The Age of the Walking Cadavers

We live in a ghostly age. Everywhere I look, I see wraiths flitting about with the lower halves of their insubstantial forms draped in trousers the diameter of which looks less than even the diameter of phantom legs. Blink and you’ll miss this unearthly sight. But blink again and a kin will come floating by. I don’t know whether it is the bite of their jeans, or the other-worldly joy of being able to fit into a pair of leggings, but these spirits always walk with a spring in their step. Their feet hardly ever touching the ground, they drift about in a realm far removed from the rest of us mortals who have to scrape away a lot of flesh in order to clothe our skeletons.
Recently I was taken in by the unwonted optimism of my inner self (who, by the way, lives a completely sheltered life inside me and is not to be blamed) and I decided to buy myself a fresh pair of jeans. Perhaps it was the sight of so many translucent legs-in-denim that pushed me into the hands of blind tailors or maybe it was the very real threat of finding myself in a stage of undress only suited to a lover’s eyes in public. I rather think it was the latter. Still, I am glad to say that I am no longer the naïve, wide eyed young girl who walked into shop after shop after shop, haunting the assistants in my search for a pair of trousers that would fit human legs. In fact, as I stalked out of the last few of my would-be wardrobe suppliers, I rather think I heard hysterical laughter and dying-duck gasps. But, in my defence, I do think shop assistants should be made answerable for the misdeeds of anorexia-supporting, cloth-constrained guilds of tailors.
Still, whatever agonies they suffered, I am sure they pale in comparison to what my body and soul were put through. My legs were chafed raw with the relentless expulsion into leggings at least four sizes too small. My back feels crippled by the frequent twisting around to see if my derriere looked like something a hippopotamus dragged about. And my soul has a king sized dent from discovering each time that I did, indeed, resemble the hindquarters of a fairly greedy hippo. The last mentioned wound may never heal, and I might have to forever live a cursed half life, especially if my poor, battered soul keeps receiving these socks in the jaw that knock it out cold for days on the end.
The Kalyug of Indian mythology has arrived; the age of the walking cadavers is here. I must admit that I am a tad surprised at how remiss medical researchers are. They spend all their time (and a good deal of resources) trying to find cures for obscure diseases (and publishing reports about the percentage of people with one toenail longer than the rest who will live 5 months longer than their peers, or some other such fascinating fact) while there is an exodus of skeletons making merry on our streets, unchecked. With Kareena Kapoor bringing back the size zero with the swooning sway of her barely-there figure in Tashan, toilets all over the country are reeling under the additional strain, while farmers and other agriculturists watch and weep over piles of food grains going to feed farmyard rodents.
There are, of course, righteous (and rather, for the want of a better word, substantial) people continuously slamming the disappear-into-thin-air physique. But who wants to listen to reason, the voice of reason carries no weight with us.
Anyway, to stop digressing, let me end the day dreams of those of you who were hoping to encounter a half nude girl hysterically wandering about (or shudders, if you pictured an African jungle colossus disguised as a human). You won’t. I did find myself a pair of trousers which do not make me look a like hippo that has been stuffing its face childhood onwards. I only resemble a starved one now, one that hails from the famine stricken lands of Ethipoia.