An NRI's Indian gymming experience!

The first time I got on a cardio machine in Kolkata I realised I really was not in California any more. A trainer came rushing up to me.

"Sir, are you sure you want to use that machine?"

I looked at him quizzically.

He asked to see my chart. At my gym in Kolkata, everyone has a chart. It's done when you join. A fitness evaluator measured my height, weight, biceps, triceps, chest ("please expand your chest, sir") with a tape measure and then wrote up a daily exercise regimen which I am not only supposed to carry around with me, but also get signed at the end of each workout.

When the trainer in the cardio room demanded my chart, I handed it over as if I was some shady immigrant asked to show his documents.

"Aah," he said, stabbing at it triumphantly with his finger. "See.  You are in the Weight Gain programme."

I've always been mystified by that. Not muscle gain. But weight gain. I smiled weakly and said, "Well, I don't want all my weight gain to come from fat."

The trainer was not amused.

"Sir, surely there will be some fat gain with muscle gain," he explained patiently. "But first you gain weight. Then we can work on losing the fat."

I stared at him wondering why I needed to gain the fat to lose it.

Eventually we came to a compromise. I would be allowed to do cardio, but I was not to let my heart rate go over 127 and I would only do the running track and the stationary bike, not the machine I had selected.

"That one will cause heavy calorie loss," said the trainer. I had a vision of all my weight gain disappearing into a puddle of sweat on the machine itself. I should have been warned.

A friend of mine, also from the US, said the first time she went to the gym and someone came up waggling a chart at her, she was annoyed. She was used to going to gyms and slapping on her headphones and working at her own pace, undisturbed.

"Do I have to listen to you?" she asked the trainer.

Sandip Roy is an editor and radio journalist with New America Media, currently based in Kolkata.

Illustrations: Uttam Ghosh

But in time, she said, she actually came to appreciate the trainers. It was nice to be taken care of.  It was good to be told what to do. It gave you some motivation and guilt tripping when they noticed you had not come in a few days. They were eager to help, forever fixing posture and hand grips. Like waiters at an Indian restaurant, all hovering around the table, they were ever present and always on call.

My trainer however abandoned me mid-routine to go get something to eat. "Biswajit, can you show sir the rest of the routine?" he said, unceremoniously dumping me into another trainer's hands.

Then when I went to get my workout sheet signed, the trainer tried to make me upgrade to a personal trainer or PT. "You have good triceps," he said flatteringly. "Take a PT for a couple of months. You will get a beautiful body."

When the fantasy of a beautiful body failed to move me to shell out few thousand extra rupees, he tried to sell me a pair of gloves. "Don't tell anyone. But I'll get it for you for Rs 50 less. Special," he said.

Gyms are something new for me anyway. I grew up shirking physical exercise of all sorts. Physical education was the bane of my existence in school.

In America I finally discovered gyms and started going more regularly. Over the years on trips back to Kolkata I've seen the gyms sprouting up. There are billboards everywhere. Full-body workouts. No machine workouts, Gyms with jiggling machines to redistribute the fat. Gyms in people's living rooms where the attendant turns on the fan and removes the covers off the machines when you show up in the middle of the afternoon. Nowadays there's even a Gold's Gym in Kolkata.

My gym is part of an India-wide chain. It's air-conditioned and very clean, much cleaner than the gym I used to go to in San Francisco where the locker room was always dirty. There are signs everywhere here that say "Outside shoes are not permitted." I had to take off my shoes to even tour the gym. Women with spray bottles and wipe cloths lurk around the Stairmaster machines ready to attack them as soon as you step off. A small dark man crouches next to the pile of mats wiping each used mat down as you're done with it. At my American gym I had to pick through mats carefully avoiding the ones with the sweat stains. Here there are two neat piles -- used and unused.

The machines are fairly new. But there's only one of everything. And some of the weights come in kilos and some in pounds causing endless confusion. There are televisions everywhere. No one bothers with headphones. So everyone on the cardio machines is listening to her own channel. Since most of it is Bollywood music videos it all somehow melds into one big dance number. The trainers spend a lot of time staring at the televisions while their clients' huff and puff. Some days a barefoot deejay, who looks about seventeen, spins his own mixes. The sound system is cranked up, Sheila ki jawaani ricocheting off the mirrored walls.

I've learned to recognise the clientele. There are the chubby housewives who come mid-morning. There are the marriageable girls coming for that quick pre-wedding tune up. There are the wanna-be muscle boys who spend all their time checking themselves out in the mirror. But it's the trainers that are the most interesting. Young men and women from the outer suburbs of the city -- this is suddenly their ticket into a new world.

"You are a journalist in America?" one said wonderingly. "So you do everything in English?" And I realise that like many parts of Indian society, the worlds of these men and women would not cross the upper middle class worlds of their clients. At most they might encounter each other in a departmental store or a grocery store in a mall where one is purchasing and the other is bagging groceries.

But in the gym their role changes. They might call you "sir" but they are still the trainers. They get to tell you what you are doing wrong. They get to banter with you about your day. They get to tell you that you need to lift that weight one more time. They scold the pampered sons of the rich who get cars on their 18th birthdays. For an hour or so, as you work out, they get to tell you what to do. And at the end of the hour, they get to sign your card.

Something is being flexed at these gyms all over India. And it's not just muscles.