The Half of It
by Chitra Gopalakrishnan
Malli knows she has a problem at five in the morning.
It’s mid-May, with no vestiges of coolness in Chennai, when she wakes up, disoriented, to humid winds blowing through her bedroom windows, heavy with the smell of fertile earth. Her thighs are wet with slime.
Though bleary in mind and eye, she understands almost immediately that her growing up has just happened, despite her not wanting it. She is thirteen.
“Period” is a strange, blunt word to describe a natural, ongoing drizzle, she often thinks to herself. Period, in her mind, conveys stoppage, a final, harsh halt. As there is no flow or flexibility to the word, she decides very early on in her musings on the subject of the monthly flow, that this is the wrong word for this condition. Utterly misguiding.
Her convent schoolmates in the uppity Besant Nagar area of Chennai have described the bloody truth of it to her. All of it.
“On those days, you will suffer from jagged pain and cramps, ugly stains on clothes that may grow dull but will never really go away, ceaseless vomiting, even fainting spells on days, and a complete lack of focus,” they have warned her.
Malli likes none of what she has heard. The strains and stretches of the monthlies seem agitating.
In her journal, she writes: “I am scared of getting into something that I can never get out of. I dread something happening to my body that will make me not me. Or becoming a person different from the person that I now think of as me. The word ‘period’ has a definiteness to it. A full stop to everything that has happened before. I feel I am better off withstanding the sly jibes and pitiful glances of my girlfriends, who have had their rite to passage before me, and their telling me I am a slow bloomer, rather than go through this messy coming-of-age process that seems to completely take away my past.”
Her best friend, classmate, and neighbour Shobhana, who is a Tamilian Brahmin like her, went through her turmeric-bathing puberty ceremony, called Manjal Neerattu Vizha, two years ago when she turned eleven. Shobhana’s description of the traditions involved, ones specific to their community, terrifies Malli.
Shobhana told her: “When I had my first period, I missed you so. My mother immediately isolated me in a room attached to the house for four days, like an infected person. Food and water were served to me in a separate plate and glass. Then on the fifth day, I was bathed in turmeric water, coated with sandalwood paste, made to wear a half-sari, and adorned with jewellery after which a pundit performed my purification ritual. Then I was given gifts by the women of my home and by all my women relatives, followed by a trip to a public venue, specially decorated, where the community gathered. They had a garish photo of me framed in a poster, a chair for me to sit on stage in lonely splendour, flowers lining it, and loud music to boot. The lyrics put me to shame, so I pretended not to understand even though I did. It was altogether too vulgar and too overwhelming for me. I was just glad that most of my friends, especially you, were away for summer.”
Deep inside Malli fears the repeat of these fearful oddities on her, the infliction of this intolerable gaiety. She knows with certainty that the making of something so personal to her public knowledge would be mortifying in the extreme to her personhood. Just as she knows that the day of the ritual would be one of despair and ruination, a day where her carefully preserved middle-class anonymity would be taken apart in public.
“Don’t they get that we are today’s teenagers and millennials who don’t want to share everything with the outside world? Don’t they get that the world has changed and these rituals are misplaced in today’s context where women make their own choices? Why don’t they do this instead to Tamil Brahmin boys who only go through a tame Upanayana ceremony, one that marks the acceptance of a boy student by a guru and then the boy’s entrance to the three other successive stages of Hinduism: that of bachelorhood, of a householder, and of a person who gives up his worldly desires and possessions?” Malli rages to Shobhana.
“I won’t go through the Manjal Neerattu Vizha or wear a half-sari,” Malli announces rebelliously to her mother as she stomps from her room into her mother’s. She is ready for their upcoming verbal fight. She is even prepared to stamp her feet and not wait for its answering echo if that is what is needed.
“So you have started your periods,” her mother exclaims, smiling with delight in her pistachio silk sari. Malli suspects that half her mother’s satisfaction comes from the bracing cup of filter kapi she had just finished, the shiny steel tumbler and dabra standing evidence of this.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, my little Malli. This ceremony is a way to make you feel joyous, to welcome you into womanhood, and take away the fears associated with it. The idea is also to make the knowledge of girls’ periods commonplace, not a curiosity of sorts to be buried within deep secret shafts,” she explains with gentleness.
“Rubbish,” says Malli, her brows knitted together in fury. “It is a ritual in a male-dominated society, one that wishes to control a girl’s fertility the minute she enters that phase. I have read enough of this, and we have discussed it at length in school. The idea is to say to the world, look this girl is ready to be married. Come on. I am all of thirteen, and I have no plans to get married. Or at least, none until I am thirty years of age.”
“I really can’t argue with you on this, Malli. I know we will never come to any kind of agreement. In my times we simply obeyed our mothers. This ritual was a given. I know this is not so now, and that things have really changed. So hear me out on this issue before you explode. Let’s avoid the ritual but at least promise to indulge me and wear a half-sari instead, which is nothing more than a long skirt with a short blouse,” her mother cajoles.
“Yet the blouse is short and will expose my breasts, midriff, and stomach which is even worse,” Malli argues shrilly. Pausing briefly to gain her breath and catch her heartbeat, Malli flares again. “It says to the world that I have transitioned from a child in a pavadai, a long skirt and a top, to half-a-woman. That I am one who will cross the bridge to final womanhood when I begin to wear a saree, a full garment as it were, when I eventually marry. Why should my life be divided into predetermined garment phases? Am I expected to be like a snake who sloughs off skin? It is ridiculous. And anyway who decides that married women cannot wear pavadais or half-saris?”
The silence between mother and daughter stretches.
“Can we meet halfway, please? Can your half of the story and my half meet at a point?” Malli’s mother beseeches. “Can I somehow help you get over your bewilderment and impatience with our customs? Help you be within the community without snipping off ties with it?” she asks with hope.
Malli relents at her mother’s conciliatory tone and spouts a half-smile on her face. She returns to her room determined to find a halfway point, a position that appeases her mother, yet one that will allow her to hold on to her views.
She spends some time thinking hard and chances on a solution. She plays her thoughts aloud to herself: “Instead of coming out to our community, maybe I could come out to a fraternity of younger school girls. To a girl group in a school less privileged than mine. Through lifeskills classes at my school, I have come to understand that these girls are desperately seeking information on their bodies that escape their clothes, on periods, and on personal hygiene. I could enroll in a school project that takes this on. That way I can take your message of dealing with womanhood with joy to them.”
What will her mother make of her idea to keep the ritual alive in her own way, she wonders.
Will she say: “What you say is indeed a wonderful idea and a great solution. I like it very much. Okay, I say no piecemeal, half-sari entry into womanhood for you. No rituals. We go with only your very own intent to help girls handle their womanhood with joy.”
Or will she refuse to buy into her idea, as a half-measure?
Chitra Gopalakrishnan is a New Delhi-based journalist and a social development communications consultant who uses her ardour for writing, wing to wing, to break firewalls between nonfiction and fiction, narratology and psychoanalysis, marginalia and manuscript, and tree-ism and capitalism.
Author website: www.chitragopalakrishnan.com