faKE wORms tHaT sHattERed mY dREaMs

Its dawn already, I am not surprised.  It’s been like this ever since I got here but I have succeeded to go to sleep at 3 these days. However the chicken chilly I made the other night turned out to be more of a ‘chilly chicken’. May be its all my friends cursing me back for that evil act of mine and no wonder I ain’t getting any sleep.

‘Not having a proper sleep routine gives you ugly dark circles and the thin appearance’ they say. I don’t really care dark circles or the thin guy look but it seems that I am going to have some problems with my digestion process. I mean, ‘you eat a lot’ I always hear this from the people who have fathomed me. That I have always adored as some sort of compliment. For a thin guy like me, it’s always good to learn that you are eating a whale of food. However it’s always been one tough job for me to put on some weight. People wonder where the stuffs I eat get lost. I too ponder a couple of thoughts. But I have been living all my life on few explanations to the fact that I am thin.

Rewind a decade or more, there was a visit by this surveillance team at my school to testify the tapeworm defiled students. On an assembly of hundreds of student they called out my name; I was a tapeworm holder. I didn’t know what a tapeworm was or how it could possibly harm me. Rather I was happy my name was called and not my friend’s. When I was reported the same at home, they said something like ‘oh! That’s the reason our boy is so thin’.

I am not doubtless, whether my family was worried of tapeworm devouring my food or they were worried about my physique or both. However the day before my eldest brother and I hit the road to Kathmandu planning to take the worm down, I won gold in a relay race. That explains I was not weak or ill or infirm but my physique was a matter. And I was going to Kathmandu for the first time. So my excitement was on the air.

I can comprehend that, I was the crux: the center of attraction. Hey! Look at him! Don’t you get enough to eat at home? Hey! Do they keep you outside the kitchen while rest of the family enjoys the food? It seems as if his elder brother is eating his entire share of foods followed by hahhahahha!!!! All these insensitive remarks by the people I knew very less, sometimes my close relatives or friends to my brothers or sisters must not have been very hilarious to the people who really cared and loved me for thin and thick(except I could never get thick).

So that must have come as a great relief to my family ‘The Report’ for I was the only evergreen thin guy in my family. Finally they have stumbled over the reason and that is ‘I was holding some tapeworms’. Now the doctor would wipe my domesticated worms and make them homeless literally. And I could gain some pounds so that my eldest brother won’t have to mull on what people say about eating my share of foods were any true. Oh! I remember this one thing I said to my bench mate (he was thin too except he now boozes over Australian beer and gained pretty weight) ‘ pakh ! ma Kathmandu gayera juka flaera aauchu ani motayera you classs ko dada hunchu tespachi you shirey(shree bahadur gurung) , vagwaney(vagwan karki) lai pitnu parcha.’ He replied with an elated smile; he was buying everything word to word, I could tell that from his liberated smile. Even I was buying it from my family. I was already living a life of a thick school boy whom all the class feared.

Nonetheless, the dreams got shattered into pieces when we discovered at the teaching hospital Maharajgunj that the report was fake and the whole surveillance team was a bunch of thugs. The final reports were negative and I never had worms. I wasn’t a happy man; I wished I had bladder full of nasty and nutrition sucking worms. I had already pledged to my friend, by now he must have already threatened a guy or two hoping that his thin friend would return thick with arms of a wrestler.

That was a story back from 4^th grade. And fast forward a decade and few years I am still a thin guy with plenty of other explanations as to why I am thin. I say stuffs like, Maybe I talk too much for a thick guy. Maybe I don’t sleep at regular hours. Maybe I think too much for my age. Maybe I don’t drink no alcohol. May be I don’t go to the gym. May be I will put on some pounds once I get to the city of my dreams (New York). I mean I have never in my life seen a single person whose weight when measured after few years stay in America reduced to that of when he first left.

But I only say these things to keep people off me for I don’t want to sound rude. I can’t say ‘budge off you faggot mind your own fucking business’. That’s rude I think. What’s with the people complaining about other’s physique anyway? Thin or thick ugly or fair; I am not chasing your girl! You moron or I am not some gay hitting on your boyfriend! You dunderhead female.

Now this might sound like a piece out of utter frustration of being thin. I don’t care if I am a thin guy or thick as long as that changes my perception over things.