First there is a solemn oath that you will hit the gym regularly. You don’t visit a gym or go to a gym. You hit the gym. Somehow that makes the whole enterprise sound more muscular than it really is.
After the customary free couple of sessions, you negotiate for a quarterly or yearly package and, if you are a newbie with some spare cash and sufficient guilt about your body, appoint a personal trainer. That makes everything official. You now own gym shoes, perhaps a new T-shirt, maybe one of those bottles with measurements on the side, and you are ready to transform yourself.
Delhi gyms are strange places because they seem to have evolved into complete ecosystems. Very often there is a café right below, selling croissants, lattes and grilled sandwiches to people who have just spent forty-five minutes trying to burn roughly the same number of calories that one enthusiastic bite will put back.
Maybe the café is there because hunger does hit hard after a treadmill session or some resistance training, especially if you have managed to finish without your legs turning wobbly or some entirely new ache suddenly appearing in a part of the body you had forgotten existed.
These days the gym itself is equally well prepared for the consequences of exercise. There is usually a physio somewhere on the floor who can give you a massage, stick those mysterious cupping glasses all over your back, or bring out that strange ultrasound contraption and move it patiently over whichever muscle has decided to object to your new fitness ambitions.
The people are far more interesting than the equipment.
I have always wondered what is inside those large bottles that the very muscular fellows keep sipping from between sets. Sometimes the liquid is pink, sometimes fluorescent green, sometimes just cloudy. They drink it with such seriousness that you assume it must contain something important. Protein, electrolytes, amino acids, creatine, or perhaps some industrial compound which explains why their arms are the size of my thighs.
My own nutritional struggle is more basic. The treadmills are on the first floor beside a large glass window overlooking the street, and from there I can often see a vendor making Maggi or frying bread pakoras. The glass is sealed, so obviously I cannot smell anything, but somehow my brain produces the smell anyway. Hunger has its own technology.
I am meanwhile struggling along at slightly faster than twelve minutes per kilometre because somebody once told me that below twelve minutes counts as a brisk walk. I never verified this but have accepted it as medical science and now spend half my treadmill session staring at the pace reading. Eleven forty-eight feels reassuring. Eleven fifty-six is still respectable. The moment it slips beyond twelve I increase the speed slightly because, God forbid, after coming all the way to the gym I should merely be walking.
Then you look around and your own little achievement immediately becomes embarrassing.
There is an auntie in salwar kameez who initially looks as if she has come in for some gentle doctor-advised exercise. A few minutes later she is lying flat on a bench with rather large dumbbells in both hands, pushing them upwards as if this is a perfectly normal thing to do at her age and in that outfit. Her dupatta somehow remains completely under control while I am still trying to maintain 11:58 on the treadmill without holding the side rails.
At the other end is a tattooed woman who can apparently open her legs a full 180 degrees. She does this casually, as if the human body was always meant to fold that way. Nobody openly stares. Delhi gyms have their own etiquette. Everyone simply notices through one of the many mirrors while pretending to inspect posture, shoelaces or something else entirely.
Then there are the serious weightlifters, usually in T-shirts whose sleeves have more or less surrendered. They grunt, lift enormous weights, sip from those mysterious bottles and occasionally decide that the moment needs to be documented. One of them will call the housekeeping guy, hand over his iPhone and say, “Bhaiya, ek photo lena.”
The housekeeping fellow instantly becomes a photographer. The man adjusts his stance, twists slightly so that the biceps receive proper representation and then checks the result carefully. I have never understood what these photographs are for. Instagram perhaps, matrimonial circulation perhaps, or maybe simply documentary proof that on Saturday morning at 9:42 the shoulder definition was particularly good.
People also arrive dressed in every conceivable combination. Some have expensive coordinated gymwear and shoes which look more technologically advanced than my first car. Others are in ancient track pants, faded corporate-event T-shirts or fluorescent footwear which can probably be seen from Gurgaon. Somehow everyone manages.
The building design adds another layer to the experience. The treadmills are on the first floor and the serious weights are on the second, directly above your head. This means that while you are peacefully trying to improve your cardiovascular health, somebody upstairs is deadlifting.
For reasons known only to weightlifters, heavy weights apparently cannot be put down gently. They must be released with conviction. Every few minutes there is a huge thud from above and the ceiling gives a small shake. I invariably look upwards and imagine that one day a twenty-kilo dumbbell, accompanied perhaps by a portion of the second floor, will come through the ceiling and land somewhere near treadmill number six. It would be a rather Delhi ending to a health programme: you joined the gym for longevity and were finished off by someone else’s deadlift.
The stationary cycles are another matter entirely. I have tried them and remain convinced that the person who designed the seat bore a private grudge against the human crotch. Within minutes your body is sending very clear messages of distress, yet the experienced cyclists appear to solve this by bending even further forward, thereby concentrating more pressure exactly where the complaint has originated.
I usually return to the treadmill, which at least presents familiar risks. Keep the pace somewhere between eleven and twelve, don’t stare too long at the Maggi vendor, listen for suspicious noises from the floor above and occasionally check whether the salwar-kameez auntie has progressed to lifting the bench itself.
By the time I leave, the macho fellows are still sipping their mysterious liquids, auntie is still lifting weights, somebody is still posing beside the dumbbells and the croissants downstairs are waiting.
Delhi believes strongly in balance.
Lets go to a jewelry shop and peek inside……..
