Those Unholy Days

Well it is the first day of Navratras and my kind mother spent the last two days preparing for the same, buying some of that usual pooja stuff. Today morning she woke up earlier than usual and was getting ready to welcome the gods into her house. But I didn’t hear the aarti or the sound of the prayer bells. Neither did the fragrance of the incense sticks spread the word of the gods having been remembered and celebrated. But soon my mind was off this unusualness and onto my daily morning routine, which, I’m sorry does not include bathing at 6am! But as ‘The Gods’ would have it, that’s exactly what I was made to do.

Mother came to me and told me softly that ‘she wasn’t well’ and therefore, I would have to bathe and do the prayers. That’s a line that my mother had developed over the years to convey to general public that ‘SHE HAD HER PERIOD’. Somehow having one’s period equated to being unwell. Somehow people were ‘supposed to’ understand that that was what she meant and not ask about what exactly was wrong and exactly why was she feeling under the weather. And that’s what I did. I ‘understood’.

I did what was required of me, chanted the Gods into our house and urged them to stay until the end of Navratras and yes, bless our house and family. Later in the day, my father carried out the evening prayers, arousing my little brother’s interest. He asked my father why he was singing the aarti as it was something which was done by my mother. Unsurprisingly, my mother answered his innocent query with the same front of being unwell. Obviously, the little boy wanted to know what was wrong and kept asking till he received the reply, “My knees are hurting and so I can’t sit on the ground for pooja”. Well, bullet well dodged! Disaster averted. Disaster of telling a boy about the menstrual mechanism of female bodies. Disaster of making him aware that women under the spell of ‘that time of the month’ were not allowed to sit for prayers. Disaster of corrupting an innocent mind into thinking like his predecessors. Disaster of allowing him to believe that it was what made the female body untouchable when undergoing the said phenomenon. Disaster of making him like everybody else who hide the sanitary napkins under multiple layers of newspaper and plastic coverings. Everybody else who shuns the otherwise pious women out of the temple campus. Everybody else who consider it to be the ‘devil’s blood’. Everybody else who is scared of accepting that that blood was the reason for their life. That the menstrual blood is the crumbling down of the wall which the female body forms to support a foetus. To support a new life.

So all ‘men’ out there, be ‘man’ enough and see the beauty of the process which is the reason for your being and will be the reason for your kids’ beings. Please realize that if nothing else, it is a biological process and women can’t help it even if they wanted! It is not ‘unholy’ and does not deserve to be treated like an illness. How come your daughters, sisters and wives are beautiful and graceful before and after those 4-5 days and not during them? How come they deserve entry into a temple at all times barring ‘those times’. Why should a woman who had been waiting to greet the gods not be allowed to because she is carrying out a responsibility that god himself entrusted her with? Why should my mother have to ask me to replace her on the prayer rug? Why should my mother feel uneasy explaining her ‘illness’ to her little son.

All said and done, I am going to tell my brother all about it. Just waiting for the right time. And believe me, that ‘right time’ will be as soon as he is mature enough to understand ‘a biological process’ and surely before the world gets to him with their sick ideas about the whole thing. It will be surely before the world can make him one of them.