This story can begin with many little incidents. Ranjith Emmanuel Padmakumar’s life is packed with so many of them, not all ending on a happy note. Such has been his life for the first 18 years and then something happened to change it in the next two. In one word, the story is about weight-loss. But it is not the beginning or the end that needs to be told, it is the in-between and the before-it-all. From that overweight teenager with 197.5 kg on him to the 85-kg 20-year-old who has several modelling offers waiting for him, Ranjith has gone through so much, that when he speaks you hear the wisdom of someone double his age. There is so much of insight, so much of calm after all that storm.
“One look, and they judge you as someone who is lazy and does nothing but eat all day,” says Ranjith, looking tall in his three-fourths and T-shirt, one inch shy of six feet. “I will never let any of these new good things get into my head or judge anyone by looking at them. I know what it is like to be on the other side. I have been there all this while.” He didn’t know what was wrong with him till he met gastro enterologist Dr Narendranathan who told him he was born with Metabolic Syndrome X. “That means whatever I eat gets converted into fat, unlike in normal people where part of the food is turned into energy. So I’d have no energy which makes me want to eat more.” When he was one, he was already 18 to 20 kg. By grade eight he was 140 kg. He was that heavy kid in class who broke the chairs he sat on.
Unsurprisingly there were kids to tease him, teenagers on bikes who’d circle the rick he took and tell him to go die. Ranjith never responded. He’d take his sadness home to his room, and silently suffer. Even teachers didn’t spare him. He remembers a day when one of his teachers was looking for a student to join the dance team for annual day, and Ranjith offered to help get someone. “She turned to me and said ‘you have done enough. It is because you are so overweight that I have to now go look for someone else’.” Another time he was insulted by a faculty in front of his juniors and teachers with the same words: “you are overweight” — the insult hurled at him like it was something he did on purpose. He skipped school for days, and this was at a time he was head boy and doing well academically.
But then his mom would always come to the rescue. She told off the people who told him off till they realised their mistake and apologised. She also came as his saviour at a time he thought he was going to die because of his weight gain. “I couldn’t even walk properly anymore. One day mom happened to see what I was searching for on the internet — the different emotions you feel during death. So then she took me to do the surgery that she had not until then felt ok about.” That was on January 22, 2014, the day Ranjith turned 18.
“The actual surgery happened on June 17. It is called gastric sleeve and reduces the amount of food that my tummy pouch can hold at one point – from around 2000 ml to about 150. This means I can only take so much food at one point.” It was very difficult at first and depressing for he felt he ate nothing at all. But the results showed soon. In the first month he lost 30 kg. By the third month it was 50 kg. “It was not easy to exercise at first because I could hardly walk for ten minutes. But slowly I walked more and more, to one and a half hours a day.” He surprises you by telling you he is yet to regularly start gym. He sure has the looks of it. No wonder then that he got his first modeling assignment for November. He has also got a job waiting for him in the aviation industry.
“I love to travel,” says the young fellow. “But what I really want to do is become a musician.” He sings, has won prizes at the school level for western music. But he knows he should wait for that, always being the practical mature young man. His life has taught him to be. For the insults had come not only for his size but for being openly gay. “Like icing on cake,” he sighs. Not that it has ever stopped Ranjith from working for gay rights. He is one of the nine board members of Queerala, an organisation that works for the LGBT community. And here again, it was his mom Mary Ann who stood by him. “I told her I was gay when I was 11, she asked me to wait some years before I am sure. At 16, I told her I am sure. And then she said, ‘Now there will be two guys messing up my house instead of one’.” Says Ranjith, “Without her, I wouldn’t be half the man I am today.”
