Woman, Eat.

I was 23 when I first heard a woman say, ‘I am hungry.’
No woman I knew was ever hungry. I hadn’t been hungry since the second day of high school.
She was older; she spoke of her appetite the way people do of a Razor, or trans fats.
It was a matter of willful acceptance. I remember this today perhaps,
5 years later, because she wasn’t the type of woman my mother called
proper slender sundar.
She wasn’t skinny. To be a full, filling body and to let anyone imagine you with food?

I began to order figments of fried fluff from the bar. Colours, shapes, olives,
something petite. But she said ‘I am hungry hungry.’
I took her to shah alam across the street. She ordered murtabak with the works.
She wasn’t afraid to be seen in public with
food fork feasting.
She ate as I sat with a diet coke. Angry, confused, smug.
No 23-year-old woman ate; everyone knew that.

Hunger seemed corrupt.
We were taught to appreciate how much men could eat.
In an endearing vote of virility. ‘What a big boy.’
Men ate from my plate. In an endearing voice of naivete. ‘My lil girl.’
I have instinctively known to leave bigger portions for brothers; to let fathers have their fills first.
What 23-year-old is only ever
peckish famished starving.
They seemed like made-up words supplied to women around me so they never had to say ‘I am hungry.’

She ate as I sat with a diet coke and a bristled esophagus.
I unrepentingly slid into the day I learned the word bulimia in a Chicken Soup paraphernalia
seniors snuck from the library. I had only ever seen the word; when pronounced it sounded like
no thank you had a big lunch am watching myself.
My stomach was lined with so many ‘I have never seen you eat’ I had swallowed like compliments.

A woman said I am hungry, and I remembered that I was too. Perhaps murtabak with the works
set off a Pavlovian ring in me and I resentfully found my tongue flooded.
It is possible I had always been sitting at that table
wagging lapping ravenous.
I had learned how to order, what is a cleaver knife, where to put my hands.
Textures, flavours, eye contact.
Twiddling my thumbs, gums bleeding, burping hot gas.
I had always been ready. Just waiting for someone to say, ‘Woman, eat.’