1 1.Aisha Paul

For an average adolescent, I was five years late in getting my period.

  And when I finally got it, I created a scene from a slaughterhouse in the bathroom.

  'Maa!' I howled. I knew my mother would miss her dying daughter's yelps in the blare from the shrilly mothers-in-law in her favourite soap, Kaahani Kis Kis Ki, now into its eleventh year.

  'Maa! Switch off the TV! I'm dying!'

  Blood was trickling down my thighs. The pain felt as if I had given birth to a sixteen-wheel trailer. I pulled out the last tissue from the box and dabbed the blood off my thighs and the toilet seat. The bathroom still looked like a slaughterhouse. I felt every bit like an injured Rambo cauterizing his wounds, except I was mewing and not grunting.

  'Maa! Your daughter is dying. Like right now!'

  Finally, I heard the title track play out. My mother was a complete sucker for the show. But thankfully, she'd heard me and came running to the bathroom.

  'Were you calling me?' she asked sweetly; I could imagine her pressing her ear to the bathroom door. God. Yes. She's a sweet woman, like Mother Teresa Home Version 2.0 and I love her more than life itself. I used to wish her illnesses on me—and then mine on my brother—and I still do sometimes, but I know better. It doesn't work like that. God doesn't cut deals with seventeen-year-olds. He's too busy engineering genocides in his name.

  'I'm dead, Maa.'

  She knocked on the door. Perfect. I had locked it from inside. I scampered to the door on tiptoes, like Bambi, around the little pools of my blood as if they were toxic waste. I opened the door.

  'What . . .' Words ran dry, my mother looked around the bathroom like the air had been kicked out of her. But then she smiled. 'Aisha! Amar bachha!' she shouted and she pulled me close and hugged me, enveloping me in her arms, blood and all, and cried in joy. 'I knew Dr Roy's medicines will work. Ami jaantam.' She was crying now, kissing me all over my face, even as I doubled up in pain in her arms. I imagine this is what it would have been like when I was born—bloody, disgusting, painful, and joyous. That is if I'm not adopted like my brother once claimed I was.

  'Are you in pain?' she asked.

  Duh.

  'Okay, Aisha. Nothing to be scared of.' She made me sit on the toilet seat, and cleaned me without once scrunching up her nose. In fact, she smiled throughout it all, while I was like, 'Can't I just die instead?' Once done, she gave me a medicine for the pain.

  She taught me, like how she had taught me many other things before, to use a sanitary pad not knowing that I had practised wearing one quite a few times. In fact, I had once worn it to school for an entire week in the hope of invoking the God of Period.

  'You're a woman now,' said my mother, looking at my reflection in the mirror, peering in to see if anything had changed in me since a few minutes back and made me more woman-like. Quite ironical because puberty was still coming at me from all corners of the ring, hitting me with whiteheads, acne and weight gain in the strangest of places.

  And then she started to cry, and I cried with her. Our tear glands are hardwired. She cries. I cry.

  It was a big day for her, and I thought it would be a big day for me as well. After all I had been waiting for this day since I was twelve—the first of my friends, Megha, got her period then and for the next few months, till someone else got it, she was supposedly superior and more grown up than her prepubescent friends. But, now that I finally got my period, I didn't feel much different. If I were to say this to the fourteen-year-old Aisha, who was obsessed about getting her period and spent over five thousand hours reading about PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome), whose variant I suffered from, she would have smacked my face.

  How can spilt blood make me a woman?

  Outside, my mother was crying into the phone to Dad while lighting incense sticks and murmuring little prayers from time to time. Over the past five years, the problem of my delayed period had been troubling them emotionally and financially. At last count, I had visited twelve specialists, some of whom charged a limb for advising us to wait patiently. A few had prescribed medicines which were rather discomforting but I did everything without so much as a word of complaint even though I saw through their deception. My parents were stressed out and I could not add to their anxiety by being a rebel.

  Later that night, we went out to celebrate my becoming a woman. My dad couldn't join us because, like always, he was in a city different from where his family was. He worked in a nationalized bank and took every transfer that came his way, sometimes for a raise as low as Rs 200 a day. That seemingly measly extra four thousand two hundred a month went a long way to provide relief to our extenuating circumstances. My dad's sacrifice game on a scale of 0 to 10 was Jesus. I loved him, though not as much as I loved Mom because she was a goddamn fairy. But I loved him enough and we loved each other in the way fathers and daughters love each other—a little on the shy side. I never jumped up and s 

at on his lap like I did with Mom or hugged him when trying to sleep. Nor would he kiss me all over. But he would forgo food for a month if it meant a new uniform for me or my brother.

  Sarthak and I were both scholarship students, and we skimped on lunches, wore worn-out clothes, but there was never too much to go around. Four more years, we used to tell ourselves every time we killed a desire. 'I will buy you everything!' I used to tell my mother. 'Buy everything you need first,' my mom would answer, a little guilty at how much her medical bills cost the family.

  So, the celebration.

  The restaurant was clearly beyond our means but thank God it was a buffet and we had with us a human vacuum cleaner of food—my eighteen-year-old brother, Sarthak. He's only a year older and really, really quiet. He went to a boarding school once. I think that did it—made him serious and broody and ripped. Initially, we would also move with each of Dad's transfers, which made both my brother and me lose a couple of school years, which in turn made us the oldest in our classes. So Sarthak, eighteen, was literally the oldest guy in our school.

  'Thank you,' he said to me while loading his plate with portions rivalling a UN food aid package to Kenya.

  'What?' I feigned innocence because that's what we do as siblings. Discussions around period, lingerie and masturbation, or any sexual reference for that matter, was out of bounds.

  'And congratulations,' he said.

  Why was he talking to me? Of all the times, he found today to be a supportive big brother!

  'If you need anything, let me know,' he said.

  Stop talking to me. I nodded and walked as far away from him as possible.

  It had taken me three months to teach my mother how to use Skype and she had used this recent knowhow to surprise me—Dad was on the table as well, watching us eat. I think he was crying. I didn't look at him because I would have cried too. We cry a lot as a family, my brother excluded, who just stares into his books and reads.

  And so we celebrated.

  Because now I was like all the other girls and I could have kids when I grew older. All this when I had just about started to like being different—the girl with a faulty uterus suffering from something as unpronounceable as primary amenorrhoea.

  But now, I was just another girl.

  My mother hugged me to sleep that night and kissed me more times on my back than any of my future lovers would ever kiss me.

  I'm sure I smiled in my dreams.