EVERYONE IS SYMPATHETIC of a pregnant woman. But in my opinion, pregnancy is only a 10-month torment which might happen once or twice in a woman’s life. On the other hand, the torment a woman goes through each month when she is not pregnant is a life sentence. Freedom, Stayfree, Whisper–advertisements of these sanitary napkins show carefree women who wake up fresh and happy in the mornings while I see young girls from poor families stare longingly at these sanitary napkins in medical shops. I never experienced this longing as a young girl because I didn’t even know the existence of sanitary napkins when I started my period.
Delayed periods is actually a boon that poverty bestows on poor girls. I was 16 when my periods started. Those days we had just one meal a day. Even that wasn’t an assured one! It was my last year at school, around the half-yearly exams. My family organized a small celebration for me. It was exciting, but I couldn’t fully understand what was going on. I had no pain for the first six months. Then, during menstruation, I started to experience heavy flow of blood. I had to walk for about two km to reach school; there was no money to pay for the bus ticket. Only a few scraps of old cloth were folded and kept in place to hold the blood flow all day. I had to keep folding in and folding out the wet and dry parts of the cloth.
