More than another take on The Vagina Monologues

Firstly, thank you Eve Ensler. I first saw a live performance of The Vagina Monologues two years ago in India. Next, i wished i could see a dialogue! However, recently, a great post by Nilanjana Roy released a flood from my conscience and the precursor to this piece was me jumping up from my bed and starting to write this. Phew! some rush that. If somebody was watching, making a record of all the reactions on my face and body between all of these events, this would also make for a very entertaining video blog. Alas, i don't record myself with a spycam and thankfully, no one else does either.

Anyway, thank you for bearing that cathartic release of humour. The point is, i'm terribly sorry as i write this. Consent is my issue. It has been in life. In my life as a woman, that is. When i was a girl, it wasn't. I hadn't grown conscious of my Vagina then.

I have been unconscious of how the word consent has been a ball of tumbleweed in the desert all along. Now, I'm sorry because i let it be. The first pangs of being violated was when i faced my first episode of being eve-teased on Delhi streets. It was an idle afternoon and there was no one around. Co-incidentally, i was also responsible for getting my little cousin sister home that day. In my attempt to push her away, i had to get closer to the young boy who passed his hands over my legs, groped my skirt and felt my thighs. I was so ashamed of myself, and so stricken with fear in that moment, i could not even turn to run. I saw my sister run away before me and walked away slowly, with my back turned to the fellow and my head hung in shame. For as long as i lived at that address, the memory would pass my mind in a flash every time i walked by that spot.

Years later, on a bus to college, i was groped again. Till today, i don't know whether or not to call it molestation. I turned back and violently pushed the man who was standing behind me. I expected that the conductor of the bus would come and tell him to get off the bus. The man kept standing there. I had to get off at the next stop so i did but i felt like i lost, again. I had never been given a choice to consent to any of these. But that doesn't mean that i gave my consent. My silence doesn't mean my approval. And i want to shout that out from the rooftops.

I may like to listen to a Bollywood number but that doesn't mean that i become the object of the song. I did not consent to a body which is similar to mine being filmed like that. I did not consent to parts of my body being touched or stared at like that. And most importantly, i did not say that entertainment was akin to life. The performer consents to perform but that does not mean that 'women as viewers' accept the implications. Women may reserve the right to be silent in the theatre where projections become the object of various expletives and abuses. Our silence is not denial or acceptance. It is an individual right.

Girls everywhere(i beg the right to make a generalisation here) are conditioned to move in a collective from when they are young. We are told that we are little vulnerable flowerlike, tender creatures that must take care of ourselves and our virginity. We are taught to be daughters, mothers, wives. We might as well be proud of the abilities we develop in those roles but our lesson in 'becoming' is flawed. The flaw is that we are also taught to be 'afraid' in our acknowledgement of our girlhood, our womanhood.

And this fear is constantly woven into our conscience. Hence, many of us take it for granted. Our ability to embody our womanhood is not our weakness. But we're afraid of our bodies because they become marked in our imagination. Marked with stares, violence, burns and all other sorts of impressions, many of which are not self inflicted and some of which are. Because we consider ourselves vulnerable, we imagine these as pollutants. We fester under the scrutiny of these marks.

 So where does consent figure in this equation then?

The way i see it, the taken for grantedness is where many of us lose sight of consent. Sometimes, we travel far from that word in embodying the conditioned qualities of womanhood. We give up the right to our bodies, or it is taken from us. Our vaginas are taken for granted or the right to feel them is taken from us. Like we are conditioned not to feel masculinity, masculinity is not conditioned to understand womanhood. Consent is that neglected, morose grey area in between these two conditions. This is my attempt at reclamation and i want it to be here, on my blog, to be 'felt' rather than to just be 'read'. This is my apology to vaginas and bodies, including my own:




I'm sorry for all the times that i let you be hurt, tousled, torn
I'm sorry for all the times i couldn't say no
I'm sorry for all the times i cried to myself because you felt used
I'm sorry for all the times i took you for granted
I'm sorry for the pile of abuses i let you bear and stored up in my mind
I'm sorry for subjecting you to silent tears
I'm sorry for thinking that you were smelly and meant to be neglected
I'm sorry for refusing to look at you all the times that i thought you were hurt
I'm sorry for just calling you 'something' under a pile of hair
I'm sorry that i just let you be there
I'm sorry for never being curious enough about you
I'm sorry i apologised for your presence at times
I'm sorry i let you fester in fear, quivering in the shallow presence of an impending crime
I'm sorry for not calling a crime, a crime
I'm sorry for all the time i have lost out - in excuses to not care enough for you

I love you

Here's to reclaiming the Vagina, my Vagina

The importance of sunshine and other thoughts

The first day we met, we laughed at silly jokes, talked for four hours and ate and drank our way into the wee hours of the morning. The three of us. A month or two later, i had a fight with them. ‘I’ and ‘them’ being the operative words here. Where the ‘them’ arose has a lot of explanantions. Age, and frames of reference being the two most important ones. The ‘I’ was me, freely expressing what i wanted to express, how i wanted to express it. ‘They’ also did, and that is probably where the dreariness of the ‘them’ stepped into the argument. There weren’t two ‘I’s, there was a ‘them’.

We all share a country, and common experiences – some more common and some lesser. We used to share food and dinner time though my tastes differ a lot from ‘them’. In time, I wanted to cook for myself. And so i started doing my grocery shopping and cooking separately. I suddenly also wanted a lack of conversation because i thought i was losing a hold over who i was - trying to fit in with them. I needed to reclaim my diet, my words, the originality of my conversations, and my idiosyncrasies. In time, i did. I went farther from them and was very happy with myself. They frowned , wondering what i was doing and why. Perhaps they never thought about how important the withdrawal had become for me.

So what is this world of ours really doing to each one of us? There has always been a ‘them’ and ‘I'. It depends which one we choose. It matters whether we fiddle with our blackberry in one hand whilst emoting with the other, and how many times we facebook in a day.  It matters because it changes the quality of the ‘I’ in us.

Being popular is fun. We all take turns at it. Some of us love following those popular ones and bask in a shared glory. Most of us probably love them because they can often make us laugh. Our inner worlds get darker as we acknowledge the burden of knowing more about the world we live in. We love facebook because it lets us all be happily popular. We also use it as an escapist means. But it also kills the time in which we can be ourselves. Talk to ourselves instead of newsfeeds and webpages.

What the three of us thought was a great friendship was now only ‘them’ and ‘me’. There is a point at which friction arises because we blur the lines between friends and family. Can friends be family? Well, yes and no. We use the term friendship to meet our various needs. Some friends can make us laugh, some can make us so happy. We also visit friends who can make us cry. We remember them forever. But friends aren’t family. But that is probably not the only reason why some relationships start out like they were always meant to be and jerk midway to take an unexpected downturn.

We stop listening to each other. We listen to nagging devious questions in our mind. We listen to the voice that says ‘this is dysfunctional’ and go along with it.

Conversations are not about efficiency and posting a ‘like’ on the next thing we’re going to say to each other. Our faces and bodies are not instagram photos in all their perfection.

Conversations are about celebrating the imperfection in ourselves and each other or about unnecessary indulgence. I don’t access them with a password to redeem myself each day. I talk because i need to communicate, laugh, cry, and feel. Let’s not breed a coup of silence. We need the sunlight to stream in through the boarded up windows once again.