The Joke

THE JOKE still haunts me. I live with it every day, its poltergeisty appearance not leaving me for one waking second till I just wish it would lock me up in my T.V. and then GO AWAY. I’m familiar with it, THE JOKE, so I talk to it. Basically it makes Chandler-esque sarcastic comments like, “Could that Sub BE anymore cheesier?” and I ask it to shut up. THE JOKE, that happened so long ago that I have forgotten its origins, its incidence and its basic geography, has come to define me and the woman that I will turn into one day (-most probably my mother, but I blame the THE JOKE and not THE GENES which I shall talk to you about in a separate story.)

[THE JOKE- 199?-200? – THE JOKE was introduced in the late 90s, it entertained many people while it was alive (and thriving). It brought smiles to the faces of adolescent pimply boys and bitchy long-legged girls.
The JOKE is a part of the genre that combines the power of the ordinary joke (building up of the tempo that culminates into a thundering climax) and the one-liner. THE JOKE needs no tempo and yet it is no ordinary one liner- it is itself, the very punch-line, a punch line being far more superior to a mere one liner.
Once the cool kids grew up eventually, and turned into what most cool kids turn into i.e. the world asks them to get over themselves (if I am lucky the girls even become fat.)- THE JOKE fell from the glory it had enjoyed in its former heydays and it transferred from the lips of a well meaning friend into my heart and soul and began living parasitically within me. I was feeding off the drama; it was feeding off my misery.]

It’s just A JOKE, she tells me. Me, I’m the Fat Kid. Every group on the playground has a Fat Kid. My personality is defined by that title. See, once you’re branded the Fat Kid, they call you names that pertain to your “Fat Kid” status (fatso, moti, etc). It’s not a mere title, it is your persona. You subscribe to all its prejudices. You live by its commandments-

1. Thou shalt forever be branded a glutton because well...everyone knows that Fat Kids eat a LOT. Every bite of food you eat shall be judged, and dare you be viewed eating an orange bar in public, thou shall be humiliated by the calling out of names aforementioned.
2. Thou shalt NEVER be asked out by a boy. It is below any normal weighted boy’s dignity to be seen with a fat girl. Your name, shalt however come up regularly, linking you to several boys so that well, they get very very embarrassed and say, “Shaat app!!! Why would I date HERRRR??!”
3. Thou shalt be picked last for every team. Because well...who are thou kidding, everyone knows Fat Kids cannot run.
4. Thou shalt be ignored at all social gatherings, gossip sessions, dance-parties and that’s because thou art not cool enough.

Sometimes I was not invited. I think that’s when the THE JOKE began to be circulated.
It went like this, “Imagine Bubbles in a BRA.”
I am Bubbles. The butt of several, “I enjoy watching Bubbles in the bathtub” jokes as well but NOTHING, nothing in the world (not even the 2 out of 100 in MATH, which, according to my mother should have been my first priority at that age and was the biggest disgrace this family had faced since the hush-hush wedding of a barely legal cousin), could make me cry like THE JOKE.
“Imagine Bubbles in a bra?” I screamed. “How could she? That WHORE!” (I doubt I used “whore”, must have been more like “that IDIOT!” at that time but it betrays the magnitude of rage that was in my heart.)

I wanted to prove to myself that they were wrong. So I went to the bathroom, stripped off my shirt and looked at myself in the mirror. The fact that my mother was making me wear ugly, conical bras to “make my breasts develop the right shape” did not help. No one told me that I should be glad that my breasts were growing rapidly out-of-control while those girls, almost four years older to me, did not have any. The point being, what I saw in the mirror that day, confirmed THE JOKE.

From thereon, every time someone laughed at me during a game of hide and seek, I freaked out, are they imagining me in a bra?

People I did not know very well, people I had just met, people I passed on the street- I looked at them and I wondered- Are they too imagining me in a bra?
The fear of not being bra-worthy plagued me all my life.
We’ve grown up. Barely anyone calls me Bubbles anymore. I am hardly in touch with my childhood frenemies. But every day I stand in front of the mirror in my bra and the ghost smiles at me tauntingly; I know it will never leave.