My mother never told me about periods. It must have intimidated her to talk to her offspring about female body-parts that, granted a wish, many of her time and age would simply wish away. She delegated the task to my cousin sister, her sister’s daughter. In those times on summer vacations children would be systemically be sent to live with one or the other of them. On one such sweltering hot afternoon my cousin began the narrative: “I’m going to tell you about something that is going to be private and dirty.” I was ten, she fifteen. Her voice spoke of scandals. It froze me. In fact I was in such a disbelief that when I was returned home after my annual exile I went straight to someone else I trusted, a next door aunt: “Is this true?” The aunt, otherwise a jovial company, nodded gravely that day. She asked me who told me like I was party to a crime scene that could lead me to danger, and before she let me go she added once again how I must never speak a word of it ever in front of a male.
Since that day few things changed. One was TV watching. When commercials ran between old Bengali movies on Sunday afternoons I’d sink into my seat a little, afraid that it’d come up now, now that Baba was home, now that Baba is sitting beside me watching TV too. At times, danger could strike even in middle of watching news on DD National. The blood was not blue till then, for our shuttered Panorama 14 inches was Black & White. But the shame was all the same.
Few months later, one day at school at the morning assembly Father Principle sounded strangely solemn. Did we lose at the inter-school, many of us thought, waiting for the bomb to drop. Once the morning prayers tapered after the usual crescendo, instead of waving his hand at the prefects so traffic could move he coughed into the mic. “Boys can move.Girls are to stay back.”
We were ushered into the large theatre hall in batches and seated by height. Volunteers from some NGO were waiting, their eyes betrayed a seriousness that bordered on grief. If you notice carefully you’d know there is a certain difference between secrecy and privacy. But we were too young to tell one from another back then. All we knew for then was we were guilty. To be girls. Given a choice that, each one of us would wish we were not the target audience; it wasn’t a concert we’d pay for. The volunteers ran some videos as the message they had for us was too sad to be delivered in person. They gave us blue envelopes as takeaways, sanitary pads – one regular and one extra-large, and leaflets with reproductory organs that belonged to last chapter of class 10 biology textbooks. We slipped the packets into our backpacks and refused to answer the boys, breaking eye-contacts, when they asked what it was about.
I don’t have any memory of the first time I got my period. No, not a single one.
I wonder why, though. Wasn’t it important, wasn’t this a milestone even? I guess that is how our minds work: our memory filters through our moments. It returns those that are pleasurable. Only. Rest, they send to dark caves inside. So much so that even moments of acute trauma is often lost in the maze, to be uncovered decades later if at all under the covers of white blank walls of therapy clinics. So I’m not surprised I don’t remember a thing of that day. I however vaguely recollect the shame of red stains on me or my friends, something we usually wrapped at the waist with school sweater, or placed our backpacks upon with extended belts hung uncomfortably across our aching shoulders. My fingers on my stomach, my eyes to the ground, my fists in fits of shame. If you were a girl you’d so much just want to disappear in thin air. But you couldn’t. You still had to go to school, you still had share tiffin with the boys and you still had to watch TV with Baba.
As I write this I am 38 now. I still have that girl in me which wants to disappear, I still have the voice in me which just wouldn’t damn speak. I still lose me all the time, I still try and find and lose again. We all do. The voice, the body, the shame.
We carry the shame with us where we go, not just on those days but on all the days. To boardrooms, to the kitchen, to even the marches that we call our own. Our voices fall low. Our heads fall down. Eyes to the ground, palms on our stomach.
Charged guilty without a trial.
For a crime we didn’t do. Sentenced.
A sentence that, to think of it, makes life possible on this planet after all.
A verdict. Cruel.
Yet, the jury agrees. That we shall be.
Like the stains that would never quite go, as hard as you tried.
The womb, the power, the passion.
A power of such an order that we cannot but be scared. Ourselves.
Mothers. Daughters. Cousins and Aunts.
Rags and riches.
Palms on our stomach.
For we shall be.
The river of blood.