When did you first realise you were a woman?
When I was told I couldn’t touch the mango pickle.
(Trigger Warning: Mentions instances of child abuse and harassment.)
I’ve always known I was a woman before I was a person, ever since I was very little. I often wonder what people think of when it comes to their sense of self– does personhood come first, or does gender?
The realisation that I was a girl came from the daily reminders society gave me. A little girl was essentially a trainee to be seconded to another family when the time came. (I was 16 when an aunt first brought up the topic of my marriage. It felt like a whiplash because the only thing on my mind at the time was acing trigonometry.)
This is why I couldn’t talk too much or play too roughly. I needed to learn to manage a household, be a good hostess, respect my elders, not fraternise with boys, study hard, and not read novels.
“You need to talk softly because that’s how good girls behave,” they’d say.
“You need to start wearing ethnic dresses because you’re getting older,” they’d say.
How can I forget the fat-shaming followed by thin-shaming that I went through in my early years? It reinforced the message that a girl needed to look a certain way to be appreciated. The only person who genuinely cared about my fluctuating weight was my grandmother. However, she was an orphan with no one to influence her opinions, so she was free to be kind.
“You have two daughters, you need a son,” my relatives and school teachers told my parents as I stood right in front of them. Apparently, the couple needed to keep trying in hopes of a son. My relatives had wailed in the hospital where I was born– I was the second daughter and, thus, unwelcome.
When I arrived at that crucial juncture, menstruation, the topic came wrapped in a thick cloak of embarrassment and shame. There was so much of it that I’m surprised I feel none of it anymore. Having my period meant that my participation in any sort of religious activity was heavily curtailed. This is when religion was entirely imposed on me from the start. The logic was simple: if I was on my period, I was impure.
“Menstruating women cannot touch pickles,” they’d say.
Apparently, the pickles could turn rancid if a menstruating woman touched them. I was expected to adhere to some unwritten code of propriety devised hundreds of years ago. Overnight, I went from being a 13-year-old kid to being a ‘proper woman’ who couldn’t raise objections to any of this absurdity.
Ah, and nothing like the harassment meted out to a little girl growing up in Delhi to get the message that one’s different, a prey. When I was about eight, an old man tried to feel up my skirt in a public park. He came to sit next to me on a bench, started showing me sketches, and simultaneously placed his hand on my thigh.
I didn’t understand what was going on, but I was scared enough to run away from the park and warn some friends on the way out. I ran like my life depended on it, and it kind of did. I stopped only when I reached my front door. To this day, I don’t think I told anyone about it.
Since then, worse has happened. On a winter morning, on my way to the school bus, a man started walking towards me. It was cold, foggy, and deserted. He seemed to be dressed in bare minimum clothing, given the weather. Actually, he was holding his pants half down. That was my first experience of a sexual nature, unfathomable because I was so young, before I was ready, and without my consent. I’m lucky he didn’t force himself on me that day.
I dreaded walking by myself on the streets. But that meant I couldn’t get to the local market, my school bus, or my coaching classes. Ogling was common, and you had to look out for any groping by men on bikes zooming by. It felt very scary to call any of them out because the threat of retaliation was real and immediate. What if he knew where I lived? What if he started following me? What if he brought back more men? What if he threw acid on my face?
As I sit and think back on these incidents today, I feel extremely grateful that I escaped some of these situations, and I don’t know how. While I’m proud of the fact that I’m a woman, I would have liked to grow up in a world that didn’t treat me unfairly merely because I am one. Or where I wasn’t held back or considered weak, and maybe could have grown up like a boy— entitled, confident, and feel like there was little I couldn’t do.
The world could have been my oyster.