Representational Image : DeviantArt

One morning you get up and you are covered in blood, there are blood stains on your bed, to your horror you realize it’s your own. Your innards are undergoing such vicious cramps like someone has hooked a vacuum cleaner to your guts and switched it on, what do you do?

Simple, clean up the mess, put on a sanitary napkin, pop an anti spasmodic pill and leave for yoga classes.

“You people go inside; I will wait here outside the temple. I can’t enter the kitchen, can you get me a glass of water please? I have put my bed on the floor, it’s ok, I am comfortable. Yes I will wash all my clothes myself with hands, I know I can’t do it in the washing machine, else it might come in contact with other people’s clothes.”

No, I wasn’t an outcast, just a girl who was menstruating.

You can pretend in social circles that you are open about it, as it is a normal thing. But when you suffer , you choose the easy way out and that is to be quiet. When you stand there in queue to buy them, you choose a woman seller and then you wish for it to be covered with newspaper and then polyethylene bags.

You don’t want people to see it. What is normally, a biological process which every woman undergoes during her youthfulness, is a social taboo.

Let’s talk a bit softly about something that makes you uncomfortable – menstruation, and also the fact why is it so.

For centuries, menstruation or periods as we call it in day to day life is a taboo subject, omnipresent but not talked about, and I fail to understand why. I mean it’s just the process of shedding out waste products from the body, simple as that. I don’t understand the need to glorify or vilify it.

I can agree to the argument that maybe the woman or girl undergoing it, wants to keep it personal and to herself, but then our society is such an hypocritical one, that it will not allow them this thing in its entirety also, what message does a girl send out when she stands in front of the temple when her whole family or gang of friends go inside? Or how rational it is that a woman who is menstruating cannot enter the kitchen or Pujaghar?

I can never understand the intricacies of logic that the society gives, if God would have hated women on periods
He would have found a better way to let them know that they are not pregnant, like pinging on your WhatsApp.

“Hey girl, still not pregnant, enjoy your life, see ya next month, XOXO, God” or sending pigeons in the olden times maybe.

But this is the way he chose himself, who are we to question his wishes? Or to assume that he hates women on periods. How can a woman become so filthy during this time period that she can’t enter her own kitchen? I mean that’s downright disgusting, this twisted logic is so silly; I don’t even want to clarify it.

And these are just a few of the curfews put on women, all of which if I write down and justify here, will take up much of your time (mine as well), but I can assure you this much, all are equally or even more silly, trust me.

Leaving the society aside, even then if we want to keep it to ourselves, we can’t. Situation arises now and then where we have to let the world know, even if we don’t want to, whether it’s asking for relaxation in the P.T. classes or buying sanitary napkins or God forbid if it’s a case of staining. So all I am saying is if we can’t keep it to ourselves we must have an understanding society, where we are not made to feel inferior during menstruation, where we get the necessary moral support.

The society is weird, if you don’t undergo menstruation, they will call you a barren woman and call you names. And if you are undergoing it, you become filthy.

When will this change? Or are we going to take this to our grave? The moment people come forward speaking about it openly, it’s not a taboo anymore. For that, they need to understand it’s a normal biological process. Irony that changes will come from knowledge.

Men generally try to sidestep this issue thinking all these are “women trouble” but no, it’s your equal responsibility to make a society which is sane and logical, you can take the initiative too, by talking about it not in a perverse, sexualized way but by taking it as it is; a normal natural phenomenon, by standing up against age old illogical customs.

Women have a even bigger role in the whole issue, because it involves us, we often run to our mothers, sisters and girlfriends for advice and to discuss our problems, they are the ones who teach us the dos and don’ts, we can bring the changes we want in the society, I am not asking people to be reckless and start disobeying all the rules. All I am suggesting is that we try to reason with our parents, and other elderly members of our house. That may not work; I can understand but must we not give up.

And if nothing seems to work, don’t worries, we all will be parents one day, and that day instead of carrying over the weight of age old customs on our back we can choose our own reality. After all I don’t want my daughter sitting outside on the steps of a temple feeling sorry for herself.

Because she should be proud that she can carry a life, not ridiculed by it.

– Aswath Raman