the tub and return to wash over my breasts. As thewaves peaked and lapped and overlapped on the water's surface, they scribbledall over my body, as if with a light-tipped, aqueous marker. It was a fleetingunderwater sign language, entailing busy toings and froings, urgent messagesthat scanned the length of my body, but lost their sense of mission the momentthe water grew still. I only had to slosh my feet a bit for them to get allwired and chittering softly again.

The aromatic scents of the bubble bath soothed, even as the iridescentbubbles poppled about my ears. The idea of having a bath horizontally - alounging bath - struck me as madly sybaritic. The buoyancy of a bathtub onlyheightens this sybaritic feeling, as against the hmm-get-on-with-your-bathgravity (in both senses) of a vertical bath.

Let me clarify again and without ado that I am not beautiful by conventionalstandards. Conventional beauty is dictated, corseted and liposuctioned to fitthe statistics of greedy advertising copywriters, fashion countries and thebeauty industrywallahs. I'm 5'3", tan-skinned, dark-haired, with smallbreasts, a slender waist and generous hips, not your clipboard Ingres goddess,but what was revealed to me was a joy to behold -- and I didn't care if I was ina minority of one.

What beautiful, sure, clean lines they were! I realised that there werealmost no straight lines in the human body. Just curves of various degrees ofgentleness -- circling, encompassing, rising, falling, duning, crinkling, afluid smoothness that arched down shoulder, breast, stomach, thigh and calf.

And it was the first time I'd seen breasts up-close, apart from the moviesand women breast-feeding their infants. My breasts were fair and rose sotenderly, they might well have been a teenager's. Except that, with the firsttouch of the water, my nipples contracted and grew business-like. In the largemirror across the tub, they looked like a pair of doleful squint-eyes, their'astigmatism' rendering them all the more endearing. My waist nipped in sharply,but the curve of my hips was so generous, it embarrassed me to even notice it.What stirred me was the disproportionate, earthy appeal of my body, the sort yousee in paintings by Renoir or Titian or Reubens, rather than the textbooksymmetry of some porcelain princess.

Presently, as the water began to lose its warmth and popple, I drew my kneesup and gave myself a lingering, rocking hug. I returned to India soon after, soit was the first and last time I ever saw my body.

(Meenakshi Shedde, Assistant Editor and Film Critic of The Times ofIndia, Bombay, won the National Award for Best Film Critic of 1998. She hasserved on the juries of several international film festivals in India andEurope, including Cannes, Berlin, Oberhausen, Hannover and Mumbai. She hascontributed to a book And Who Will Make the Chapatis? This is an extractfrom a travel book she is writing.)