Mothers who do not miss tiny specks of dust that settle on the rods of the window, like the toppings on your favourite ice cream, cannot be fooled when it comes to those tiny deep red blobs on your pale lemon-yellow frock, while you whirl around playing ‘Runner and Catcher’. I was rushed inside with unnecessary force, amidst a hush and a frivolously weeping Ammumma and bathed in cold water. I tried to mouth my genuine bewilderment while Amma scrubbed me vigorously with soap. She did not respond except for a curt nod and continued with her task (wiping now) while I sneezed a couple of soapy froth bubbles owing to taking in breath at the wrong moment. While I scrambled out of the bath, she said “You’ve become a big girl now.”
Never would I have ever imagined that a simple and an absolutely normal biological occurrence as periods could instigate chaos in a household.
Well, it can.
Arrangements were made and I felt as if the house was heaving suddenly with a lot of people who came to visit Me. I was made to sit in a room where people sat around me and spoke about totally insignificant matters like the oncoming exam for their child or the extravaganza of next-door family weddings. I remember aunties and elder sisters pressing their fingers on me and looking at me almost pityingly (which I’d soon find out why) as they came in and squashed into the remaining space in the room, while uncles refused to meet my eyes and stayed ‘outside’ the room, embarrassed for some reason. None of this surprised me more than the fact that people started weeping unnecessarily when they saw me all decked in a traditional ‘pattupavada’ and wearing a flower garland that fell way below my actual hair. A relative who I swear I was seeing for the first time ever, came so close to plant a wet kiss on my cheek, that I could actually see her eyes fill up like a fountain before they spilled. Utter confusion and a complete disarray ensued in my brain on what was exactly happening to me and why was there a sudden shift of worlds due to a few negligible, probably washable, drops of blood stain?
Some of my marvel at the whole thing seemed to have clawed its way to my face because Amma pinched me hard and whispered, “Close your mouth and stop gaping like that.”
A momentary distraction came in the form of my brother and cousins who peeped in through the window. Their sincere worry had been that the ‘Runner and Catcher’ was still on hold and we were down by just two points. I wished I could give them a proper and credible reason for putting The Game on hold but I was too perplexed and all I could manage was that it was something serious as there were a lot of adult tears involved.
Little did I know that the events that followed would be just as weird and strange as the others. A brown hard bound vintage copy of the Ramayana was placed before me as I sat facing the idols in the pooja corner. I was asked to retrieve a ‘Mirror with a tail’ from it and look into it and perceive my beauty while the crowd in my house stood and watched. I took the mirror from inside and stared at it trying my level best to ‘perceive my beauty.’ All I saw was a pair of bemused eyes staring back at me along with my identification mole (mentioned in my school diary) near my right eye.
Thankfully, the periods that followed later in life had been less eventful and surprisingly marked by a lack of concern. For one thing, cramps made their way into my monthly bloodsheds like stubborn pigeons refusing to go away even after repeated warnings. Spotting days after spotting days passed as Amma received calls from school informing I passed put in the assembly or the exam hall or the audio-visual room and the like. I’d be brought home where I lay in a pool of blood and my misery. Defying logic was one of the acclaimed qualities in Amma. The logic here was pretty simple too. Why not allow me to stay home on the first day of period? At this she strung a together words that made up a flashy multicolored mismatched chain, like ‘strong’, ‘giving into the pain’ and ‘bold enough to endure’. Finally, Dad decided to save his energy for a worthier argument and left the matter.
One such day I was brought back from school and in between my emotional and bodily distress akin to your lower abdomen getting ironed so that it became wrinkle-free, I managed to ask her, wouldn’t these monthly auto tours gauge a larger hole in the money saving schemes designed by her. In response to this, she left me to my despair in the hall upstairs, alone and knowing I’ll have no one to rant to, which is the ‘worst’ when in pain. No doubt about it, fifteen minutes later I saw darkness creeping into my eyes and colour bombs exploding inside my closed eyelids as I clutched my stomach in agony. I slipped onto the floor allowing the cold to creep into the scorching blisters. Some kind of a yelp came out of my mouth in the next contraction and I was hazily reminded of the same noise that Caliban from The Tempest produced in the excerpt covered by our teacher a few weeks ago. My exceptional liking towards Literature has come in handy quite a few times in life. This was one such moment when the lines of the Play flowed out of my head through the wails in my abdomen like a water out of a tap. As I twisted and turned and warped in convulsive pain on the cold floor, my throat shrieked the most gruesome and hollow-toned monologues by Shakespeare, though everything was punctuated through a scream. Half an hour later, I was put back in bed by a thoroughly shaken father, who kept asking my aunt, the family doctor, if period cramps could affect mental stability and turn his daughter into an English chanting 80-year-old.
More fainting and seizure days followed while I resorted to my drama recital once within the confines of home. I still had no idea how it worked but somehow my energy alterations to the monologues reduced the impact of cramps on my head. This way, I’d be more concerned about the ensuing derangement of Lady Macbeth or Caesar or whoever depending on the text chosen by the school for the year.
Maybe that’s what is meant by purgation in literature; how it purges you or relieves you slightly of your pain. Or the Cramps and Caliban share a secret code in life. Plausible. Later on, there were people (not the teary ones) who appeared to say, “Cramps are a passing phase. They stop when you’re fifteen, no sorry, twenty, or was it twenty-two? No. definitely twenty-four.”
Shakespearean texts work more than these unsolicited advices, everyone. Nineteen years later, cramps are still on, for your information. So are Caliban’s little monologues.
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