What Do You See When You Look in the Mirror?

by Nikita Singh

  Living My Best Life

  1 January 2021

  Gyms, yoga studios and other fitness centres have always used the arrival of a new calendar year as a marketing opportunity to sell people the exciting possibility of a new body, new mind, new you. But it wasn’t until the end of 2020 that such promotions caught Zeenat’s attention. And once they did, she immediately became obsessed with the idea of fitness. In a matter of minutes, she had completed the process of downloading an app, filling in her information, setting her goals and signing up for a week-long free trial. The only problem was that she was now on the seventh day of the free trial without having done a single workout routine.

  The previous year had been rough for a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons. For Zeenat, it had been especially difficult. She tried not to complain and reminded herself to check her privilege constantly. After all, everyone she loved was alive and safe, and she was healthy. At least, her body was.

  She had only moved to America in the fall of 2019. It had been hard to move 7000 miles away from home to a foreign country, on her own for the first time in her life. But she had been determined from the beginning to make the most of her time there and go home having acquired an experience of a lifetime. It was this determination alone that kept her from turning around and taking the first flight back when she first came to realize, to her disappointment, that the city that was to be her home for the next two years, while she pursued a master’s in English literature, was a full four-hour bus ride away from New York City. Although, technically, Binghamton is a city in New York state, it turned out to be quite a bit different from the New York she had expected when she had applied to her university. Those expectations were based primarily on movies, TV shows and entire songs dedicated to the greatest city in the world. No one ever wrote a song about Binghamton. And if they did, Zeenat would feel bad for them.

  Her best friend from Delhi had moved to Manhattan a year before she landed. When Zeenat expressed her displeasure with her new home, her friend had promised her that they would see each other every other weekend, explore the museums, cultural sites, and all the restaurants and clubs in the city Zeenat’s heart desired to eat or dance at. This way, Zeenat could still cling to her plan to experience the New York she had dreamt about.

  A short seven months later, everyone was talking about the novel coronavirus. Her roommates, Mona and Sunny, didn’t pay much attention to it, focusing instead on their classes and keeping their love affair secret from Sunny’s girlfriend. But Zeenat spent her nights obsessively scrolling through her social media accounts, absorbing all the information and misinformation served on her screens. Doomscrolling, Twitter called it.

  Suddenly, the world around her changed. Zeenat had seen it coming, had even expected it. Even then, it failed to blunt the shock of the impact. Zeenat’s life shrank to her small room in their small apartment, her phone and computer screens becoming the only windows to the world outside. When the world came to a standstill, all movements were shifted to the digital space. And, because screens were the only avenues with any movement, it was impossible to look away.

  At first, Zeenat didn’t think the lockdown would affect her too much personally. From the beginning, Zeenat recognized that she wasn’t a victim of the pandemic, just a bystander. Yes, she was affected, but in a much smaller way, relatively. People were getting sick, dying, losing their loved ones, their livelihoods. Meanwhile, Zeenat was forced to stay home … and that was all. As sacrifices go, that wasn’t a big ask. After all, she could still take her classes online, call her mom and text her friends.

  Slowly, as the weather got warmer, the same small sacrifice began to seem bigger. She had arrived in Binghamton in August, had the chance to enjoy a few weeks of fall before it became progressively cold. When the temperature dropped below freezing and snow blanketed her city, Zeenat decided to put her exploration plans on hold till spring. The coronavirus arrived in New York before spring, and didn’t leave when summer came, or fall, and soon, it was winter again.

  Zeenat learned a lot in 2020. About pandemics, racial unrest, the economy, climate change, police brutality, American elections – all the things her screens fed to her every day. She learned to take a break, stay still, be okay with her loneliness. She held on, waiting for all of this to be over, for things to go back to normal.

  She knew fully well that the world wasn’t even close to normal, but there was the hope of a vaccine now. Zeenat dared to hope that the vaccine would put the world back on track towards reopening. So when, in the last week of 2020, an advertisement for a fitness app presented itself to her, Zeenat impulsively clicked on it.

  She had never really considered fitness before. Health, sure. She ate nutritious, well-balanced meals in a routine way every day. She drank enough water and tried to get enough sleep. These measures had been enough in a pre-pandemic world, but nine months of stillness had left her feeling … soft. She had noticed roundness where there used to be angles, and had decided to join a six-week programme to get back in shape.

  Not that she didn’t accept her body the way it was, because she did. She had learned on Instagram that it was her responsibility to love herself, and treat her body and mind with kindness. So, she thanked her body for all that it did for her, showed her appreciation to her physical form and, in a healthy way, decided to embark on the path to self-improvement.

  She simply wanted to be the best version of herself. She would buy the six-week fitness programme for herself as a New Year’s gift. But before that, she had to test out the app to make sure it was the right one for her. It was important to find what worked for you, she had read somewhere. Similar to the Confucian philosophy – choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. Zeenat wanted to make sure that her workouts felt more like a choice than a burden.

  Which is why, now, on day seven, as she stared at her screen, she questioned if this workout app was right for her. Judging by the fact that she hadn’t even attempted to try it yet, maybe it was not. Was she just making excuses? No, no, she wasn’t, she convinced herself.

  Only a few hours remained before the free trial expired; it seemed unlikely that she would be following through with her plan.

  Oh well, she thought to herself. The journey to becoming the best version of yourself and living your best life didn’t have to start on the first of January. Calendars are a social construct anyway.

  6 January 2021

  Standing up for herself and speaking up more was also on Zeenat’s self-improvement list. Growing up as a middle child in the small town of Ajmer, with parents who worked full-time as doctors, it had been easy for Zeenat to stay in her comfort zone: quiet, observant and happy. She never needed to step out of it, explore new avenues.

  Before she moved to the US, her younger sister had told her, quite sternly, to try to make friends with Americans and other international students, as opposed to sticking with a closed Indians-only group and returning home with an incomplete educational experience. Zeenat had intended to follow her sister’s advice; however, once she had arrived in Binghamton, she had found a room with Mona and Sunny within a week, and been introduced to their friends. In class, she’d sat next to Prateek, and then become friends with his friends. Without trying, she had found herself within a bubble of exclusively Indian friends, at home and school.

  It was comfortable, familiar and fun. What did her younger sister know anyway? When you’re in a foreign land, it’s only normal to gravitate towards people who made you feel at home. She didn’t like that their group referred to Americans as ‘ye log’ (these people) or that they used Hindi to talk about others behind their back, only, they did so in front of them. It made Zeenat uncomfortable, but, besides those minor grievances, she liked her group of friends.

  Well, everyone except Priyanka. For reasons Zeenat couldn’t discern, Priyanka seemed to have chosen to criticize her every move. Zeenat had a lifelong experience of staying within the lines, so the fact t
hat her every action was now able to entice outrage and ridicule in someone was unchartered waters for her.

  It had started with small jibes like, ‘Oh, you’re wearing that T-shirt again?’ which gradually built its way up to more personal things. Priyanka questioned why Zeenat never shared photos on Instagram. And why Zeenat still talked to her boyfriend back in India, instead of putting an end to the misery of a long-distance relationship and finding someone new in the US. After the first few months of the coronavirus lockdowns, when the restrictions had been somewhat lifted, Priyanka was constantly curious about why Zeenat chose to avoid joining them for their backyard barbeques and game nights.

  ‘What are you afraid of? We don’t have COVID. And even if we did, even if you got it somehow, you’ll live!’

  ‘I just want everyone to be safe,’ Zeenat would say to defend herself.

  ‘Come on! Don’t be such a buzzkill.’

  Zeenat was proud of herself for not giving in to peer pressure. Even though she hadn’t said all the things she wanted to say to Priyanka, she had stood up for herself in a small way and done only what she was comfortable with.

  In an ideal world, Zeenat would’ve gathered the courage to show Priyanka the graphs with the rising numbers, news about small businesses shutting down, people dying, healthcare workers begging and pleading everyone to stay home. Just because the government wasn’t enforcing a lockdown any longer didn’t mean people couldn’t still use their better judgement and keep everyone safe. Instead, Zeenat simply muted Priyanka’s Instagram account, in order to avoid seeing her break all precautions and live it up in a pandemic.

  One day, Zeenat would stand up to Priyanka. But for now, she was focusing on her own mental health while still maintaining COVID safety. She ensured that she went for a twenty-minute walk every day, no matter how cold the weather. It energized her, sustained her motivation to get up in the morning.

  This particular morning, she had decided to go to a Starbucks to get herself some coffee. She wasn’t much of a coffee drinker; fully aware of her obsessive tendencies, she made sure to stay away from caffeine to avoid an addiction. But every once in a while, she would treat herself to an almond milk latte.

  ‘Thank you,’ Zeenat said through her mask, picking up her cup from the counter.

  It wasn’t until she was outside and had lowered her mask for a sip that she realized that the barista had used cow milk instead. This was a problem not only because Zeenat was trying to avoid animal products as much as possible, for the environment, but also because she had developed an intolerance to lactose upon moving to the US and consuming growth hormone–infused dairy. Maybe not a complete intolerance, but definitely a sensitivity.

  She contemplated her options. She had already taken a sip. Maybe she hadn’t spoken clearly enough? Placing orders at Starbucks was always so stressful. Maybe it wasn’t the barista’s fault. She couldn’t possibly confront him when she wasn’t sure. But she also couldn’t drink dairy without risking diarrhoea. Wasn’t there another Starbucks close by? She pulled out her phone with freezing-cold fingers to check how far she would have to walk to get the right order of coffee.

  No, a voice inside her jolted her. You know fully well that you placed the right order. You practised it on your walk over.

  She had. She knew she had placed the right order, making sure to speak very clearly.

  Don’t be a pushover. How would you ever stand up to Priyanka, your friend, if you can’t even stand up for yourself to a stranger?

  She knew what she had to do. It took Zeenat a few moments, but eventually, she did put one foot in front of the other and walk back into the Starbucks.

  18 January 2021

  In the first two weeks of January, Zeenat’s life hadn’t transformed quite as much as she had anticipated. 2021 wasn’t very different from 2020. Her big plans for fitness had failed so far. She ended up buying the app, after the trial ended, but hadn’t even started the six-week programme yet. All she had managed to do were two twenty-minute sessions of Pilates. That wasn’t nothing, she told herself now. At least she wasn’t completely inactive like she had been in 2020. Even if she kept up this low-intensity, infrequent schedule of once a week, by the end of the year, she would still have done fifty-two more workouts than she did the year before that.

  In any case, fitness was a marathon, not a sprint. Even if she did manage to do six weeks of six high-intensity workouts a week, it didn’t mean she would never have to exercise again for the rest of her life. Of course not. She had to find something that she didn’t only love but could also sustain. Pilates wasn’t it. She might try yoga next.

  This internal monologue made Zeenat feel better and she moved on to the next big health-related self-improvement goal she wanted to work on: nutrition.

  Zeenat was trying to switch to a vegan diet. It started when she developed a sensitivity to lactose and began researching alternatives. That opened the floodgates to the evils of the American dairy industry and its environmental impact, which in turn led her to a research conducted by the University of Oxford, asserting that cutting meat and dairy products from their diet could reduce a person’s carbon footprint by up to 73 per cent. Upon further inquiry, Zeenat found that a vegan diet was considered to be the ‘single biggest way’ to reduce one’s environmental impact on earth. It conserved water, kept the soil and air clean, reduced energy consumption, and, if done right, could be more nutritious for the body overall.

  In the past, Zeenat had dismissed veganism on the basis of misinformation and prejudice. Vegans were often made fun of, considered snowflakes and seen as people who thought they were superior to everyone else, people who judged others for consuming meat. But the more she read, the more Zeenat realized that the foundation of veganism was quite strong, its arguments quite valid.

  These arguments made her change her diet setting on her fitness app. Now, she was determined to cook nutritious, vegan meals for one month, to start with. She had been successful too, though it hadn’t exactly been easy, with Sunny cooking butter chicken in the kitchen while she chopped vegetables for pav bhaji.

  ‘Are you seriously not going to eat with us today too?’ Mona asked. She sat perched on the counter, looking down into the pot of chicken.

  ‘I’ll eat with you … but not what you are having.’ Zeenat shrugged, chuckling. Veganism seemed like such an important step in the right direction in her own head, but whenever someone else talked about it, Zeenat felt as though what she was doing was so silly.

  ‘Dude, you’re missing out,’ Sunny said teasingly.

  ‘Don’t tempt me! If I’m going to make it, I need your support!’

  ‘And our support you shall receive,’ Mona said. She took the ladle from Sunny, ran her finger over it, and licked it clean. ‘Too bad this is so delicious. Ghar ki yaad aa gayi, yaar. It has made me homesick.’

  ‘You’re bad.’ Zeenat shook her head and looked away, and mumbled under her breath, ‘Fourteen days to go.’

  ‘And then what? You’ll go on a meat rampage?’ Sunny asked.