Illustration/Uday Mohite
I started menstruating very young and was told never to discuss it with others. I learned the euphemisms (my maasi from Russia is visiting). I tried to follow the code of secrecy, but it was hard. I have PCOS. It meant I bled like a Biblical flood, staining clothes, sheets and sofas, spending a lot of my meager salary on expensive sanitary napkins. The world that week was a blur of pain, nausea, weakness, painkillers and laundry.
Along with it, I worked in a profession that favours machismo. Filmmaking is shaped as an endurance test: long hours, irregular meals, all-nighters in smelly studios with filthy toilets. We would joke about how our thigh muscles got strong, while our kidneys got weaker. We would not-joke about how many women never became filmmakers, because there weren't enough toilets.
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In worlds populated mostly by gents, if you don't drop out, not only must you laugh at bad jokes by men, you feel the need to show you can hack it, and are 'as good as any man' (apparently there's some rumour that they are good). A friend who was the only woman in her production office would swaddle her used sanitary pads in reams of newspaper, to hide in her bag, because it would feel 'ajeeb' should it be seen.
I'm glad I didn't or couldn't stick with this programme. I did not touch the pickle (not a pickle fan), but I did start to say "walk slower for me, I'm having a bad period day" or "Can we stop? I need to change my pad." The world finds a hundred ways to take you less seriously than a man. Concealing menstruation wasn't something I felt I had to do to keep that world turning.
It got easier once I began to work for myself. Sometimes I'd lie down through an edit. Colleagues took a day off without euphemisms. We had enough dustbins. Now, many studios have usable bathrooms.
As long as menstruation is discussed only in terms of taboo, it will simply be used by people to get cheap feminist cred, preventing an advancing conversation about health, systems and workers rights, including those workers who handle menstrual waste.
So, when Zomato announces menstrual leave, inclusive of transgender employees, it's to be welcomed. While celebrating this, I would not dismiss the skeptics. We have all inhabited spaces which pay lip service to equality without accommodating difference. In the 1930s, new maternity leave laws meant factories laid off, and stopped hiring women workers. Some people responded to issues of sexual harassment by saying they would stop hiring women. With paternity leave, men who availed of it, somehow didn't rise as much as those who didn't.
In an era where demonstrating diversity and inclusion is good PR, we can welcome change, without drinking the Kool-Aid, even if it's home delivered. Zomato instating a sexual harassment process for those who face discrimination because of menstrual leave, is encouraging, but the 10-day allowance is mystifying, when there are 12 months in a year of, well, monthlies. We should see it, appreciatively, as a beginning, not, gratefully, as an end. These things are meaningful if gender representation in such companies gets healthier, right up to senior levels. Gender asks for a paradigm shift, like the pandemic has: to change the meaning of work in a way that acknowledges life.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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