I belong to an educated, lower-middle-class, North-Indian family. I’m a single child, a boy; and we don’t talk about periods at home. I couldn’t understand the advertisements of sanitary pads till my 8th or 9th grade, an age when most of the girls had already started menstruating.
Why is the girl sad, why is she running now, is it a kind of diaper, what does it soak, I had no clue.
So, like many of us, my introduction with menstruation began with the famous ‘reproduction’ chapter of biology textbooks. Even though the teacher didn’t explain it, I read it out of curiosity and understood the most of it, perhaps. Still, I had no idea about cramps or anything ‘real’. Adult jokes on periods were another ‘source’ of knowledge about it. As I was growing up, I started to observe and understand why a female family member is not attending pooja, or what it meant to keep pickles or food items ‘pure’.
During my 11th or 12th, my friends and I had no clear knowledge of periods but our ‘observation skills’ used to inform us that if a girl was having periods in class. The red spots on white skirts, sudden washroom permissions, their whispers, and often embarrassing faces were enough to let us know about ‘the time of the month’. It was a means to humiliate girls for a few boys and a topic of ‘intentional avoidance’ or evasion for the rest of us.
While graduation, I opted for humanities, left science, and biology and I don’t remember any encounter with periods during that phase, except in fiction. There was this novel where a vampire protagonist says that their thirst for blood is of a different kind, else he would have gone insane while a lot of women walk on road while having periods. I thought about that point for a long time, relating it to several vampire-witch novels I had read then.
And then happened something that enlightened me: relationship.
I was in a long-distance relationship at that time and periods used to play a crucial role in our meetings. When you meet someone special after a gap of two or three months, you definitely do not prefer to see them under cramps and flow. Our meetings used to get influenced by her dates. On several occasions though, we met during her periods, and only then I got to know how a woman suffers during that phase. With her, I got to know several facts like the pain is massive during the first days, how it affects her moods and activities and all.
That sudden knowledge of an ill-informed boy from a girl of almost similar age somehow affected his attitude toward the female body. My mind was apparently learning about periods, their pain as described by her and everything related, but then, I got a new problem. I could not behave normally.
So, whenever I got to know that she is having periods, I used to feel anxious that she must be going through such pain and I should stay a bit away from her. Just like a person having a big wound or painful bleeding needs some space, I felt she must be crying out for space as well. So, I used to be extra gentle while hugs and uncomfortable while tight hugs. I used to feel that she would collapse out of pain if I hug her tight or make her walk at my own speed.
Whenever I get to know that a woman is having periods, I feel similar to what I feel after seeing a pregnant woman with a big belly – scrupulously protective and dramatically conscious.
This nature is something that I’m constantly trying to fight, even now.
So, then, I got took my admission to post-graduation. I read about women struggle, feminism, and everything that a person must read in order to unlearn the patriarchal notions which are consciously, subconsciously fitted inside our brains. There, I had friends who were chill and maturely knowledgeable about it and it was quite a liberating, learning experience. Now, I could talk about periods. I could speak the word ‘Period’ without giving it a disrespectful tone (not in front of my family though). But I was opening towards the subject.
A few months back, it was around 6 in the morning; we were going to ghat when a friend said that she is expecting her periods. I accompanied her to all the medical shops and whenever she asked for pads in a shop, I stood next to her. I didn’t want to stay hidden from the eyes of the shopkeeper. She bought it, and that was the first time I held a sanitary napkin. In my post-graduation!
And it was orange-coloured! Way beyond my imagination! I held it and, laughed at my stupidity of the past 22 years of my life. Today, I am still learning and unlearning. I feel bad about the way periods to have been stigmatized, or tabooed in our society. When a ‘co-ed student’ like me could have no familiarity with such a natural phenomenon like periods, and have such wrong notions about it, I feel gender equality has definitely got a long way to go in India. Now, I talk about periods as casually as I talk about Netflix. Recently, when I texted a ‘what’s up?’ to a female friend, her reply was, ‘Periods. Period.”
I laughed and advised her to rest, and eat her favourite chocolates.