Chronicles from Mehra World: What My Personal Trainer Didn’t Tell Me

Madan halted the car outside the club entrance, got out, walked around and opened my door.

I took a deep breath and braced myself for what was to come.

Getting out of a car under my own steam was one of the first things I had learnt after learning to walk. Yesterday, however, it had somehow become a carefully choreographed operation.

I retrieved my left leg with both hands, hoisted it across the threshold, and gently deposited it on the porch outside with all the reverence Anjali displays while unpacking the expensive china for dinner when her parents are visiting.

Having rehearsed the manoeuvre some seventeen times since morning, I repeated it with the right leg with the quiet assurance of a principal dancer performing a well-rehearsed routine.

I was pleased with the progress.

German car manufacturers think of everything. Whoever designed the overhead grab handle had clearly envisaged a day when some structurally compromised gentleman would need it. They had no doubt imagined him to be comfortably into his seventies, not someone still basking in the carefree exuberance of youth at fifty-eight.

I clutched it with my right hand and, with the deliberation of a man defusing a bomb, hauled myself into an upright position.

Once standing, I continued holding on to it for another few seconds, not merely because I had developed a touching emotional attachment to it, but also because I thought it prudent to allow the various components of my musculoskeletal system to reach some sort of working consensus.

Only after I was reasonably certain that both my legs intended remaining beneath me did I let go.

Success.

I was standing.

Entirely unsupported.

In my current condition, this qualified for inclusion in my personal list of athletic accomplishments.

It was just as well that no four-year-old happened to be in the vicinity. At that particular moment, even an affectionate poke from one would have had me draped across the porch!

Madan instinctively extended his hand. I wanted to clutch it for dear life and never let go—but checked myself at the final fraction of a second.

It occurred to me, just in the nick of time, that I was a man he had always regarded as a veritable pillar of strength, someone virtually indestructible, given that in his twenty years of loyal service he had watched me scale the corporate ladder with the nimble grace of a mountain goat.

I did not deem it appropriate to let him witness a man hitherto invincible in his eyes reduced to a mere mortal who appeared to require a winch and a team of labourers simply to untangle himself from a sedan.

Idols falling from grace invariably hit the devotee harder than the floor hits the idol.

No. One has to draw the line somewhere. If a gentleman begins accepting assistance while merely getting out of a car, civilisation itself is placed on a slippery slope. Today it is stepping onto the porch. Tomorrow someone is tying one's shoelaces. By Friday they are buttering one's toast.

The Mehra tradition has always stood firmly for self-reliance, mention of which can be found in the family journals, though probably not under circumstances involving quite this degree of physical scrutiny.

The walk to the entrance couldn't have been more than thirty yards, but I approached it with all the care of a gentleman attempting an elderly Himalayan rope bridge without having first updated his will. Every step was negotiated individually. Muscles whose existence I had remained blissfully unaware of for six decades had suddenly decided to introduce themselves, each with its own unique form of protest.

The doorman saw me approaching.

"Good morning, Mr. Mehra."

High-end club doormen are remarkable people. They have seen it all. Triumphs, disappointments, domestic disagreements, discreet romances, drunken stupors—everything. The delicate nature of their profession requires them to maintain an expression of inscrutable serenity that would have earned them distinguished careers in diplomacy.

Yet I could have sworn that I detected the faintest flaring of one nostril and the slightest arching of one eyebrow. Those, as we all learnt on our mothers' knees, are the unmistakable signs of momentary consternation, which my state must have evoked.

I wanted to acknowledge his greeting with my customary wave. Unfortunately, that would have required one arm to raise the other—the third-class lever principle, as we all learnt at our fathers' knees. That would almost certainly have persuaded the doorman's remaining nostril and eyebrow to join their colleagues in consternation. The poor fellow would almost certainly have lost his job.

So I settled for a grunt instead. We Mehras do not care to see hardworking, inscrutable doormen rendered unemployed.

The lounge was mercifully only a short distance away.

Ashish, my friend of thirty years and fellow partner in our consulting venture, was already there.

The empty sofa beside him seemed to beckon invitingly.

Ordinarily, sitting down requires no more thought than blinking. Yesterday, it demanded the sort of planning generally associated with lunar missions.

I approached it cautiously, turned with the precision of an oil tanker entering harbour, reached back with both hands to locate the armrests and, after confirming their structural integrity, began lowering myself in stages. I glanced at Ashish, expecting him to leap up and offer a pair of sturdy helping hands. My friend of thirty years, however, merely sipped his coffee. Not a nostril twitched. Not an eyebrow arched. The man had no sympathy.

Eventually, gravity and sheer Mehra grit reached an understanding.

I landed.

Not elegantly.

But safely.

I leaned back, carried out the customary post-landing inspection to ensure that all major systems remained operational, and then closed my eyes to say grace.

When I opened them again, Ashish was looking at me over the rim of his coffee cup.

He paused, looked me up and down once more, and added,

"Was it a truck?"

"No. Yours and Neeta's personal trainer. Anjali engaged him for us yesterday on Neeta's recommendation."

"Karan? You hired him?" Ashish asked.

"I didn't," I corrected, in the hollow voice of a man whose domestic sovereignty had been comprehensively bypassed. "Anjali did. I merely happened to be standing in the vicinity and was swept up as collateral damage. I didn't even get an opportunity to exercise the people-assessment skills I had spent three decades developing."

"And then?"

Like I said, the man had no sympathy.

I gave him a pained look and continued, "It appears Neeta's recommendation carries a strategic significance that renders all established due diligence procedures entirely redundant. The inconvenient fact that he had managed to transform both you and Neeta over the previous six months settled the matter. You should have warned me, Ashish."

"Buddy," said Ashish, "if we husbands were privy to even half the conversations our wives have with each other, we could prevent most of the disasters that eventually befall us. I can see that Karan subjected you to the initial assessment exercises."

"Yes. I didn't know that, before one is allowed to lift anything heavier than the TV remote, the modern fitness industry insists on assessing your strength, flexibility, balance, endurance and, I suspect, emotional resilience. In the process, I was introduced to muscles I had apparently owned for sixty years without ever having made their acquaintance.

And did you know, Ashish, that apparently the calves contain what fitness enthusiasts refer to as a 'second heart', which means, technically speaking, I survived four heartbreaks before I met Anjali, not two? I could have justified drinking twice as much on each occasion."

Ashish shook his head, sympathetically this time. "I keep saying, wives should be actively discouraged from talking to each other."

We nodded in perfect agreement and sighed simultaneously, acknowledging the futility of the thought.

"Listen, Arvind," said Ashish, "there's no getting out of it now. I'm speaking from personal experience. You might as well grin and bear it.

"And look at it this way. Throughout your career you've turned around businesses, brands and teams. None of those turnarounds happened without a fair amount of pain, did they? Think of this as your own personal turnaround. Bear the pain. It'll do you good, just as it did me."

I tried to point out that he was perfectly right. Each had indeed involved a fair amount of pain. The only minor distinction was that the pain had been borne rather more by others than by me.

Unfortunately, he silenced me with a dismissive wave of his hand. I would have responded in kind, but was in no position to match that limb movement with one of my own.

Having taken full advantage of my inability to protest, he took another sip of coffee and continued.

"We're all retired now, and only a couple of birthdays away from that extra return on fixed deposits and the luxury of a separate queue at airports. We spent more than thirty years investing in companies, brands and careers. It's about time we started investing in our own health and well-being."

There has always been one quality in Ashish that has set him apart during the more than thirty years I have known him.

Wisdom.

He was almost always right.

I looked at my coffee, then gave my limbs a wistful glance, fully aware of what they were about to endure over the coming months. They had served me faithfully for nearly six decades. This seemed a singularly poor way of repaying their loyalty.

But, as Ashish had once again correctly observed, there was no getting away from it. I couldn't quite manage a grin, so I settled for a grimace and quietly surrendered to the inevitable.

And so it began.

Looking back now, I realise that these last few months can be neatly divided into two distinct and equally harrowing phases.

The first consisted entirely of discovering muscles. The second consisted of feeding them.

It turned out that what I had always thought of as a leg was, in fact, merely a convenient collective noun for quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, glutes, abductors, adductors and an entire, highly sensitive supporting cast.

The discovery extended to the rest of the body. What I had cheerfully regarded for nearly six decades as a single, integrated human being was, in reality, a loose confederation of highly opinionated muscle groups, each fiercely protective of its independent democratic right to protest, as indeed befits the democracy we live in.

Then there were the names of the exercises. Some sounded perfectly harmless. Take the lunge, for instance. I had always imagined it to be the final desperate step a hungry man takes to secure the last piece of cake on the dining table before someone else got there. In reality, it turned out to be a prolonged negotiation involving one's knees, hips and dignity.

Others, however, seemed more honestly named. The Bulgarian Split Squat, for example. Why Bulgaria, a country whose tourism brochures feature smiling faces, ancient monasteries and beautiful mountains, should lend its name to an exercise clearly designed by medieval interrogators remains entirely beyond me.

And then there were the bear walks, duck walks and frog jumps. I have yet to fathom why a retired corporate executive should be expected to master the locomotion techniques of assorted members of the animal kingdom.

Had any client during my corporate career obtained photographic evidence of me performing these manoeuvres, every commercial negotiation thereafter would have lasted no more than thirty seconds. They would merely have placed the photographs on the table and quietly pointed to the dotted line.

And for a man who was still negotiating the complex business of rising from a yoga mat, being asked to adopt the "Superman" posture struck me as wildly optimistic.

Somewhere around the third week, I became deeply convinced that Charles Darwin had got the entire theory of evolution completely backwards. Here I was, a reasonably senior corporate executive who had spent three decades climbing to the top of the corporate food chain, voluntarily dropping to all fours every morning and making a determined journey back through the evolutionary process.

I also discovered that, within the personal trainer's lexicon, several perfectly ordinary English words possess meanings entirely unknown to any lexicographer.

The word last, for instance, bears no discernible relationship to the standard laws of linear time. There is always another 'last' set waiting patiently around the corner.

Recovery merely describes the interval required to move from one instrument of torture to the next.

And then there was the concept of failure. I learnt, with mounting alarm, that failure was no longer an unfortunate outcome to be avoided at all costs, as it had been throughout my corporate career—a principle in pursuit of which I had nearly killed myself on several occasions—but the precise destination one was expected, indeed encouraged, to reach during every single set.

I did make one discovery, though.

Not altogether surprisingly, Ashish was right again.

Just as he had predicted, despite this sustained assault on both my body and the English language, my body began showing unmistakable signs of cooperation.

The persistent ache gradually receded. I found myself standing noticeably straighter and breathing more easily. Climbing the stairs no longer resembled an unsupported Himalayan expedition, and even the weighing scale, hitherto one of my less enthusiastic admirers, began producing figures that I found unexpectedly agreeable.

I also derived a wholly disproportionate sense of achievement from discovering that I could now impersonate Clark Kent's alter ego for one hundred and eighty uninterrupted seconds, even without the benefit of a blue suit.

By some minor physiological miracle, the exercises had become habit. My body had quietly learnt what it needed to learn.

The gruelling routine had also performed one invaluable public service. It had completely cured me of my previous, all-consuming obsession with the minutiae of United States politics—an unfortunate affliction documented earlier in Mehra World.

Unfortunately, another had quietly taken its place.

Nutrition!

The trouble with the Mehras has never been the subject itself. It is our inability to pursue anything casually. Every passing curiosity is treated as though it were a doctoral thesis awaiting completion.

And so it was with me. Food ceased to be a source of epicurean pleasure and became a full-fledged scientific discipline. Compared with what followed, my earlier obsession with United States politics now seemed little more than a casual recreational pursuit.

A photograph of everything I ate or drank was dutifully submitted to ChatGPT, which painstakingly broke it down into protein, carbohydrates, fats, fibre and every other nutritional statistic known to modern science, thereby reducing one of mankind's greatest technological achievements to the clerical task of auditing my lunch.

I began reading food labels with the same concentration I had once reserved for the annual reports of blue-chip corporations.

Evenings, once reserved for a quiet sundowner and gentle reflection upon the events of the day, degenerated into high-pressure closing exercises, reminiscent of my CFO on the last day of the financial year, desperately searching for one last accounting adjustment before the books could be closed. Except that, in my case, the balancing figure was invariably a few elusive grams of protein.

One evening, Anjali looked up from her phone.

"Arvind, we're at Atul and Seema's this Saturday. Music, drinks and dinner."

Besides being one of our partners, Atul had been my friend for well over thirty years.

"Seema just called," Anjali continued. "The theme for the evening is Amitabh Bachchan film songs. She has asked you to come prepared with a few."

She paused before adding,

"She has only one request."

I looked up.

"She says you're perfectly welcome to discuss American politics if you absolutely must. But under no circumstances are you to discuss calories, protein, healthy fats, fibre, macros, micros or anything else capable of being measured in grams over dinner."

I stared at her in wounded silence.

This, I felt, was monstrously unfair.

I had devoted months of painstaking scientific inquiry to the subject. Entire evenings had been sacrificed in the noble pursuit of nutritional truth. To have this body of research declared socially unsuitable after two glasses of wine and a kebab struck me as a singularly philistine attitude.

The Mehras, however, as mentioned earlier, are pillars of propriety even under considerable provocation. Creating an unpleasant scene was therefore quite out of the question. That did not, however, mean one was obliged to suffer in complete silence.

I therefore selected Kishore Kumar's Kisi Baat Par Main Kisi Se Khafa Hoon from the film Bemisaal as my chosen vehicle for conveying the depth of my emotional injury.

The fact that the film bore a title that could equally well have described my choice struck me as an encouraging portent. I allowed myself a small, smug smile.

The appointed evening arrived. Carefully selected glasses were repeatedly replenished with beverages of varying colours, strengths and compositions, vocal cords were exercised, and, in due course, dinner made its appearance.

I poured every ounce of restrained anguish I could summon into what I considered a performance of quite exceptional artistic merit, fully expecting my carefully coded message to land with devastating subtlety and leave the audience sitting in stunned, contrite silence.

Instead, the audience responded with enthusiastic applause, generously complimenting both my choice of song and its rendition.

My carefully guided missile had, it appeared, been routed to the entertainment department instead of the communications department's decoding unit.

I abandoned further attempts at artistic protest. The Mehras, after all, also know when to put their tails between their legs and execute a dignified retreat.

The evening, I am happy to report, was a tremendous success. Atul and Seema, as always, proved to be wonderful hosts.

On the drive home, Anjali smiled.

"You were magnificent tonight, Arvind. The song was beautiful."

She paused for a moment before adding, "I'm rather glad your subtle little message didn't land."

She had missed nothing. I found myself absurdly proud of her.

"It would only have made everyone uncomfortable. They had invited us for an evening of music, laughter and friendship."

She smiled again. "Your tennis and Bollywood anecdotes, on the other hand, had everyone in splits."

She was right, of course.

I perked up.

Then I reflected.

Perhaps it really was time to move on.

After all, I had already discovered that the only reliable way to get rid of one Mehra obsession was to find another.

I could certainly do that!

But that, as they say, is an entirely different story.

Chronicles from Mehra World will continue next week.

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New to Mehra World? You may also enjoy What Retirement Did to My Brain—the first adventure of Arvind Mehra.

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