Modern times call for modern terrors and there’s none more terrifying than the attack of the ‘Super Skinnies’. You know those skin and bone women alongside whom if you stand, you light up instantly like a neon sign that says ‘I eat’. Those owners of a frame so lethally skeletal, they can turn a party into a science lab by just removing their clothes.

If accosted by a ‘Super Skinny’, prepare for conversations made up entirely of exclamation marks and frequent emissions of “I’m too fat”. Since they see themselves with a specially made internal camera, their chatter consists of imaginary calorie intake. Just last night, they are wont to whisper, we ate up an entire microscopic mountain of chocolate pie.

A glass of warm water in their hand emphasises their guilt at going oral even as the other hand on the hip checks for any bloats from the sips. In their world everything edible is low-fat, skimmed or invisible. After the sudden burst of magical energy that accompanies their confessions of cake-eating and the subsequent cardio penance, they lapse into silence and thin smiles of “soon I die, only I don’t have the strength to actually say it”.
Being thin is a virtue like honesty and loyalty and the world is bulging with odes to the underweight. Mika may sing, ‘Big girls, you are beautiful’ and Fergie may insist ‘Big girls don’t cry’, but bigness itself is not celebrated like in the deluded days of Ruben and Renoir. And though Robert Morley says in his essay, ‘In praise of obesity’ that— “fat girls are not swooped upon by thin boys attracted by their lack of contour and definition and carried off into domestic slavery”, there are large, grumpy men melting into small svelte figures in newspaper ads under the headlines of ‘before’ and ‘after’.

All pain no gain...
At any given party a silent assessment carries out a catty contest for the ‘slightest’ woman. Conversely, big-made women are free to engage in real conversation, loud guffaws and a free hand with the food while the slender ones totter about in their corsets and high heels. Yummy mummies are the norm at school gates while XXL women gather at candle-lit couture counters opened specially for them. Gyms are filled with girls frantically going somewhere on the treadmill as apparently there is no such thing as ‘too thin’. Breakfasts are replaced with cigarettes and laxatives are swallowed in double doses to maintain low weight.

Fearing that models may die on their way to the ramp, some European countries have banned catwalks for the comatose. Only those emaciated women whose nostrils can be actually seen to move while exhaling are now allowed.

Super Skinnies will choose blindness, limb amputation and kidney failure over being chubby any day. Sex appeal on the deathbed means everything to them. As fad diets give way to anorexia, androgyny is all. If wonky blood pressure, ulcers, blood poisoning, depression, osteoporosis, dental decay and heart problems go into the making of a size zero figure, they don’t care. For Super Skinnies are dying to be thin. Well, literally. As their vital organs shrivel up, the haunting beauty of the dark circles under their eyes and hip sockets grows more intense.

They make the most darling corpses though. With collarbones that jut out with such sweet poignancy and a bruised pout that can only come out of committed bulimia. The coffins, too, are smaller and take up lesser space on earth. As disgruntled worms turn to grass for nourishment, their bodies disintegrate faster for the lack of flesh and the decalcified bones just scatter into pretty talcum powder.

Advocates may argue that all that gauntness lends an air of mystery; sure, it leaves no clues to missing body parts. There are no undersides to their arms, no visible space for the small intestine, no cheeks to accommodate thirty-two teeth, no hips for the jeans to stay hooked on to. Their mouths are moving but their wit inaudible. Many things are beyond them, like mating and multiplying and an average bowel movement. The Super Skinnies can actually be seen shrinking in public when their hungry body starts to eat itself.

Hurry and watch them while you can, before they go completely extinct.