My virginity is none of your business
Are you a virgin?
Wait.
No, really. Wait. Don't answer yet.
Really. Wait.
Ask yourself.
Just how many times have you heard that question.
"Are you a virgin?"
As a woman in India. In a nation that worships sexual sacredness in its fairer sex, sanctifying it as a divine virtue, belonging to the likes of Sita, Sati, Durga, Kali, basically, the cult of "good" women. All dead, or imaginary, I mean. The kinds we don't meet everyday. In cramped tin buses, in spilling over metros, in modern offices, in ominously silent fertility clinics, in sweaty sabzi mandis, in darkened movie halls, in fragrant smelling parlors, in colourful children's parks, in front of yellow school buses, waiting to drop off their sleepy-eyed children, in glass ceilinged jewelry stores - places of natural feminine existence.
Our battlegrounds. Our bedrooms. Our boardrooms. Our bane. Our bliss.
Question yourself. When is the last time someone posed the same question? Pointedly. Pretending it was perfectly natural. When, to be honest, you felt assaulted. Robbed of a sacrosanct privacy that you always believed was basic. A detail, a diagram, a discussion no one really should be bothered about. Except yourself.
A darkness you own. A journey that is intimately alone.
Fine, I'll make this simpler. I'll start with myself. I'm 36, single, childless. I have two moody, perennially turbulent ovaries, one of which was operated upon when I was 19, by a renowned surgeon in Kolkata, who told my mother I may have trouble procreating, later, parting my thighs, inserting his slippery fingers, encased in a tight rubber glove, a painful vaginal probe. "Ahhh," I'd shrieked. Salt tears pouring down the sides of my face. Trying to reach out for my mother's warm arms, as she turned her face away. Her eyes, suddenly steely.
"There is a problem, a capsule around her right ovary… she may have problems later, conceiving, taratari… get her married soon… she needs to bear children at the earliest," he paused prophetically, his left thumb shoving below my navel, now. It was the first time a man had touched me. There.
I was 19. A virgin.
It was a pain I never forgot. An ache so personal, that I somehow always associated it with sex. A numbness. A failure, as if. Someone else's….
"You've spread your legs, before, " my first boyfriend commented, in jest, as we kissed hurriedly in his Fiat. It was second-hand. It was what I felt.
"I'm not ready yet," I choked, pushing him away.
What if our wombs could speak? I've asked myself many times, since that evening. What if it was not just a factory to mass manufacture eggs, a dull waiting room, for sperms, a mechanical delivery unit, to produce babies? That shed some of its unused baggage during a monthly menstrual cycle, that was to be the object of many a PMS joke, about our sex? What if it was a person? What if every month was being counted? Like a story? Like pages of a book?
Flesh? Feelings? Blood? Bravery? Coarseness? Character? What if we were more than our sexual status?
"Virgin? I mean, journalists are known to be quite… fast," a prospective suitor from Shaadi.com pried, years later in an airy Bengaluru café. Overlooking evening traffic.
I bit my lower lip. Wondering how a Harvard returned techie, with a swanky apartment in the Electronic City, and a new, red sedan could have the "balls", to ask me this, sans emotion, or respect? Perhaps believing it was a sign of his urban coolness. Growing up on a pop culture that made so little of a woman's virginity. Or wait.
"My virginity is none of his fucking business. What was he wanting me to say? Yes? While secretly hoping I was this blushing, pure bride… my virginity a treasured gift, asshole," I bitched to my colleagues after work over a beer. Some of them having fallen strangely silent, their eyes ominously vacant, as if they'd all been there at some point, in the complicated chakras of an arranged marriage.
"But, you know the best part, we, can always pretend. I mean, you can always tell them you broke your hymen while swimming…" one of them hugged me, protectively, her protruding bellybutton grazing past mine.
"Is that what you claimed?" I met her reassuring glance.
"I said it was Bharatnatyam," she winked, adding, "as if they care once you are naked, in bed…"
She sounded wicked.
Or maybe, she was being a womb. Speaking up for itself. Making up stuff. One, little, white lie. Knowing there would be more. Calling it self-preservation, in her own head.
I'd almost forgotten that conversation, until…
"Are you a virgin?"
This time it was a matronly gynecologist, in one of South Delhi's reputed private clinics. My mother swallowed hard. Trying to behave normal. The same fear, returning to her beleaguered, aging face. Unmarried, daughter, armed with a dysfunctional reproductive system.
What if the next marriage proposal asked for more details on this front? Latest USG report along with her janam kundli?
"That is none of your business," I retaliated, after asking my mother to step outside.
"It is normal to ask, since you are unmarried, as in, are you sexually active?" the doctor resumed, clinically.
I sat up.
"Even if I were, why is not your job to just treat me like any other patient, with any other medical hitch, as in, isn't it my birthright to want all my organs to be alive and kicking? My ovary and uterus the same as my lungs or kidneys? Why must I have to constantly justify their existence in proportion to babies, husbands, lovers?" I went on.
Speaking from a different place - a place of pride and passion. Of refuge and revolt. Of victory and vulnerability.
"Biology is complicated…a woman's privates…" the doctor muttered, separating my legs.
I positioned myself.
The fight had started.
I was prepared.