Written by: Ahendrila Goswami
The metro was crowded and I was running late for my class. It was 10:30am and no matter how queasy it made me feel to look at the sea of heads sticking out from the mass of sweaty bodies in the compartment, I decided to climb inside and bear with it. Unfortunately, the 20-minute ride would go on to scar me for the next couple of months.
We had merely crossed a station when a woman standing behind me suddenly whispered in my ear that my kurta had a disapproving red stain. I was alarmed. I immediately knew that it was my leaking sanitary napkin, but standing where I was, barely able to move and inside a moving metro compartment, I could do little to help myself. I confessed that I was menstruating and thanked her for having informed me about it. As I started thinking of how to get myself cleaned up, I realised a motion in the crowd. It turned to a panic within minutes.
Women started making all sorts of clicking noises with their tongues and tried to move aside. I stood alone, huddled with my bag of books in my arms. I could sense their eyes journeying upwards from the scandalising stain to my neck, and resting finally on my face. In retrospect, I believe they wanted to spot an ounce of shame or guilt for having brought something as ‘unholy’ and ‘hush hush’ as periods to public space and accidentally exposing it too, in front of them.
The woman sitting in front of me asked me to move away from her so that I don’t touch her, and soon, I found myself saying “sorry” to all of them around. One of the voices in the crowd proposed to know which station I’d be getting down at, another asked me to stand near the door, but most of them just frowned and turned away from me. It was a harmless stain on my kurta, but their honour seemed to have been wounded by it. I jostled towards the back door and to my surprise, one of them angrily told me that if I cannot take care of my periods, I should probably not step out on those days.
Already tremoring from the experience on metro, as soon as I got down at the platform, another group of women passed by me and kindly pointed out that I had stained myself. I told them that I knew it and would take care of it soon enough, but on realising that I was already aware of the speck of ‘disgrace’ on me and was yet acting perfectly calmed about it, one of them said, “Isssh chi, lojja nei (Ew, are you not ashamed)?”
Almost at the verge of tears, I tried to hide my kurta from as many people as I could, and coming out from the platform, took an Uber back home. The next time I had to take a metro, the next day precisely, I stood at the platform for a long time and watched the compartments filling up with bodies headed to work. I came back home and didn’t go to college for the next two days.
But this ‘I’ in my story is not a singular entity. It is every menstruator who is reminded daily of the shame, the nose-curling-up reactions and the various popular misunderstandings around periods.
I have read testimonials of angry menstruators on Facebook and on the internet, in general, ranting about the harassment they have faced in public due to a period stain and I know that no matter how much support pours in for them through likes, shares and comments, their daily realities barely change, unless a miracle happens. But miracles are rare and ground realities so deeply impact the menstruators that most of them around me opt to stay at home even if they do not suffer from dysmenorrhea or other period related illnesses.
The next time I was on my period, I could not bring myself up to take the metro. It took me a lot of time to shed the fear of the crowd’s gaze upon me. But once I did, I knew I had a story to tell for a lesson to be learnt and shared around.