Confession # 1 - I am Homebody

So I came to the realization yesterday that I’ve become a homebody. Not an exciting I-am-spiritual-and-have-to-do-lots-of-cool-things-at-home-body. My movements have actually been confined to the narrow radius between my bed and the television that’s about three steps away. Exercise consists of rolling to one side of the bed, beating up the pillow into shape so it can form the perfect back-rest, then beating it up again a few hours later after I have crawled-trudged to the television to put in a new DVD in the player and then collapsed back on the bed. I knew I needed help when I had a near existential crisis the moment I discovered I was on my last Tudors season. No more Jonathan Rhys Meyers jumping on the bed, literally and metaphorically.

Of course, when the high of Lays and Pepsi deserts you and Jonathan bows out with a cruel smile and you are left staring at your bloated reflection on the black screen of despair, you begin to indulge in a bout of self-pity. What brought me to this? How did I, who was meant to run an NGO, be an actress and record my own album, write my own book and win a Nobel Prize for Literature, marry a gorgeous man and bring up a picture-perfect family, end up like this? So I did what every mature twenty-nine year old woman who had seen a lot of the world does: I blamed my mother.

You see, my mother was the protective sort. All the Dawn headlines proclaiming theft, murder, arson where ingested by her wide-eyed person as she convinced herself that if she didn’t take care of every step I took, I would be the subject of such criminal violence. Ever since puberty hit and I began, in Gwendolin Fairfax’s words, ‘to develop in every direction’, my mother became super paranoid. I couldn’t go to the beach because I’d be raped. A bunch of girls from IBA had gone to the beach twenty years ago and had been raped while their male friends helplessly looked on. I couldn’t go to restaurants because once a man had fallen in love with a school girl and abducted her and taken her to his haveli in interior Sindh and had his way with her. I couldn’t go to the market after nine because the shopkeeper, seized with a frenzy of passion, would shut up shop with me in it and chase me around the counter while I fended him off with strepsils, makhi-mars and bunties.

I couldn’t go to night-spends because all my friends had brothers waiting to rape me. When I went to my first co-educational school for my A-levels, the boys, whether they showed it or not, were also waiting to rape me, hook me on drugs and then party all night. It took about two weeks for me to realize that men were normal creatures who didn’t think with their phallus all the time (well, most of the time) and so I began to make friends.

But then came the problem with my ten o’clock curfew – I couldn’t go to parties or hang out with my friends and so school and university passed perfectly respectably, without a single fling or romance. I studied, did my assignments, watched some television and then went to bed. With the result that I have now become a teacher. I GIVE assignments, watch some television, then go to bed.

So as I lie in bed and type this blog, I realize that I am a homebody. Always have been, am, and looks like always will be. My life has come full circle. And, looking at the effect of this sedentary routine on my figure, I feel it apt to say, I AM a full circle.