Things They Won’t Let Me Say About Periods

Posted on Apr 11th, 2017

by Soumya Panda

Stories and Experiences

‘Period’ is treated just like the word ‘sex’ in our 1.3 billion plus populated, shy country. Everyone does indulge in one, but you can’t talk about it; another happens to half of humankind, but you can’t even pronounce it. The world could have churned many more Shakespeares had wordsmiths not spent time coming up with chumming, the red flower blooming, that time of the month, leak week, burst pipes, the full stop haunting, flooding down south, and more such “genius synonyms”.

Now the thick thesaurus definitely came in handy when fifty percent of homo sapiens started bleeding when they were in school, the dispeller of the darkness of ignorance. Where uttering‘period’ meant saying ‘Hitler’ in a Jewish extermination camp; where saying that you were menstruating meant invoking Satan on Friday the 13^th; where you had to smile like the Laughing Buddha while Dementors would be sucking the soul out of your uterine lining; where you might as well be getting tormented by ‘unforgivable’ at the hands of Voldemort but all you could ever mouth was ‘It’s just you-know-who.’

Wish I could put up a ‘Feeling blessed, smiling face with a halo emoji’ status update on Facebook for not being in this school in Muzzafarnagar which was in the news recently because seventy girls were strip checked to find out which one was them was bleeding!Such thoroughness! If authorities would check for gutka, cigarettes, drugs, guns, and other R-rated materials kids smuggle to school these days, with as much diligence, the world would be a much better place!Terrorist attacks would probably go down if the public was frisked so meticulously at entry points!

I remember when a friend of mine had gotten her first period when she was in school. Mortified at the bloodshed rippling through her underwear onto her skirt,she thought she might die!The topper of the class, her parents made sure she knew all about science, history, civics, geography, economics and every other thing under the sun. But to educate her about her own body! Well that wouldn’t have fetched her marks anyway, right? Cause it was hushed and rushed through in class and was out of the exam syllabus anyway!

To prevent such blunders from happening, the women of the house would condition us time and gain to carry an extra napkin in our school bags lest“Aunt Flo” decided to visit town. But we girls would be busy being humans first, when suddenly periods would hit us unannounced and we would have to go find ‘that girl’. “I hear you know janitors who can hook me up with some stash.”And then like a drug lord mafia she would say, “Follow me”. We would have to go looking for that elusive female janitor who legend had it, had a stash of napkins hidden in the wardrobe to Narnia. You would have better luck finding Dawood Ibrahim within that time! Way stealthier than pot dealers selling their hoard, at some dinghy corner, she would then magically produce a dirty sweat soaked envelope containing a questionable pad, from underneath the folds of her unsanitary saree. The gory saga would end only upon swearing on the cottony Holy Scripture that you would pay her the five bucks the next day, else forget about landing a napkin ever again.

If you thought, that was ridiculous, get a load of this: my brother who’s in school tells his friend that he is done with the chapter Mensuration. His friend goes, “Du-uude (two syllables)…say Areas and Volumes! Mensuration, yuck it sounds like menstruation, you know”. I wanted to tell him, “Son, I’m sure your mother was praying to get her period, but got you instead. Yuck! You know!

At office, I was witness to another incident from which I learnt a life hack. A bunch of people were discussing about work. A colleague of mine was looking for a notepad in her purse, when a tampon fell out of her bag accidentally. Now a tampon is to Indians what kissing in the public is to,well Indians. People fled the area like Americans fleeing the scene when an Arab guy throws a bag at them as a prank, for gag reels. I realized then that if you are PMSing and don’t want to change your WhatsApp status to: ‘Can’t talk, on period.’, you don’t need to build a fortress of pads and tampons around you; just place ‘a’nazar battu of a tampon or a pad on your table and no one would want to touch you with a ten mile pole. Like Goodnight to mosquitoes, no one would dare come in the radius.

A few days back I got my period. The chemist was sipping tea with two more “gentlemen” when I said what young girls from good families should only let their menfolk say on their behalf, “Bhaiya ek Stayfree dena.” “Bhaiya rehne do”, I said when he started wrapping it up in a newspaper. “Bhaiya bina polythene ke khali hath me lena hai mujhe.”A pin drop horror injected silence was followed by the final nail in the coffin by me that lead to his temporary demise from planet earth. “Diapers ya incontinence pad dete samay to itna jhamela nahi karte”

As I walked back home holding the ticking time bomb in my hand, I felt the wrath of the Sanskari folks on me who were mumbling silent prayers because they had just seen the devil.To the aunties advising us to take a walk on those days, do Balasana, eat a banana, or drink some hot chocolate to feel good; if you could just think of periods as a normal bodily function and not black magic, then we would definitely feel good. Here’s wishing that they could see the regressive blot in their thoughts instead of spending hours searching for that one red spot on our skirts.To shushing it no more and saying it out loud. Period.

References: Here

Author: Soumya Panda