Coming of Age by Megha Nayar

I will never forget the day I had my first period, so memorable was the date – 09/09/99. I was twelve and prepared but reality did not match expectations. I had anticipated a runny flow, like a tap bursting open. Having witnessed my girlfriends make emergency exits from class with one fist tightly wrapped around a secret thingamajig, I was counting on the arrival of womanhood to be bright-red and conspicuous. Instead, it came as a thick brown discharge that looked like the consequence of an over-confident fart.

That first period was a slow-motion event. It was icky and annoying but largely tame.

When my mother taught me how to affix a sanitary napkin to the inside of my panty, I saved her instructions in my head with bullet points. A class topper, I even revised them twice. Place the upper end of the napkin about one inch north of where the vaginal opening sits. Check that the entire napkin is firmly glued to the panty. Change every four to six hours. Take two baths a day, keep your crotch clean. And, listen – don’t toss your undies into the laundry pile anymore. We can’t expect a man-servant to handle a big girl’s panties. Wash them yourself at bath time. Here, take this detergent soap and scrubbing brush.

Big girl.

I listened and nodded, suddenly feeling shy. I knew, in theory, that periods are a perfectly legit part of female evolution, yet for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to look the domestic help in the eye that evening. I avoided him for several evenings thereafter.

In school, curious things were happening. My classmates were starting to soar like birds, their heads expanding with strange new ideas. My best friend Paro, who’d matured six months before me, was falling hopelessly in love with a senior. She nicknamed him “Red Bag” because he carried, well, a red-coloured bag. I did not know his name. She didn’t either. But he had a face like an angel’s and she was convinced she would spend the rest of her life with him. Every day, during recess, she would drag me to the third-floor corridor from where the both of us got an unobstructed view of Red Bag having a snack in the canteen. We could only see the top of his head though, and the food going into his mouth. “Look at him eat a sandwich again! That must be his favourite snack,” she would muse. “Look, he hasn’t oiled his hair today! Must be planning to go out in the evening.”

Those were pre-internet days. The earliest mobile phones were still five years away. We lived in a small, conservative town – one where the most rebellious thing twelve-year-old girls could do was talk to boys in public. I was not the type to flirt – neither with dudes nor with danger. I had been conditioned since birth into goodgirlness. My bestie, however, was a cheeky lass.

“Oye!” she whispered to me one morning during a Social Science test. “I managed to find out Red Bag’s name.”

“What?!” I felt a tiny shiver climb up my spine.

“I followed him to the parking lot yesterday after school,” she explained. “His bike wasn’t very far from mine. I pretended that mine had a punctured tyre and made a show of dragging it out of the mud. He noticed and came over to help.”

“Wow!” The girl was crafty. “And then? Just like that you asked him his name?”

So, after he helped her with her bike, she turned around to thank him – calling him someone else’s name on purpose. He corrected her. I’m not A, I’m B.

Clever. I was mind-blown. I also felt a slight nudge of terror, even though it wasn’t I who’d strayed.

Yes, this was straying. In our part of the world, girls from respectable families were not supposed to seek romance. School was for education. Love could happen later, when your parents picked a man for you, or when you picked a man you were sure your parents would approve of.

Right?

Right.

But Paro was intoxicated. The guy with the red bag was her drug. She wouldn’t stop drooling over him. Her scores dipped. All day in class, she day-dreamed. She wrote his name in the back of her English notebook. She played FLAMES with their names written together, and the result was M for Marriage. She was thrilled. She tore out that paper, folded it into a little origami flower and slipped it under her shirt. “I want to hold him close to my heart,” she said. I grinned.

Inwardly, I wondered if she was becoming the wrong kind of company.

My mother had told me in detail about the kind of girls to stay away from. Girls who wore eyeliner to school, or black bras. Girls who looked for excuses to slap boys on their arms. Girls who did not study seriously for exams. Girls with low calibre and high hemlines.

Paro was fast beginning to resemble them.

The following month, on a crisp December morning, we embarked on our annual school trip. The bestie had done a mad dance the previous week when she’d found out that grades 8 to 10 would be going together. Not like they could do anything scandalous like hold hands on the bus, because teachers are known to metamorphose into hawks on school picnics. But still, he would be around. She could watch him all day. Maybe they’d get to talk again? Fifteen hours of possibilities lay ahead. She was deliriously happy.

The picnic venue was a forest with a hundred-year old banyan tree. There was ample space and opportunity for everyone to frolic around. The sporty ones grabbed their badminton racquets, the lazy ones sprawled out in the shade with playing cards and packed snacks. I wanted to soak in the greenery and take a quiet walk around the woods. But when I turned to call Paro, I realized she was no longer with me. She, along with the rest of the hormonal ones, had vanished in search of a secret hideout. She wouldn’t be back all day.

In the evening, when everyone began piling back into the bus, I reserved a seat for her. I was, of course, livid at how she’d ditched me without a word, but my goodgirlness always got in the way of confrontation. I did not know how to throw a fit. When she finally hopped on board, dishevelled and grinning, I saw the look in her eyes and knew her love story had made progress.

“What did you do?” I asked after the bus took off.

“Let’s just say I got to know someone better,” she winked.

Good Lord! What had the girl done?

“Nothing serious, babe. Just some fun. A little kissing. Harmless stuff.”

I wanted to know more but she refused to elaborate. I had too much pride to badger her. She plugged in a cassette and began listening to Barbie Girl on her Walkman. I turned to the window, upset at her treatment of me, but more importantly, very worried for her.

Why hadn’t she spared a thought for the consequences of meandering? Assuming she’d been canoodling with Red Bag, what if someone from the school had seen them? What if her parents were informed? Or worse … what if she fell pregnant?

I’d learnt from one of the magazines in my mother’s Femina collection that “oral sex is a legitimate alternative to regular sex”. I also knew, from studying biology, that anything oral concerns the mouth. Like oral exams, for example, where one has to speak out the answers. Naturally, oral sex had to mean kissing then. What else could it be?

The thought travelled from my mind into my bones, making me shudder. My mother always said that mingling too much with boys was dangerous. It could cause an accident and tarnish a girl’s life for good. I did not exactly know how babies came about but had an inkling that kissing – also known as oral sex, as earlier deduced – had something to do with it. And if oral sex was an alternative to regular sex, it had to have the same outcomes, obviously.

Oh god, why was this girl tempting fate?

I said nothing to her but made some quick calculations. Her last period had ended a week ago – I knew this because she’d made numerous trips to the washroom and had done her I’m-walking-ahead-of-you-please-check-my-skirt routine a few times. I also knew, as her closest friend, that she had a 29-day cycle. I calculated – her next period would be due on the 15th of next month.

So, if she got her period as usual, it would mean she wasn’t pregnant. Right? Isn’t that what the magazines said?

Those three weeks after the school picnic were the longest three weeks of my life. I was wracked by anxiety. None of the usual distractions worked, not even my favourite activities like reading story-books and studying for class tests. I was tormented by the prospect of my best friend dropping out of school. At night, I tossed and turned for hours. At one point, I even had a nightmare where I saw her arrive in school with a massive protruding belly, instantly becoming the target of vicious mockery. The teachers outraged at her, making tch tch tch noises. The Principal announced her expulsion from school at the morning assembly. To make matters worse, he called me in for interrogation as well. “You are Paro’s best friend, aren’t you?” he asked me severely, his infamous cane just inches away from where I sat. “Are you also like her? Do you have a boyfriend too? We’re going to summon both of your parents. Girls these days have no shame!”

When the nightmare broke, I was trembling. I realized I’d peed a little in my pyjamas.

On her part, Paro was blissfully unaware of my distress. She continued her shenanigans – meeting up with Red Bag in the canteen, chatting him up in the parking lot, even exchanging home phone numbers – and I grew convinced that all hell was waiting to break loose upon all of us. I wondered if I should tell my mother about her meanderings, but then I was afraid my mother might turn up at school to set her straight, and the last thing I wanted was drama, so I held my tongue in check.

On the 14th of that month, Paro did not come to school.

I contemplated the possibilities – maybe she’d woken up late, maybe her alarm didn’t ring, maybe her bike got punctured en route. Such exigencies alone could explain her sudden disappearance. I must have looked at the door at least a million times, willing her to turn up. But she was determinedly absent.

Ditto on the 15th – her seat remained empty. All through the morning prayers, I wished desperately that she would appear at the door, dressed in the red-and-grey school pinafore. But there was no sign of her.

Both days, I was powerless to concentrate on studies. In and out they went – the Mathematics teacher, the History teacher, the English teacher, the Arts teacher – but to my mind they were as absent as Paro. Nothing they said registered. Not a word.

At 12:30 PM, when the last bell rang, I darted out of the classroom like a human arrow. My bag had already been packed, my shoelaces tied. I’d been sitting in lunge position, right next to the door, so that I could escape getting stuck in the crowded corridors. Off I ran, like a cat chasing a mouse, and reached home so quick my mother asked if the school had let us off early.

After gobbling up my lunch, I told my mother I was going to Paro’s place to help her out with schoolwork. “She has been absent these past two days”, I explained. “So, I need to help her with the missed portions.”

Before my mother could question me, I grabbed my backpack and rushed out of the house. I hopped onto my bicycle – my faithful pink Ladybird – and cycled like a maniac all the way to my best friend’s home, not stopping once to catch my breath.

At their porch, I rang the doorbell and waited. My heart was drumming in my ears. Aunty seemed to be taking an eternity to reach the door. In the meantime, my brain conjured up the worst possible consequences. What if Paro’s parents had found out the truth and given her a tongue-lashing? She would be grounded. They would take her for surgery. A doctor would extract the baby from her stomach. Would the baby be fully formed? Likely not. Babies can’t possibly grow much in a month or two. What would happen to Paro? She would be hidden from the world until her belly settled back into shape; that was certain. Would she be permitted to resume school? Unlikely. Her parents would lock her up indoors and get her home-schooled. She wouldn’t be allowed to step out unescorted. Her plans to study in America would be axed. Worse, she would never get to see Red Bag again. Like a pair of separated swans, they would writhe in agony and eventually die. As the only person who knew of their boundless love for each other, I would be morally obliged to share their saga with the world. I would pen their love story with depth and longing. It would make everyone cry, maybe even win me a big prize. The BBC would interview me. The critics would call my book “poignant” and “moving”. But the awards and accolades would do nothing to heal my heart, broken from having lost my best friend forever. I would live the rest of my life cautioning every girl in the world to never indulge in oral sex until after getting married.

At this point the door opened, jolting me out of my thoughts.

Paro’s mother took a moment to register my presence, perhaps because of how disoriented I must have looked, and how profusely sweating. “Hi Aunty,” I panted, my heart now throbbing at hundred-decibel levels, “I … sorry for showing up like this. I just came to meet Paro. Is she … okay? I … she missed two days of school, so I came to help her with lessons. Hope she is okay?”

Aunty smiled sweetly at me. “How nice of you, kiddo! Paro is fine, she is just having a very heavy period. You know how it is, right? She was groaning so much, I told her she could stay home. She’ll be back in school tomorrow. Now, why don’t you come in? Paro is watching Princess Diaries on cable. Go on, join her – I’ll bring you girls pizza and milkshakes in a bit.”

And just like that, the thudding in my heart subsided. I went in. Paro gave me a delighted hug. I joined her on the couch, and all was well in our little world.

***

Epilogue

I did learn, eventually, that kissing and oral sex aren’t synonyms. I also learnt, over long years of un-learning, not to issue character certificates to other women.

First published in The Sock Drawer in March 2021

Coming of Age by Megha Nayar

Megha Nayar

Carving Out My Girlhood by Beatriz Salvador

Mange by A.C.