‘This is gaslighting.’
‘Aren’t we too old to be using these terms loosely? Or do you want to maintain your rizz? Because no cap, you still want to be mad relevant.’
‘That’s gaslighting again,’ she says. ‘And talk about yourself. Thirty isn’t old.’
‘I’m twenty-eight.’
‘You look older. You should try running.’
And with that, she slaps her headphones back on and starts running at a speed that makes me nauseous and sends tremors of pain through my knees.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m sitting on the mats to do some crunches, but what I’m really doing is scrolling through the comments on my last podcast and waiting for Amruta to wrap up her interminably long workout session. She always trains till failure. This is at odds with my training philosophy: train till slight discomfort. She’s holding planks with determination as if the world’s weight rests on her back, not Atlas’s or the mythical Kurma turtle. Her workouts are a spectacle. They involve dumbbells, kettlebells, all kinds of bars and bands,sweat, blood and sometimes, tears. They are motivating, but also demotivating. I try to tell her that gym’s for vanity, it’s to do a double-bicep flex or jut butts and click pictures, but she makes it an extreme sport.
‘That was six minutes,’ she says.
‘That was half my lifetime,’ I correct her.
‘Hey?’ A voice says behind us.
We look up to find a woman standing over us with a look of confusion and hope. We are used to girls and women walking over and either appreciating Amruta or asking what she eats to keep in shape. Amruta usually gives some honest but generic advice which no one ends up following. Unless fitness advice is complex and comes from a neuroscientist who’s also at 4 per cent body fat, no one takes it seriously.
‘I’m Drishti. I have seen you in the gym a few times,’ says the woman. ‘Actually, I just gave birth. Actually, not just. It was about a year ago. But it feels like just.’
‘Congratulations!’ says Amruta brightly. ‘Is it a boy or girl?’
The woman ignores the question. She’s in a hurry. ‘My friend just told me that you’re also a mother. But you don’t look like one at all. I thought you were in college or something.’
The woman tries hard to not stare at Amruta’s tiny waist.
Amruta wipes off her sweat. She rolls her mat. ‘Two of them. Boys. Twins.’
The woman’s eyes flit to Amruta’s waist again.
‘Hmmm. Actually, I’m freaking out. About all these extra folds,’ she says, panic and disappointment in her voice, pointing to her belly area. ‘How did you get rid of the belly?’
Amruta is about to answer her when she rains down more questions.
‘Is there anything specific you did? Something you ate? Or didn’t eat? Did you have a caesarean too?’
With a gentle tap on her arm, Amruta says in a soft tone, ‘You look amazing. Don’t worry about it. Take your time. It will go, sooner or later. There must be already so much running about with a one-year-old. Has your baby started walking?’
The woman’s in no mood for generic responses or body positivity. ‘How later is later? How old are your kids?’
‘They are ten.’
Shocked, the woman takes a moment to recompose. It happens every time Amruta tells people she’s thirty and mother of two ten-year-old boys. Amruta’s dedication to living forever, her allegiance to Retinol, sunscreen, and her petite 5’1” frame, her heart-shaped face, delude everyone into believing she’s in her early twenties.
Drishti looks Amruta up and down, then blushes, embarrassed by her action.
I butt in, ‘It’s okay, we all check her out occasionally. A little more than occasionally.’
‘I had my kids early,’ clarifies Amruta.
I seize the moment. ‘But if you want tips on raising kids, you can always listen to our podcast. It’s called Kids Raising Kids. It’s available everywhere. Audible, Spotify. The works.’
‘Daksh!’
‘What? We can’t promote our own podcast?’
