Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Part 2

I Want Dirk Nowitzki to Host Sat.u.r.day Night Live So Much That I'm Making It the t.i.tle of My Book

Barf Me to Death and Other Things I've Been Known to Say

The Last Mango in Paris (this would work best if "Mango" were the cheeky nickname for an Indian woman, and if I'd spent any time in Paris)

So You've Just Finished Chelsea Handler's Book, Now What?

Deep-Dish Pizza in Kabul (a touching novel about a brave girl enjoying Chicago-style pizza in secret Taliban-ruled Afghanistan)

There Has Ceased to Be a Difference Between My Awake Clothes and My Asleep Clothes

I Don't Know How She Does It, But I Suspect She Gets Help from Illegal Immigrants

I Forget Nothing: A Sensitive Kid Looks Back

Chubby for Life

I DON'T REMEMBER a time when I wasn't chubby. Like being Indian, being chubby feels like it is just part of my permanent deal. I remember being in first grade, in Mrs. Gilmore's cla.s.s at Fiske Elementary School, and seeing that Ashley Kemp, the most popular girl in our cla.s.s, weighed only thirty-seven pounds. We knew this because we weighed her on the industrial postal scale they kept in the teacher's supply closet. I was so envious. I snuck into the supply closet later that same day to weigh myself. I was a whopping sixty-eight pounds.

Some of the first math I understood was that I was closer to twice Ashley's weight than to her weight.

"Don't be closer to twice a friend's weight than to her actual weight," I told myself. This little mantra has helped me stave off obesity for more than two decades.

My mom's a doctor, but because she came from India and then Africa, where childhood obesity was not a problem, she put no premium on having skinny kids. In fact, she and my dad didn't mind having a chubby daughter. Part of me wonders if it even made them feel a little prosperous, like Have you seen our overweight Indian child? Do you know how statistically rare this is? It will then not come as a surprise to you that I've never been thin in my life-except the day I was born, when I was six pounds.

It's a small point of pride that I was a six-pound baby, because from my limited understanding of baby weights, that's on the skinnier side. I flaunt my low baby weight the way really obese people must flaunt their dainty, small feet. It's my sole claim to skinny fame.

My older brother Vijay, and me, interrupted as I was plotting to eat him.

As you can see, from then on, however, it was full-speed-ahead food paradise! In grade school, I would vacillate along the spectrum from chubby to full-on fat until I was about fourteen. Being overweight is so common in America and comes in so many forms that you can't just call someone "fat" and have the reasonable expectation anyone will understand you. Here's the breakdown:

Chubby: A regular-size person who could lose a few, for whom you feel affection.

Chubster: An overweight, adorable child. That kid from Two and a Half Men for the first couple of years.

Fatso: An antiquated term, really. In the 1970s, mean sorority girls would call a pledge this. Probably most often used on people who aren't even really fat, but who fear being fat.

Fata.s.s: Not usually used to describe weight, actually. This deceptive term is more a reflection of one's laziness. In the writers' room of The Office, an upper-level writer might get impatient and yell, "Eric, take your fat a.s.s and those six fata.s.ses and go write this B-story! I don't want to hear any more excuses why the plot doesn't make sense!"

Jabba the Hutt: Star Wars villain. Also, something you can call yourself after a particularly filling Thanksgiving dinner that your aunts and uncles will all laugh really hard at.

Obese: A serious, nonpejorative way to describe someone who is unhealthily overweight.

Obeseotron: A nickname you give to someone you adore who has just stepped on your foot accidentally, and it hurts. Alternatively, a fat robot.

Overweight: When someone is roughly thirty pounds too heavy for his or her frame.

Pudgy: See "Chubby."

Pudgo: See "Chubster."

Tub o' Lard: A huge compliment given by Depression-era people to other, less skinny people.

Whale: A really, really mean way that teen boys target teen girls. See the following anecdote.

DUANTE DIALLO

There have been two times in my life-ages fourteen and nineteen-when I lost a ton of weight over a short period of time. At fourteen, I lost the weight because of Duante Diallo.

In ninth grade, my cla.s.s was made up mostly of the same kids with whom I had gone to middle school, with the exception of about twenty splashy new students. One of those students was Duante.

Duante Diallo was a handsome kid from Senegal who'd moved to Boston to play basketball for our school. He was immediately the star forward of our varsity basketball team. We had a not-great artsy-private-school basketball team, the kind made up of slender boys whose primary goal was to seem well-rounded for college applications. But you could tell Duante would've been the star of even a really good team. He was beloved by teachers because he was a brave kid for being so far away from his parents, and beloved by students because he was good-looking, a jock, and had an interesting African accent. Also, people couldn't believe the stuff he had done in Senegal, like smoke, drive a car, have s.e.x, live in a village, and hold a gun. When he was introduced at a student a.s.sembly, he chose to give a short speech where he taught us a sports cheer in Senegalese. In the hallways, small crowds would form around Duante as he shared stories from his past. Once he shot a cow with an AK-47. He was so popular you could barely look at him without being blinded by cool.