Birds and Bees

Some mornings Ma would leap out of bed, throwing the quilt away, uncaring if she stepped on my feet in her hurry, or on my father’s. She rushed to the bathroom and locked the door behind her. I would sometimes notice the brown stain, oval and well-shaped, like a bird’s egg upon the sheet. Some mornings I would also notice the stain on Ma’s petticoat before she ran out in her hurry. I was not much older than 7 or 8. Ma’s saree seemed always to have come undone these mornings, or perhaps she ripped it off, too fast for me to remember their patterns now. I saw only the light brown petticoat and the darker brown shape of an egg upon it. The spot fascinated me, so perfectly shaped, like a disproportioned moon. But Ma’s rush to get into the bathroom left me disturbed and curious. And when Ma returned from the bathroom she asked, “Was there any blood in your potty? Your soo soo? Let me know if there ever is, okay?”

I became still and just stared at her, confused. She repeated herself. All I heard was some mumbling and nothing else. I shook my head, barely breathing. Was I about to die? Was there a death-disease in my belly waiting to extract from it chunks of blood? For hours after the question, I held my motions. I did not want to go, did not want to look into the commode, and did not want to find the tint of blood upon its ceramic. Had the death-disease already crawled in? Had Ma locked herself in the bathroom so she could cry?

There was never any talk of the birds and bees in our house, meaning that there was very little to speculate from. Ma, a non-believer in any faith, never quarantined herself or other women during their period. She continued to cook and clean, to pray and eat, to sit with friends and neighbours. She even went to the temples. She really did not care, and had it not been for those occasions when she had to make a dash, I would have thought, even now, that my mother never suffered the awful days of menstruation.

However, because she never made a big deal about her period, she also never told me anything about it. I was very young, and by the time I was nine I was already away, getting an education in India. She had missed the window of opportunity to have ‘the conversation’.

In India, I lived in a hostel. There were around forty girls between the ages of eight and 18 living there. At least 50 percent of those girls had hit puberty and were in the cycle, and yet, even there, menstruation was a subject not openly talked about. The older girls thought it their duty to protect and shield the younger girls from puberty. When asked about the sanitary napkins, the older girls made ridiculous and desperate excuses: calling the pads everything from little mattresses for dolls to stationary items required for their senior curriculum. “You will know when you grown up,” they would say, but they would never provide a satisfactory explanation. With 40 girls around me, I still grew up only partially aware about my own body, my sexuality, my future as a woman and a mother, my blessings and my curses.

When in Grade 7, at the age of thirteen, I finally saw blood. But did I fully comprehend? I cannot say for sure. Vandana, a classmate, had started her period earlier and her older sister had taught her all that she needed to know in a manner so hush-hush that Vandana, already a shy person, told us nothing. And we too were afraid to ask what exactly it was she was not telling us. When I finally did get my period I was alone and unsure. We were in Shimla, in the midst of a school excursion, supposed to be having fun, and here I was in a bathroom, close to tears, without a clue about what I was supposed to do. I asked Vandana for a sanitary napkin and when she gave one to me she burst into tears. “It hurts,” she wept, unable to stop her sobbing. I cringed. I wanted to throw the pad down, to run away, become a child again—to remove every drop of blood from my veins so there would be none on my underwear. I stepped away from her, perplexed by her tears, unsure of what it was that hurt.

The irony is this: I was not a naïve girl. I had by thirteen fallen in and out of infatuation with several boys, had experienced eve-teasing and street-side harassment and had some boys scribble poems referencing my non-existent breasts on the school bathroom walls. I had been teased and called Smriti Jessia—suggesting I was a wannabe model because, in a moment of inspiration, I had let a slim strand of hair slip off my ponytail and dangle over my face. I had watched movies with semi-explicit sexual scenes; “close your eyes,” our seniors would say and I would, although only for the first few seconds. I knew all the common ‘bad’, words, but I did not know how to use a sanitary napkin, did not know what it really meant to have your period, did not know that for years, I would live in dread of certain weeks and days. I did not know that for five days every month I would lose my appetite for food, fun, and life. For five days I would want nothing more than to curl into a tight ball and weep, pray for the cramps to stop, and wonder why evolution had not taken care of this menace.

Everything that transitions a girl to a woman is taboo in our society. Everything is rendered dirty through silence and mystery. Nothing is seen as biological; nothing is looked at through medical eyes unless something goes wrong. I wonder how it would be if girls could live in an open world of comfort and camaraderie, how much more we would understand about our bodies, ourselves, our parents and peers, if only we were better informed.