The story of my Period

The very first time, I thought I was dying.

What else can you expect from a twelve year old? I still remember the amused smile on my mother’s face when she exclaimed “Now what have you done?” followed by all the hush - hush phone calls to relatives to announce that the prodigal daughter has now become a “woman”. Then came all the relatives with smiles like split bottle gourds on their faces and all the petting and beaming with me wondering when I was going to be asked about what was it that I had done. Strangely, everybody but me seemed to know and I was desperately hoping that someone would ask so that I would know the answer too! Of course it did not help that of seven girls; it had to happen to me first.

After two days of dazed smiling for the photographs, all decked out in a saree and all that hitherto forbidden gold, followed by cruel restrictions of forbidden passage to the kitchen, bedroom, puja room (confining my life to a rattan mat), not to mention the forced ingestion of Castor oil (it gives you ache free days from the next time was the explanation) and sesame laddus, I decided I shall ensure that it shall never happen to me ever again, come what may!

So imagine my horror when I saw the blood the next month.

You see, it had occurred to nobody that this bewildered child might not know what had just happened to her. So continued the horror, month after month, until a year later, deliverance was given, unto me, ironically, in the form of Carrie. Though it did explain a lot of things, that what happened to me happened to others too and it was not my fault, it did not explain the pain every month and the misery that accompanies it.

It wasn’t until much later, while I was well onto my way into adult hood that I came to terms with what it was and why it was. Later it even became comical, the hurried recollections of all things done under the duress of alcohol whenever it was late and the relief it brought when it did finally begin but it was a long journey for my period to become a thing of shame, the knowledge of which was to be kept hidden to something that happens every month, bringing with it the assurance that everything was going on as intended and as things were to be.