Period Pride with Papa

I grew up in small town India in the 80s, and in the 90s during my teenage years PERIODS was considered one of the dirtiest words ever. There were horrendous incidents of my friends spotting their school skirts and then walking (yes walking, we lived in a hill station) with great difficulty to home covering the spot with a sweater or a blazer, the school’s small infirmary didn’t have any ready to use sanitary pads back then and most mothers and older sisters still living in their time wrap to even talk about it. At homes those four-five days meant isolation and untouchability (girls were considered impure during periods.)

I was almost 13 plus and awaiting my periods to begin still when my father (yes you read it right) my father- papa sat me down to talk to me about periods. He first asked me what I knew about my body and anatomy and the changes happening to me as a young girl. I told him my sketchy know-how garnered from biology chapters and library books and even a sanitary pad company sponsored workshop in school about periods but I also told him about my fears about periods and how most of my friends use what they called “rough cloth” and how it kept them discomforted those 4-5 days.






He talked to me in a very technical and non- evasive way about periods, asked me what I would prefer using the new belted sanitary napkins that were the norm then or we can make our own disposable ones using cotton gauze and cotton, because he didn’t want me to use “rough cloth” like the other girls.






I loved making things with my engineer dad so I said okay let’s make our own, and that’s how I was taught to made my first disposable cotton gauze sanitary napkins by my father. A few months later I also got used to sometimes using the commercial ones and then came another major hurdle- I had a major leg surgery for which one of my full legs was in plaster. Two days later I got my periods. Lying straight in a bed with a wet pad wasn’t a good feeling at all, that’s when my father in the pre-internet days did some research and found about tampons. He bought me some and not only advised me to use those but helped me change them too, I was 15.







That one parent-child moment changed my perception of body image, sexuality, menstruation and gender forever. I passed on my new-found knowledge, confidence and ease about periods to many friends though both me and my father got labelled as "strange" as a result most of the time.



Ever since I was always eloquent about menstruation awareness and related issues and now that my father is no more and I am myself a parent to a pre-teen girl I realize in that one moment my father gave me that voice and that confidence.






He never allowed anyone in the family including my religious mother to put any menstruation related restrictions on me regarding going to the temple/kitchen in the house or touching the pickle. I could tell him I am having menstrual cramps and he would make the best hot chocolate ever and give me a hot water bag to place on my tummy.








Yes I was so blessed to have such an evolved parent who moved beyond the pre-defined boundaries of "masculinity", fatherhood and motherhood and dis all he could to raise a strong, confident, feminist-humanist who is committed for life to keep using her voice and agency to pass on the favor to as many young girls as I can.

My late father with my daughter

Kadam Chhota, Change Bada!


Every change begins with a small step, whether it’s a change within your family, or the whole country!

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The #PeriodPride Warrior’s Rhyme

Image Courtesy: Google

Grandma tradition

Spoke to little P

When you get your period

Listen to me:

“Pickles could rot

And plants could die

If you touch cattle

Their udders may dry

Don’t say prayers

Or touch any holy book

Don’t enter the kitchen

And don’t you dare cook

Why do you need to

wash your filthy hair?

Do not touch your husband

If you really care

Your dirty, unclean cycle

Can make men and children ill

If you go swimming

You’ll drown for sure

or be a shark’s kill

If you go dancing

Or play out in the field

You will stain your skirt

and your family honor indeed.”

But P knew her body

So she wasn’t really afraid

She laughed at the don’ts

and a new song, she made

“My dear dear granny

Granny full of traditions

I will not follow your taboos

Not any of these conditions

Across borders and cultures

Women of the world unite

In feeling no shame

For blood that makes life

So listen my dear

I will do as I please

I am a #PeriodPride warrior

your taboos I shall defeat.”

“This blogathon is supported by the Maya App, used by 6.5 million women worldwide to take charge of their periods and health.”

Other posts for this blogathon :

Not just blood, not just red

An Intimate untouchability

Not Just a Woman's Problem

The Curse of a Taboo

Not Just a Woman’s Problem #PeriodPride

This is a fictional account of how damaging can menstrual taboos and silence about reproductive health be for both men and women, and how men can support and encourage women and families to understand menstruation better and join hands to empower #PeriodPride.

“This blogathon is supported by the Maya App, used by 6.5 million women worldwide to take charge of their periods and health.”

In the small village Rohera near Rohtak, Manveer was the youngest of his five older sisters, well technically one of them- Mamta, his twin just two minutes older than him. She was the only daughter of the house his father and grandmother were kind too, because she had brought along a brother, an heir of the family.

While they were very young, all the older girls were married hurriedly, one after the other. Manveer was not very close to any of them and spent some time with them only on Rakshabandhan.

By the time Manveer and Mamta were ten years old, they were the only kids left around the house. The older sisters, three of them now had kids of their own and visited occasionally during the festivals.

The youngest of the four – Asha, however came more often, beaten and thrown out by her in-laws, as even after two years of marriage she had no kids. Manveer felt bad for her, he wanted to ‘protect’ her as he promised on Rakshabandhan every year. He wished he knew where babies could be brought from and he could bring her one.

Just days before their eleventh birthday, they were told Asha had died; she had jumped into the village well. He went with his father and uncles for her last rites and thought finally she was free of the humiliation and pain of not having children. Every one said women must have children; those who didn’t were useless to their families and society.

A few days later, his mother prohibited Mamta to play with him in the fields or go out alone for toilet. He argued a lot as to why he could and she couldn’t but his usually condescending mother only told him, “She is a big girl now and will soon be married off, so he should learn to stay away from her.”

Mamta stopped going to school also and would now work more around the house all the time, wear ‘chunni’ all the time and often complain of stomach aches. He could see her in pain sitting in a corner of the courtyard but during the ‘secret’ pains he was not allowed to sit near her and was told to avoid talking to her.

Soon Manveer found new friends in High School and just as the case was with all his other sisters grew distant from Mamta. It was their 15^th birthday and now just like big cities and films, he used to cut a cake and have a cold drinks and burger party for his friends, all boys of course.

Mamta was not allowed to come out and interact with any outside boys and men. As he sat flaunting his new mobile phone to his friends, he noticed her quickly slip into the newly made toilet in the house.

Minutes later, there was blood in the drain that ran out of the toilet at the edge of the courtyard. Manveer rushed to the toilet and asked Mamta if she was alright, he presumed she had fallen and hurt herself badly.

All his friends were sniggering meanwhile and the oldest of them Dinesh, pulled him away and told him she was okay, maybe having her ‘monthly woman problem’.

Image Courtesy : Google

Manveer knew a little about sex and how women had genitals (breasts and vagina) different than his own but he didn’t know anything about a ‘woman problem’. Dinesh was there expert on all issue related to women and sex. He even had videos of village girls bathing, or using the fields to defecate and proudly shared them around.

Dinesh told him that girls were ‘dirty’ every month for a few days and bled from ‘down there’ for a few days, only after they started bleeding every month, they could be ‘impregnated’ by a man.Dinesh was also constantly making fun of him and his sister’s stupidity and ignorance. He even made some crude jokes about Mamta’s body, Manveer didn’t like it but Dinesh was older and stronger and was kind of leader of the pack so he couldn’t retaliate.

Later as he returned home ‘ashamed’ and angry he told his mother how Mamta had made a spectacle of him in front of his friends, didn’t she know that the drain was open and didn’t she have any shame exposing her ‘dirtiness’ to boys.

His mother was very angered and as he sat outside with a glass of milk he was happy as she hit Mamta repeatedly with an iron tong. Ever since that day Mamta never looked at him directly, she would try to avoid him and stay out of his way at all times.

Soon after his Matriculation, he was sent to a hostel in the city and now he only rarely saw her. Family members were trying to get a good match for her is all he heard about her.

Then one day in winters the same year, his warden hurriedly sent him home citing an emergency. As he reached home he knew someone had died, maybe his old grandmother. The dead body was kept on the brick floor, it was Mamta’s.

He was told she died of typhoid. It had been ten days; he was eagerly awaiting his return to the hostel after the thirteenth day rituals when he found Mamta’s mobile phone in one of the drawers of his room in the house. It was one of his old phones that he had given to her, so that at times he could call on that to speak to his mother.

He switched it on out of curiosity. No messages, no call details. No photos. Only one video, he opened it. It was dark and shaky, some girl inside a dimly lit toilet, half-naked, it was Mamta removing a blood soaked rag from her underwear and replacing it with a clean one.

The video was only a minute long, he played it again and again and couldn’t understand why or what of it, but it filled him with anger and disgust. The angle was definitely from a hole in the roof across the outer wall.

So someone had made this and had sent it to Mamta? Why? He tried calling the number from which had been received but it was switched off. There were no answers for the curious questions in his mind, he could not tell such a shameful thing to his parents. He felt humiliated and violated, just like his sister.

Could it be Dinesh? But he had died due to a drug overdose months ago. After worrying about it for a couple of weeks though he went back to his hectic routine and forgot all about it.

Years later, just a week before his marriage as he was arranging his personals in his cupboard in that ancestral house, he stumbled on a tin box full of childhood stuff. In there he also found a faded big foam and glitter flower-shaped golden Rakhi, the last Mamta had tied to him. He held it tightly remembering her and there it was a small strip of paper taped under it. Mamta’s suicide note – it had brief broken sentences about her wishes for his long life, her agony, the blackmail, the shame, the frustration of silence, there were no names but a lot of claustrophobia between the lines.

Manveer quit his job with an MNC immediately after, he had found his life’s purpose. He initiated a start-up that made low cost sanitary napkins for village girls and was dedicated to menstruation awareness. He named the two programs ASHA and MAMTA.

Image Courtesy : Google

Every time a young village girl spoke confidently about periods, without shame, he felt his sister lived again. His enterprise was committed to ensure awareness that during menstruation women and girls must not be excluded from using water and sanitation facilities safely and without shame, must be able to participate fully in social, educational, productive, and religious activities and never be ‘ashamed’ about their bodies.

His workshops included young boys too as he believed that often in their lack of awareness it was boys like he himself once was made girls feel ashamed. Even if they wanted to talk about menstruation, they were prohibited to discuss menstrual issues with their mothers or sisters or their fathers and older men. As a result they had half-baked knowledge and used crude terms for it, teased girls and often acted insensitively or completely indifferent.

Now he was married and had a little girl and a little boy of his own. He was far better informed now and knew that they will be better siblings to each other than he was to his sisters. He knew and always said in all his workshops –

“Periods are not a woman’s problem; they are man and woman pride, the symbol of birth, the sign of the human ability to reproduce.”

He was one of the strongest voices now in the field of menstruation awareness and wanted more and more men and boys to join him in facilitating women and girls to exercise their reproductive health rights with joy, without any apprehension, stigma or taboo.

ASHA and MAMTA were flourishing, without fear, without shame.

Other posts for the same Blogathon

Not Just Blood,Not just Red

An Intimate Untouchability

An Intimate Untouchability - #PeriodPride

Image Courtesy : Google Images

“Hi! I am writing an article about menstruation awareness. Please share any personal memories regarding it, particularly about seclusion/confinement/restrictions, or the other names used for it. Your privacy will be protected. Thanks!”

I sent this text to about a 100 random women in my phone book, before I wrote this piece. Most of these women are urban, educated and seemingly liberal. Only 4 of them replied, surprisingly only those whose families were not silent about periods but despite awareness and understanding the issue had applied ‘minimal’ restrictions like not entering sacred spaces on them.

The silence and shame associated with talking about it to even a fellow woman is quite evident. Such taboos are passed on from one generation of women to another conveniently because women/girls are socialized into a state of ‘learned helplessness’ as suggested by Lenore Walker though in the context of domestic violence victims/survivors, where the victims/survivors begin to think of themselves, their anatomy and their sexuality as subordinate and dirty.

In fact body shaming, sexual shaming is sometimes more covert but aggressive in urban spaces. I can say this from personal experience that ironically the talk about periods began much earlier for most rural girls in my home state Himachal Pradesh than it does for most of our little girls in cities even now.

Little girls there know that every few days women in their homes and families are secluded because they are dirty and must remain separated from the rest of the family for those few days.

Periods in some local Pahari dialects are referred to as “Zudke”  ,literally meaning ‘clothes’, so it is not even referred to as anything related to the female anatomy, but to the clothes or rags the women traditionally used to soak the flow and how they had to wash everything clean once the dirty period was over. Even the popular Hindi words – Maasik, Maheena, and Mahavaari refer to its monthly occurrence, indicating no connection directly to the female body.

Image Courtesy: Google Images

Little girls by default in hilly villages become the carriers of food and messages to and fro between the ‘Obra’/’Khudh’ (cow/cattle shed) and the house as their mothers, aunts, female cousins and older sisters are confined/secluded during their ‘unclean’ period. They mustn’t touch the ‘dirty woman’ they are told, if they do they would have to bathe again, so they are instructed to leave the eatables at a distance and speak from a distance if they have to. It is believed and enforced by deep cultural conditioning that contamination from menstruating women can bring the worst curses from local deities and even lead to drying up of crops or secret diseases.

The irony is that they are confined to a corner of the cattle sheds traditionally and yet is believed that if a menstruating girl/woman touches a cow, the cow will become infertile – leading these girls furthermore to regard their own bodily functions as curse and impurity and be restricted to a corner even in that confined space.

The culture not only associates a routine female body function as unclean and impure but imposes seclusion on women in connivance with ‘god men’ and local deities, as women and families are often scared with curses and diseases so that they adhere silently to the seclusion and do not speak up against this humiliation month after month.

It is also important to understand the generic architecture of homes in the hills to realize how traumatic and humiliating this seclusion can be for most women especially young girls.

Traditionally the homes were wooden structures with two floors, while the upper floor was family quarters, the ground floor roomed the cattle and the sheep, so women were confined there during their periods. With changing times cattle sheds are now constructed as a single hut slightly away from the main house and the seclusion thus becomes even more evident and in some cases unsafe too. The door is locked from outside and in case of an emergency even her loudest cries may not reach the house.

To add to this turmoil is the fact that toilets if there are any are also constructed closer to the main house and the woman is often denied access to it during this time. If she uses cloth, she must wash and dry it to reuse in complete secrecy and if she uses napkins then these must be disposed secretly.

Social and economic upward mobility and some work by social initiatives and NGOs have probably increased awareness about menstrual hygiene and girls are increasingly using modern sanitary products but the discrimination at ground level hasn’t changed much. Women in some families might not be sent to cowsheds but even in their semi-urban or urban homes are confined to one room, have to sleep on the floor, can’t go to the kitchen or prayer room, can’t touch some eatables like pickles and can’t touch other family members etc.

While women slog equally in fields and kitchens all year through, only men participate in most religious rituals in villages and cook the sacred feasts and only they are allowed to offer the yields to a deity. Lots of rural girls drop out from school still around puberty due to lack of support and awareness. Hundreds succumb to infections due to unhygienic methods of managing menstruation. The fear and shame associated with a menstrual stain is so overwhelming that they give up their opportunity of an education for it.

The religious notions of purity and pollution are rules that deny women basic human rights of caring about their health and bodies. All women, regardless of their caste are considered unclean during menstruation. Sometimes they are not allowed to even take a bath especially for first few days of their menstrual period as it is believed that they can contaminate the water source permanently.

The argument often propounded in the favor of seclusion is that the confinement frees the woman of all her household duties during those days and she can rest. Even if a logical benefit of doubt is granted to that logic, what kind of rest does a woman experience if she is psychologically stressed by separating her from her children and family and the physical comforts of her kitchen and bedroom are denied to her?

Untouchability based on caste and religion was long back ended legally by our constitution, but this untoucahability of a more personal and intimate kind is still practiced in many homes and families, and the worse is it is taken for granted too, both by the perpetrators and the victims.

There is no open discourse about it within families, TV channels still get changed whenever there is a sanitary napkin advertisement playing and women though are not tied with physical ropes to restrain their movements and daily routine, the stronger but invisible ties bind them securely to the margins, make them silently experience the “shame” and discrimination associated with menstruation.

Silence about it strengthens the shame and the shame shrouding it strengthens the silence. Generations of women suffer in shame and in silence.

Its time our girls are freed of this burden and can love their body and menstruation as a privilege and not a curse.

 

“This blogathon is supported by the Maya App, used by 6.5 million women worldwide to take charge of their periods and health.”

Other posts for the same blogathon

Not just Blood, Not just Red

Not just a woman's Problem