In my experience, ‘Periods’ teach us a wide range of lessons, one of them being that you’ll always be treated differently because you’re a woman. And if you look around, the blatant discrimination and horrifying, humiliating stigma is strikingly obvious with respect to this normal body function. After more than a decade of menstrual cycle, I’ve some bizarre, funny, embarrassing tales to tell, but one stands out, which also remains one of the most poignant experiences of my life till date. Well, my mother thought ‘not telling me anything about periods until I start getting them myself’ is the perfect way. Though as I grew up I found out, despite decades of experience, she herself wasn’t much knowledgeable about periods (and that’s why sex education should be mandatory). Anyway, I was in school and idiotically ignorant about what’s in store for me. Sure, I’d seen the commercials where pads’ soaking capacities were boasted aloud, but the thought that it’s for soaking blood flowing from our vaginas was beyond the imagination. Sure, nature can’t be that gross or gory. So one day, as usual, I pranced to my class, sat down and chatted with my classmates, and when the class started, we kept our conversations alive in hushed voices. What happened next is a little jumbled in my head – so traumatic that I can’t forget and even tried to pretend that it never happened. So, what happened was, I had a blood spot on my kurta, my classmates (girls) certainly knew something about it, because it was reported to a teacher, and I ended up sitting in library, waiting for my dad to pick me up. In pain, confused, terrified and ashamed. Meanwhile it occurred to two of my ‘friends’ that it’s a perfect time to tell me that a teacher is raging mad at me, and wants to see me now. I told them that I was not feeling well, and I’ll handle it later, but they were insistent, so I decided to see it through. Now here’s something – our school had two buildings, and my classroom and the library were in different buildings. Halfway through, they laughed and said it’s just a prank. I was so upset and angry, I decided never to talk to them. Well, after a hotchpotch of facts from my mom, I returned to school after two days. And that’s when the nightmare began. I was a bit early, most of the benches were vacant, and I put my bag on one of the most preferred benches and left. Finally something was happening right. After assembly when I returned, there were no bags on the bench (which just never happened because we had long benches, meant for four students.) Not only that even the bench behind me wasn’t occupied. At the moment, I wasn’t upset, just confused. So I did what I still do, find an isolated place, and just forget about everything. I went to the library, and spent a few hours. When I went back to the class in the recess, I realised that my bag had been shifted to another bench, which was a bit far and was normally used for dumping the school projects. Anyway I spent next fifteen-twenty days on that bench, with barely anyone speaking with me, ignoring me as much as they could. I was in utter confusion. My overactive imaginative brain created multiple scenarios of what I could have done to offend the entire class at once. To be honest, periods never seemed like a good option because I knew it happened to all the girls, so obviously my girlfriends wouldn’t treat me like that because of it. For once I thought that it was all because I was an SC, but that still didn’t make sense to me because that had never been an issue before for most of the people. However, things almost became normal after a month or so, and we all pretended that nothing had ever happened. Except, I just could not forget.
#MyPeriodStory: Untouchability
