MENSTRUATION AND MEN

           MENSTRUATION AND MEN

Boys take a while to know about the periodic bloody experience women have to undergo through the major part of their lives and even longer to understand its significance. 

For most of the men, the elucidation comes largely through education or after getting married or when they are in a relationship.

Though I am no exception but I had a fair idea of women’s monthly cycles earlier than I should have. Thanks to my dumb-ass, traditional, superstitious and hypocrite clan.

We are Suryadwij Brahmins (ancestors of Sun God). I grew up seeing my grandparents practising strict rules at home connecting them to spirituality. They didn't eat onion and garlic. Even when a peel of these forbidden smelly vegetables came inside the house (brought by the wind or stuck in shoe-sole), they would wash the house. Many more were there. Most of them are weird and laughable. 

One regarding the menstruation of women is nearly impossible to follow, now. It didn’t seem tough then because of the big family size and the Joint family system. 

The woman in her periods was not allowed to enter the kitchen at all. She couldn’t cook, she couldn’t wash dishes or clothes, and she couldn’t enter the temple and couldn’t pray. She would eat in separate utensils, kept outside the kitchen for the very purpose.

As kids, we often heard elderly women saying ‘She doesn’t have a hand, she will not cook’. Nineteen people of the family would widen their eyes and stare at the girl strangely. All except the children knew she had become ‘untouchable’ for a few days. Curious, we would ask the mother what did that mean and left her embarrassed. She would distract us to escape answering.

My father worked in the Indian Air Force. When he was posted to another city, we had only one woman, my mother, who could cook. The rule could not be followed. So the ‘doesn’t have a hand’ phrase soon, erased out of our memory.

As I progressed in my academics, I learnt about the monthly ritual of the uterus of a woman and could relate to the frequent havoc it created in my big family.

After my father voluntarily retired from his services and settled at Delhi in his own house as a nuclear family, my mother continued not following the rules. Consequently, our relatives, including my grandparents ‘disowned’ us and stopped visiting us. 

My parents have left for their abode in heaven and the things are still the same. I, being the only son of my parents, am an outcast.  However, I refuse to abide by the weird practice just to mingle with them. When somebody visits them during the time when the woman in the house is in her periods, the man works in the kitchen and proudly tells the visitor that 'She doesn't have a hand'.  

My predecessors were all decently educated. All men, conversed with each other in English at home and the women understood what their husbands and sons talked. They themselves used many words in their routine conversation. But, is it something I should feel proud of when I know the absurd and baseless system they followed.

Menstruation cycle is something men should feel more proud than the fairer sex for it signifies their existence.

It’s a periodic phase of fatigue and pain. Women experience painful cramps due to muscle contraction. There is a severe pelvic pain, unbearable backache, tired and heavy legs that the women endure during the difficult five days that visit and revisit them for a good part of their lives.

Women need care and love during those days, not neglect and hatred.

This makes sex education in schools more imperative. Men must be made to understand that it is a unique physiological process in women that enables human beings to continue their population on the only planet to have life. Women can’t be hated and should not be disowned in those days of a month.

I may be wrong but in India, the women are more responsible for their exploitation. When they realized this and tried to change, it was too late and therefore, is taking longer to put things in their place.

Some Excerpts from my Novel RAPESCARS…They Never Heal….

1.     “…Like all girls, menarche had hit me at twelve, transforming me into a woman. We used to have a lot of discussion about who had and who had not got their periods in school. We girls experience bouts of pain and carry ourselves on the fatigued legs, but for years we don’t realise the significance of bearing menstruation. And when we do, we understand that it had made us a woman. The reasons our mothers and sisters give us are inadequate and inappropriate.

The cramps and pain it gives may be horrible, but the way menarche changes our psyche is fascinating…”

“…I am not an atheist and respect God for everything but I believe he too has been unfair to women. It is iniquity on God’s part to make women bear the pain and unease of menstruation as early as ten- twelve years. He denied them of the pleasures of adolescence, an epoch that visits the lives of only men amidst childhood and adulthood. Girls become women out of a child because nature blessed them with ovaries that seem to be in a hurry to release the eggs. Each woman, the suppressed creation, suffers almost two thousand days of her life in pain, bleeding and cursing herself for being a woman when her womb dutifully dresses up and prunes itself during those five odd days every month. Nothing is more optimistic than the uterus of a woman..."