My belly ~ I remember it especially at nine, getting into a swimming pool in India. But of course, it was always there.

In journals that I began writing in earnest at twelve, when we moved to the U.S and I started attending an American high school, I scolded myself like a schoolmarm from those old movies: “Really, my dear, we need to go on a diet.”

“Starting tomorrow,” I replied to myself.

There were many tomorrows of diets.

In my belly, there is a memory of rice. I wince to write that. I might as well write about mangoes and spices while I’m at it and hit the marks of a (proper) South Asian writing in (proper) English.

What I will say though, a disclaimer at the start - it matters to be clear: ‘no mango was harmed in the writing of this story.”

But the bit about the rice - the story goes aisa, like this:

When I was three or four in India, I was left in the care of my grandmother for a month or two. My father was traveling all around the world on a grant from the Indian government, focusing on business exchange, something like that. My mother joined him for two months of that grant, while he was in the US.

In that time, the story goes, my grandmother fed me rice when I cried and also, when I didn’t. That is, I ate especially when I cried and also when I didn’t.

I cried all the time, unrelenting rain.

(I refuse to say ‘monsoon.’ Rice and mangoes are enough.)

When my mother returned, she told me later - I had become unrecognizable to her.

I was a plump and petulant child, a ‘real fatty boom boom,’ as folks called chubby kids. And I became an increasingly fussy eater.

As I grew older, I felt my belly was laden with extra flesh, a band around the middle that felt and feels heavy, and hard to stomach. Pun intended. It didn’t matter what my size was or what my measurements were: my belly was always, often, too much for me.

Even now, while being fifty, in a mountain village in Spain, on a still humid day, sitting on a rock, wearing hiking pants that are a bit snug, feeling the folds of flesh that the tightness of the pants pushes up - even now.

I feel a sense of almost dissolution when I touch my belly. Like if I don’t watch out, it will become unmanageable. I will spiral into too much fleshiness and that feels like the end of my world.

I hear the youngness in myself in that thought and also because it is so young and so fixed on its own truth - no other truth exists - it feels overwhelming for a while.

The feeling is so strong, I can barely touch it. I can barely stand to feel it.

This amazes me. I am amazed at what continues to ‘colonize’ me. I use this word because my life work has turned out to be unmasking colonizations of many kinds. I didn’t expect that my life would be about this subject. But it has happened I have gone and written and performed a play about being colonized by fear, by a history that ennobles me as an Indian who speaks English well, and about the process I am living now, of excavating the body for a felt sense of what oppresses.

Where in the body are the places that stop the stories and that liberate them?

My soft belly is often colonized by a desire to be like someone else who is thinner. In my creativity, I do not seek one ounce of sameness with others. Not one. In fact, I go out of my way to be different. But in my body, I long for those times when I was thinner like a lost civilization I once found and can never find again. I look at photos of that time and marvel that I had managed the impossible task.

I came to Spain to study flamenco. Often, while dancing and seeing myself in the studio mirror, I cringe and say to myself, “I don’t have the body of a dancer.” This is true because I came to dance late in life.

There is a dancer I know who says, “Oh, I’ve put on weight, Oh, I’ve lost weight” and shrugs one way or the other. I’ve tried that attitude on for size and some days it suits and others, it feels like it will all vanquish me - the danger of a soft belly, the fear of never having enough money, the terror of proving right all the folks in the family who say I am not sensible and have no sense of what the “real” world is like and will fail at it all. Creativity be damned. Dance be damned. Where’s the money in it? Where’s the future in it? Empty Bank Accounts of the world - Unite!

In those moments, all the fears collude and circle me like a ring of standing stones. But unlike the standing stones that I once loved, the ones in Callandish that I embraced one halcyon summer in the Hebrides, these standing stones of fear do not sing. Instead, they step closer and suffocate. Even the grass dies, even the insects, every single thing that has organic matter disappears. gone gone gone.

When I began to travel all over the world in my thirties, it was such a liberation. But also I carried the persistent feeling that “I don’t look the part of an adventurer. I don’t have the body for it.”

And still I dance, still I travel, carrying the shadow of a parallel feeling which sometimes distills into a series of difficult moments that feel like the end of me, what I’ve heard described as a PTSD-like trance state. Then I have to go into my repertoire of calm: breathe, let go, be now, root out the false narratives, and on and on. I am getting better at it but it takes so much energy to go against the flow of the rutted roads where the voices have been traveling all these years. You try, you get stuck, you get someone to pull you out or you wriggle out yourself by the skin of your chinny chin chin, fat pig that you are.

Sometimes I wonder: beyond how we women have been socialized to be less, is the body afraid of its own extra-ness? We came into the world, a species fighting for our survival against other animals and the elements, even as we bonded in clans and created ecstatic art with ochre on our hands.

Sometimes I imagine I am descended from a prehistoric human who was in charge of keeping watch.

She lay at the entrance of the cave at night, hardly sleeping, her body in a low-grade state of fear, ready to run or make sounds should someone arrive. Hardly resting, hardly sleeping, fully in a heightened state of fight or flight.

Fear and hypervigilance is our common human inheritance as well. I wonder if we will be the end of ourselves.

But we can also become one tribe just wanting to help each other. Remember the time of the Thai soccer team? I watched and read all day, all night the saga of them being lost and found from that Cave. I wept, I despaired, and I marveled at the day that all the parents and family came down to the entrance of the Cave and healers wielded nets that looked like butterfly nets, moving them swish swish in the muggy air, cleansing whatever hungry ghosts that were blocking the safe return of the boys.

Maybe it helps to imagine hungry ghosts as butterflies. Catch them if you can. See them in the net. Marvel at their colors and the way the insect wriggles, the way their feet curl into the net and hold on. Then shake them and release them to their own journey. Fly away, fly away, fly away.

I am learning to nurture what a felt body sense of peace and harmony feels like and how to live in that feeling more. But sometimes, all the fears become one, and they enter the skin.

All that day in the mountain town, in those snug pants, even as I saw my trance, I could not shake the fear. In the end, what loosened the trance was scanning the news, and seeing an article in The Guardian which began “What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on the weight debate”

The reviewer said she cried to read the book, Fat Talk: Coming of Age in Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith.

I can’t even tell you what the rest of the review was about because all the words went right where they were needed. The earth of my skin absorbed the rain of that story. The ground was so parched that it just received the rain and slept in it.

I think this is why I am writing this essay. Because sometimes, it takes just a few lines of reading someone else’s story and seeing yourself in it to bring back the breath.

In that same issue, off to the side, was a letter that began, “Should I worry about my belly fat?”

This is also why I am writing this essay. Ode to mixed messages, who we are, who we aren’t, what to fear, who to love.

This is not a happily ever after story. It’s a moment-by-moment encounter.

Dissolving into fear.

Rising up into whatever the opposite of fear is on that day.

Going down. Coming up.

Drown and surface.

Surface and drown.

And swim.

Yes, swim in the same sea.