Periods, Pads and PMS

The first time I got to know about periods, was pretty much like stumbling unknowingly into the wardrobe that led the Pevensie siblings into Narnia. A secret world of women bound together by this mysterious magic, a sisterhood where all of us gathered to hold hands and sing hymns and dance around a banyan tree. It was in sixth grade when a girl in our class got her first period at school and I still remember everyone hovering around her, whispering secretively to one another as they led all of us in a procession from the class to the teacher's room, with me at the rear wondering what in the gods name was going on. Apparently, the malady that had affected my classmate was called 'periods' and no one was ready to explain to me what it exactly meant in simple understandable terms. My mother, when asked about the same that evening launched into a whole ass science lecture about uterine linings and ovaries and estrogen, that left me even more confused than before. It was my grandmother, in the end, who sat me down and explained to me, that period basically meant that I was about to bleed from my vagina every month for the next 40 years of my life.

And instead of being scared and weirded out by it like a normal teenager, my 11-year-old self was absolutely fascinated, and I couldn't wait to join my fellow sisters and participate in this bleeding ritual every month. Since I was a late bloomer and all my classmate's had gotten their period before me, I would pester all my friends and my mother to explain how it felt to have blood coming out of their vagina. Would it burst out? Would it be painful? Did it come out like you pee but instead of water, it would be blood. Truly I was one of those annoying kids, who had 'but why' at the end of all answers given to them. And when that fateful day came, right after my math exam (even my uterus hated math!!) it also came with great embarrassment. You see in my home state, when a girl got her first period it was celebrated grandly with a function dressing up the girl in a saree as relatives and friends applied turmeric and Chandan on her as a way of giving her their blessings and best wishes (also in the olden days, loudly proclaiming that the girl was ready for marriage now). While thankfully my mother put her foot down at the grandness of the function, that did not stop my grandmothers from steamrolling my mother and emotionally blackmailing me into at least inviting a few of our neighbors to come and attend. To this day I cringe to think of this random uncle who I had spoken, maybe 2 words to, in my entire life, congratulate me on getting my period. He even shook my fucking hand as he said it!! Sir, there is no reason for you to know I got my Periods, nor do I need your congratulations. I wanted to dig up a hole and off myself into it.

When I was young, I always thought the stereotype of women being emotional before their periods was just men being their sexist selves. I was alas confronted with the evidence of its accuracy, when our coaching teacher was scolding a guy in our class for something once and my eyes started to well up with tears. At that time, I thought I was probably an empath with deep sensitivity to other's feelings and considered the world's pain as my pain. However, when I got my period at the end of the day, I realized, no, it just my hormones and that I was way too selfish a person to care about the feelings of people wholly unknown to me. While different women get different signs of PMS, I know I'm about to get my period in a few days when I start eating everything edible in my sight like gathodgaja. Nothing is safe from my clutches, and everything I find ends up directly in my mouth. I have eaten 8 carrots one after the other, once and let it be known that I detest carrots with my entire being. On one occasion in a dire situation when there was only rice left for dinner with no other side dish, I just mixed it with ghee and ate a plateful of plain white rice like a savage. It's like I forget what fullness is and it feels a through my stomach has expanded 4 times its actual size and nothing will satiate the monster I have created in my body.

Thankfully periods in general have not given me much grief. Light stomachache and the mortal peril, that all food items in my house are in, are pretty much the only thing that made life difficult. However, what has caused me much hassle has been society's attitude towards periods. The shopkeeper putting the pads in black bags, to seeing my aunt sneak in the whispers packet into her house like its cocaine, to seeing your cousins not being allowed into the kitchen and the puja room because periods apparently make you impure has caused complications for many a young girl in India. I still fume and seethe with rage to this day when I remember the first time, I encountered such mindset and that too from my own grandmother. I was told to say put in a room without coming out for the whole day as there was a puja going in and me having my period would--I don't know stink up the room with its unholiness or some shit. I swallowed my anger when my uncle explained patronizingly that in the olden days, women were not even allowed inside the house during the periods, as though he and the rest of society were doing women a favor by forcing them to stay in a room without touching anything, getting food from others like a prisoner in a jail. I burned with indignation as my male cousins joked about how nice it was that women got free days where they don't have to do anything, conveniently forgetting that it was my aunt who was going to clean the messes left by them the next day.

Truly it's almost a miracle how my mother turned out the way she did. In hindsight while I may have been scratching my head wondering if estrogen was the name of an American white lady, my mother made sure that the first time I came to know about periods was not through the lens of Indian society, but through the lens of science. If an egg isn't fertilized by sperm, the body sheds blood. It was biology. It was a natural bodily process and that, there was nothing to be shameful or embarrassed by. It could have been so easy for my mother to do to me, what my grandmother did to her. She was from a village, born into a deeply patriarchal family, had no avenue to broaden her mind as we do with the internet. It would make sense and seem natural for her to continue to follow tradition. But she did not. She knew that when her own family members restricted her freedom of movement in her own house, there was something deeply wrong. While she will never change the world, she changed things for the one person who would be the most affected by it, me. To this day, with the exception of the first time I got my period and that time at my grandmother's house, I can't remember my mother ever setting any rules for me to follow during my period. Sure, she has on many occasions scolded me to high hell as I washed the bloodstains off the bedsheets and the sofa covers, but she has never once told me not to sit on the sofa or sleep on the bed during my periods again. That is breaking the cycle. That is her way of ensuring that the next generation of women are closer to equality than she herself was. To me, that is feminism and my mother, the first feminist I ever knew.

SOS: How do you wear a Saree!!??

 It was wedding season in our family. For the last 3 years, each of my cousins had folded like dominos under their parent's pressure and had finally decided to take a stroll down the path of holy matrimony. And attending these weddings for the past three years had given me a saree fever. My mother hated sarees and never wore any, so growing up, I never had much interest in them either. But all that changed the day I attended my brother's wedding and noticed how beautiful everyone looked in a traditional silk saree. I realized that sarees looked elegant, were universally flattering, hid my tummy, were suitable for all occasions and also pretty cheap. There was just something about an indigo chanderi Saree paired with chunky oxidized jewelry that just spoke to me. The only obstacle I could see, preventing me from getting on the saree train was the fact that I had no idea how to drape one.

My mother being an ever-helpful women, just threw one of her old saree at me and asked me to be the Genz that I was and learn how to drape a saree from the internet. So, I went forth on the battlefield searching videos after video's (and there were a hell lot!) on how to perfectly drape on a saree. I spent a whole day watching videos that had racked up millions of views of women giving tips and tricks on how to wear a saree and came to the realization that every Indian woman at some or the other point in her life had probably encountered the same question on how to drape this huge swath of a fabric and searched for the same on YouTube. Watching those videos however, made me an overconfident bitch who overestimated her abilities. I mean I was studying CA, one of the hardest courses in the country, I could easily wear a saree in minutes, it was hardly rocket science. After all, millions of Indians wore it every day, so did all my ancestors probably. Wearing a saree was in my blood, in my fate, it was my destiny. Boy how wrong I was.

The one thing people never tell you about wearing a saree is how hot it gets. You can't put on a fan because you don't want your saree to fly away and A.C was out of question, so by the time you finish wearing a saree, you are also sweating onto your saree like a pig in the sewer. Finding the pallu of the saree requires as much concentration as a scientist observing an amoeba. The number of times I pricked myself while securing the saree with the safety pin, uncountable. Not to mention just handling the sheer amount of fabric, it just goes on and on, confusing me with where it starts, where it ends and what I'm supposed to drape. The only win was that all the tripping and flailing and spinning in circles I did with the fabric strewn all over the room has at least made me more flexible. There is also apparently the top and bottom part of the saree which we are supposed to know from the falls stitched on to them. All this through, I could handle, it was annoying for sure but still within the realm of possibility. The part I hated through was pleating the pallu of the saree.

I had till then never thought much about the size of my hands and the dexterity and strength of my fingers. However now that I have, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that my fingers are very bad in performing the duties they had evolved to do and are very severely in need of strength training to breach the well-fortified high wall of equal saree pleats. There have been times where I felt like I had done about 100 curl ups with a 1kg dumbbell by the time I pleated the pallu of the saree. Every time I think that's it; I've mastered the art of symmetrical pleats, a random fold peeks out from the bunch to say hi, making me scream murder.

But even with all that, I still think it's a worthwhile endeavor to learn to wear a saree. I've always thought sarees were one monolith block, but over the past few days I've learnt that there are hundreds of different kinds of sarees, sarees that are a specialty in each states and the rich traditional history associated with them. Also, I feel wearing a saree marks the official end of my youth and start of my adulthood. So, cheers to a future 40-year-old me with my 2 cupboards full of my saree collection.

Is this my Billionaire Origin Story?

As a kid, I always used to have my head in the clouds and my nose in a book. Life was simple. Enid Blyton was the best author in the world and there was nothing more fascinating than a murder mystery. I remember being especially obsessed with Secret Seven, which features a group of you guessed it, seven kids running around solving murders and overseeing a secret society in their free time. There are only 15 books in this series, but to me they seemed endless. I desperately wanted to be a part of their secret society with all its clandestine meetings and coded rituals but what I wanted the most of all, was to solve my very own mystery murder. I wanted to be a detective, a Walmart Sherlock Holmes, if you will, using my amazing skills of deduction for the good of the world, to find out from a blood stain on a piece of cloth, that it was the victim's brother who killed her because she refused to give up her inheritance.

The summer I turned 12 I was on a hunt for a juicy murder to test my capabilities as a newly minted friendly Neighborhood Spider Women. And somehow my 12-year-old brain decided the perfect victim for the imaginary first murder I was going to solve, was our flat's watchman. This is something I truly feel guilty about to this day, because our watchman was the sweetest person ever. He would give us his water whenever we were thirsty, share his snacks with us, give us first aid whoever we fell, not to mention actually ensure our flat was safe. Poor man had no idea that I was plotting the many gruesome ways he could be found dead whenever I greeted him with a smile every morning. However much I tried to manifest a murder and will it into existence with my sheer determination, the neighborhood remained peaceful and our watchman unfortunately healthy. I had also not fallen so low in life to actually become a psychopath and murder people just to play detective - detective, so I had to move on to plan B.

You see the kids in secret seven never actually went looking for a murder, murder found them. The book always started with them doing something fairly innocuous, like going on trip, or helping their parents renovate a barn or something. In one of the books, they band together and set up a lemonade stand in their neighborhood, and this seemed to me the perfect cover as I eves dropped on elevator conversations looking for the perfect victim. The lemonade stand would just be a front for me to do some underground sleuthing for any murders happening in our building ad carry out my super-secret undercover mission. 

To this day I will never understand how I managed to convince all my friends in the flat, not to mention their parents that the perfect way for all of us to spend our summer vacation was to make lemonade and buttermilk and sell it to the poor unsuspecting people in our apartment going about their day. But that' exactly what happened for the 3 days we managed to set up the lemonade and buttermilk stand. It was 3 days of us raiding our houses for lemons, sugar, salt and curd. It was us congregating at the entrance of our flat every evening, hawking our wares to entertained adults, who out of amusement brought our probably disgusting tasting lemonade and buttermilk (none of us were master chef's) It was the most fun 3 days of my life, but what was even better was the money we earned out of those 3 days. We counted the money pouch at the end of 3 days, to find that we had earned about 600 rupees (granted most of the lemonade was brought by us ourselves) but it seemed to us less like 600 rupees and more like a 100 crore.

The whole idea started because I wanted to solve a murder, but that thought did not even cross my mind as I coordinated the raw material needed for making the lemonade and buttermilk, as I set up the table that was to double as our 'stand' and as I counted how much we earned at the end of the day. It was only after we had spent all the money at KFC stuffing ourselves with our hard-earned money, that this thought occurred to me, maybe my calling in life wass not being a detective and solving murders, but being a businesswoman, a genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist. A mercenary life of making money through business seemed the best and most appropriate path in life to me. So, it's goodbye sherlock and hello Ambani.