Varsha Tiwary
His knuckles knocked out an irritated rhythm on the table, miming the tap-tap of her Mac keys. There is blood, Vinny thought she had heard him saying.
Her eyes flicked up from the paragraph she was furiously typing and confronted the narrowed eyes of her son—dark fuzz over lips, framed by lank parted hair growing down to his nape—now questioning her. The sneer dominated, because the rest of his face was obscured by long fringes he had to keep swinging out of the way. Having got her attention, he jerked his curtained face towards the washroom door, the door he had banged shut seconds before, that she, in her creative flow, had completely ignored.
CAN’T YOU WIPE IT? PLEASE? DO YOU EVEN CARE? DO YOU EVEN KNOW I HAVE A CLASS IN TEN MINUTES?
Vinny felt the decibel level of his voice inside her skull and clenched her teeth in response.
Wipe? Wipe what? What are you saying? Her voice came out loud, defensive.
She wanted him to see that she was in the midst of something very crucial, that she was developing a line of thought in a complicated compound sentence but instead, she had to tear her attention away and watch the triangle of sunlight moving on his curled-up lips. And hear the righteous indignation in his newly thickened, manly voice. The triangle of sun rippled and moved, every time he swung his neck and pushed the silken fringes behind his ears.
IS THERE A WAY IN THIS HOUSE A CHAP CAN GO INTO THE LOO AND NOT FIND BLOOD ON THE SEAT?
His right hand flew up from his waist, slicing the air, pointing to the other room. Then it swung back towards the bathroom door of this room in a weirdly accelerated tai chi movement.
IN THAT LOO— IT’S YOUR DAUGHTER’S HAIR CLOGGING UP THE SINK. HERE YOU PUT BLOOD ON THE SEAT. WHERE DO I GO? DO I HAVE A RIGHT TO A TOILET SEAT EVEN?
She had a vision of going around putting neat drops of blood on the seat like chef’s garnish just to annoy him. Was this sullen monster the same chubby, gray-eyed infant who had, fifteen years back, slipped out of her body swathed in her blood? Blood that he now found so vile?
Take a toilet tissue and wipe it yourself, she said in a low, cold voice. Like I wipe droplets you leave on the toilet seat.
He kicked the side of the bed and stomped out, muttering. The door he banged after him rattled in her skull for a while.
But no, she would not oblige him. His discomfort was a small price for her freedom to bleed.
* * *
The story she had been writing was about menstruation. They seldom called it that when they were young. It was being down, having chums. Periods or monthlies. When you went to the doctor for anything, even a fever or cough, or a stray stye in the eye, the doctor, after asking name and age, asked for the date of last period. As if, like the pulse, the period was the ultimate barometer of female health. Or maybe, the purpose was to make the girls as young as thirteen or fourteen know beyond a doubt that not remembering the date of the last period could land them in the worst kind of trouble.
In Hindi, the term was monthly religion. Blood was a girl’s, a woman’s, religion. No wonder—like religion, bleeding women also inspired legalized madness. Not just in priests, who told women not to enter temples or take part in rituals when down, but in mothers, aunts and in-laws who too avidly adhered to these proscriptions. When she went to the girls hostel, she found that women of all religions—Sikh, Muslims, Jains–had been told by priestly gatekeepers that bleeding women were vile, dangerous, threatening.
If the women themselves could not be concealed, contained, and cloistered during periods, then the fact of bleeding itself had to be. Bleeding, with all the staining and slowing and secrecy and censure, could not be aired. Whisper. Or pretend you stay free always, well-hidden.
* * *
From the next room, she could hear her son and daughter shouting.
Look at you, with your blow-dried hair and kohl-lined eyes! Who would believe you make such a mess in there? he screamed at his sister. The tone said that his sister was ill-brought up, a slipshod creature.
Sister Agnes, in the catholic convent school she studied in, used to speak in this tone every time one of them had an accident.
If you don’t learn to take care now, you will go and disgrace yourself in your husband’s house, she would say to a girl in a soiled skirt begging her for a pad. The girl who committed the crime would stand heavy-shouldered in front of Awful Agnes, head hung low in shame, mumbling apologies. With profuse thanks, she would snatch the offered pad—a thin rectangle of cotton-wool covered in gauze, wrapped in newspaper—precious contraband. Within an hour, that cotton would turn into a wet wad between the poor girl’s legs making every move fraught, progressively embarrassing and dangerous. The shame would be so severe that none of the girls or their parents would ever question any of this. They all were simultaneously implicated and complicit. It was as if Sister Agnes and the other nuns had never bled, never stained their skirts. As if their superior selves had somehow beaten their bleedings into discreet, mannerly obedience.
The only time this concealment blew away was in the college girls hostel. She had lived in a swarm of two hundred women thrown together, sharing beds, bathrooms, anecdotes. There she found that a period was an open secret. And there were as many periods as girls—to each an idiosyncratic monsoonal flood of her own. Even in the same woman it was never one thing. A trickle now, a gushing deluge some other time, completely unpredictable in intensity, mostly erratic in exact timing. For many, it began with a great tearing of the innards reducing them to whimpering animals, doubled up with pain, clinging to sanity by popping auralgan tablets and clutching hot water bottles.
Her five day period stood on the curve of a range, from low-intensity two day periods to horrific ten, or even fifteen day periods. She herself came to read a preponderant pattern in her bleeding. A mild pain with a trickle on the first day accompanied by a desire to eat overly salty and sweet things, followed by an unsettled stomach, a gushing flood, a seizing in the lower back which could be cured only by many extra hours of sleep. All this punctuated by groggy gettings-up to change soaked pads. What she came to know beyond doubt in that female universe was that it was beyond any woman to do anything about her bleeding. Of course there were always pills, medicines for period ailments, bitter ayurvedic concoctions to drink and the yogic postures to do or not do in those days to set things right, but nothing that the woman herself could do to bring the blood on, or to make it go back or to make it behave like a sensible period. In fact, there was no such thing as a sensible period. Part of the period legends in her hostel was the story of Asha, a classmate who grieved for her lost sister who had mysteriously disappeared, kidnapped possibly, during a train journey to her hostel in Ahmedabad. Her period had completely stopped. It took two years and falling in love for them to resume. When the period came, it did not stop for a month.
* * *
All the compound sentences in her head had broken down into fragments and images now, floating out of her grasp, evaporating into thin air. She wondered as she sat listening to the shouting match in the next room if she should just wipe the damned seat and tell the brat to use it. She got up stiffly and immediately had to sit down again. Just as well it came now, in a moment of distraction.
Of late, the flashes had become a regular visitor. She would be sitting, walking, cooking, reading or deep in sleep, when suddenly her skin would prickle and a slow heat would suffuse every inch of her. As if somewhere between her ribs, a slow flame had been lit and she needed to bide time till the thing spent itself. And just when this thing had completely distracted her from the task she was doing, it would go away as if all that feeling of being toasted on a slow-dying fire was just something her dramatic mind had cooked up. Were she not to touch the wetness in the roots of her hair, feel the wet trickle under her breasts, the beading on her upper lip, it would have been easy for her to dismiss it as nothing, a hallucination. But the sweat, the clamminess was proof. She was in that in-between peri-menopausal time when bloody wrenchings of periodic womb-shedding could go along with sleeplessness, sweats and flares of a heating-cooling womb—like dying signals of some star embedded in the universe of her body—with bonus aches and itches stealthily taking over the still supple looking limbs.
Yet in polite company, where one’s heart attack or diabetes could spark interesting talk and gratifying show of concern, talk of blood was a no-no, even in all-women gatherings. So when colleagues the same age as her, probably in the throes of the same wrenchings met her at office parties and everyone asked how everyone was, they laughed through concealed wrinkles and artfully covered up grays and pretended there was nothing like menopause. If menstruation went undercover, how could menopause dare to exist?
In the hostel, the old woman who sat at the gate making them sign themselves in, complained of menopause every time she saw a girl howling with period pains and requesting a doctor. Her knees and her back hurt and she could not sit or stand long.
Every time one of the girls gave her an account of their pain, she would say with relish, You will know what pain is when the periods stop.
In that cloister of women, there was little need for anyone to hide or deny the secrets of their bodies. She remembered the corridors and washrooms ripe with evidence and odors of women’s bodies—the proofs of their fertility, marks of blood casually left around—scandalous garments fluttering gaily on lines. Their unshackled breasts and bare legs parading out of the bathrooms.
And how the elderly sweepers shrieked at the mess they made. They had cut squares of old newspapers and strung them on hangers in every washroom to make things tidier. But there were so many of them and so few loos. The publicness of their too common secrets turned the whole hush-hush thing into something laughable—like the ridiculous coyness of heroines in black and white movies fluttering eyelashes and weaving their fingers to show their anxiety—when the hero proposed. Joking and poking fun at the pretensions of the real world gave them a breathing space the real world could scarcely imagine.
* * *
From the other room, came a loud howl, and her son stormed in, his face crumpled in tears.
Look what she has done now. She has finished me, and he went into a paroxysm again.
Sighing, rubbing her temples, she looked outside her window. The squirrel who had nested in the space between the window shade and fiber awning chattered at her offspring. Telling them to fuck off probably. Unlike the human progeny, they listened and scampered away.
Resigned, she summoned Ana who came marching in with an equally grim expression. There was a restless contentment about the way she stood, her chin up, her arms folded, ready to fight back.
What did you do to him, girl?
Come on mom, I did nothing.
She did. Liar. She killed my reputation, shrieked the boy. I even missed my online class.
What did you do? she asked Ana again.
Ana rolled her eyes mutinously.
Mom, he tore my artwork, called me icky, thinking he can bully me into wiping the toilet seat. So I Insta-posted a rant, telling all the cool girls in his class what a misogynist creep he is. Mom, we are in period-positive times. We are free to bleed. He just can’t behave like this.
And now they are all calling me a creep, the boy wailed.
He was a broken man-child and little boy, both together now. He had lost face before his classmates.
But mom, his hatred is creepy. Grow up, bro, get real, she said, and swiveling on her heels like a complete lady, marched out.
Vinny had read somewhere that menstruation was so far outside a man’s understanding that it was easier for him to treat it as fiction.
And Mom, I am placing an order for the menstrual cup on Amazon. Tell me when the OTP comes.
It was as if the boy knew he had lost the battle. His tears stopped, his face set into a mask, and he walked out.
Outside the squirrel, having got rid of her progeny, sat on her haunches, daintily nibbling a half-eaten groundnut. Peahens shrieked and beaked their dumpy-looking progeny in the dusty ground beyond. Vinny told her own progeny to get lost and manage their equation themselves.
And both of you together will clean out both the loos by evening. It's not my job. Get that? And son, you better get used to the facts of life. Women bleed.
Varsha Tiwary
Varsha Tiwary's writes from New Delhi, India. Her short stories and essays appear in Shenandoah, Eclectica, DNA Out Of Print shortlist, Kitaab, Muse India, and Jaggerylit among several others. She is working on a short stories collection.