The Blood of My Women

On July 10th, 2025, I woke to the headline of adolescent girls in an Indian private school in Thane, Maharashtra being strip-searched and publicly shamed for some drops of blood found by school staff in the restroom. Of course, I had assumed this was a fabrication, a revisitation to something cruel that had taken place over a decade ago, perhaps in a time when the Nirbhaya case was still fresh in our minds, and we knew from every local and national newspaper how our world treated our women. I glanced past the headline, half asleep with the sound of fans whirring in my ears, their blades working mercilessly to calm the angry, humid air in my room at an artists’ residency in upstate New York. For the next hour, I scrolled on my phone in bed, spotting nothing else about the incident, no other reflection or mention or critique, so I presumed my initial assumption concerning fabrication had, in fact, been true. 

It was only a few days into my residency; I had hardly worked on the writing project I had brought along—finding my motivation nearly absent—when another headline emerged on the same sticky-warm morning in early July. Shreeom Kumar had killed his 25-year-old daughter, Radhika Yadav, over what the internet said was his disapproval of her Instagram reels. It happened in Gurugram: the home of the Indira Gandhi International airport, a city that sprawled along one end of the yellow line of the Delhi metro, the same line I would take to work when I travelled to Hauz Khas every morning back in 2018. Of course, it was later revealed that Shreeom Kumar’s anger had been a result of shame: the shame he felt when neighbors teased him for living off of his daughter’s income, the money she made from her tennis academy, the shame of living off of his daughter, the shame of his daughter, living. 

Now that I am older, I realize how much shame has dictated my own life, from as far back as I can remember, permeating through every action I have taken or been encouraged to take, every memory that has persisted in my ever-forgetful mind, bookended by shame, leading to the mess of nerves and fits of tears that I am today. Even today I find myself afraid to speak freely amidst voices that belong to people who have lived longer than me; I am wary of discussing matters of the body, of desire and need; when others are confident, I am insecure—of my words, my body, of baring memories and baring skin and walking down a street alone even when it’s not dark. If I count back the years, there is no question about when it truly began, the shame that emerged during my journey to becoming a woman. In the summer after I turned eleven, my mother told me I would stay with my aunt for a month while she visited some relatives in a village close to Lucknow. She told me that if something were to happen, if something were to come out of my vagina, that I should wait until the room was empty, until my uncle and cousins were not within earshot, to approach my aunt and tell her that “it” was happening. The ambiguity is not something I have inserted, this is in fact how my mother prepared me for my first period, the only difference being that she never used the word “vagina” or any Hindi equivalent of it. Vagina is something I learned much later on, in tenth grade when the word was printed in my biology textbook in the chapter on reproduction. And even now, I don’t know what it would be called in Hindi, in the language I have grown up listening to and speaking and thinking in, there is no word I can think of for so many parts of my body because they are not words that are ever spoken out loud in the spaces that I enter or leave behind.

I am grateful that my first period, despite my mother’s fears, did not start that summer. At the same time, I find it curious that I cannot truly recall my first period at all, what year it happened, where I was, how I finally figured out what to do with the blood inexplicably escaping my body, and whether I had any help. In a time as recent as the late 2010s, I do remember, however, that my mother had a drawer where she cut up pieces of cotton cloth—rags to soak the blood without masking its iron-edged scent. This came with its own layer of embarrassment, when I went to camp in the seventh grade and saw another girl with a package of sanitary pads—a luxury to which I had never been introduced. It wasn’t like we were poor, we were one of the millions of middle class families living in the Delhi-NCR area, my father had a stable job in a tech company and earned enough to send me to a well-known private school. I suspect it was in fact, my mother’s fear of being recognized as a woman who would bleed, as someone who spent days every month in pain that was labelled as a religious impurity, of approaching the male shopkeeper of our local pharmacy with her request, of even mentioning such a thing to her own husband. 

Enough time has now passed since the morning I came across those two headlines that differed in crime and execution, but shared a thread of shame, for my anger to have mellowed out and shifted to other things and other people. Since then, I have found my mind occasionally drifting back to those stories as I go about my relatively quiet life, though the stories have faded from the collective consciousness of social media and news outlets, perhaps because they were not gruesome enough or perhaps because there have been incidents of greater relative obscenity, violence, and indignity since. Despite this, I feel the need to bear witness to these two stories—who are we to decide which atrocity is enough to warrant remembering? Who am I to decide where incidents of injustice lie on the spectrum of resultant suffering and impact? All I know is that these are stories I can’t forget, stories like any other which are deserving of a greater audience, a greater pool of remembering. 

When I think back now, I find it surprising how at first, I didn’t even doubt Shreeom Kumar’s motivation for shooting his own daughter—three bullets out of five that lodged in her flesh; I didn’t doubt that something as trivial as a disagreement over her Instagram reels was reason enough for him to take a gun and aim it at her back while she was cooking him food in their kitchen. This is no doubt a residual sentiment from my years before leaving India. Even though I have been living in the United States for the past few years—trying to make a life out of writing and teaching and have grown as a result to have a better understanding of not only myself, but what I believe is right and wrong—there’s still some remaining fragment of a world of different morals that seems to have survived years of relearning and recaliberating to a new and debatably more “progressive” environment. Having spent an adolescence frequenting cyber cafes in secret, I grew up around an ideology where engaging in any sort of intimate public display over social media—anything as trivial as being Facebook friends with someone of the opposite gender, posting a picture with visible makeup on before marriage, or an innocent Instagram reel—could be labelled as “improper.”

I think back also to how little was spoken of the incident in Thane in the week following that initial headline. Entering the keywords “Thane” and “girls” and “strip search” in my Google search bar returned the same few results, insignificant enough to count on the fingers of my right hand. It is disheartening to reach the conclusion that in the year 2025 when our Prime Minister had been claiming that India is the “mother of democracy,” such a thing could happen to a group of school-age girls and not evoke national outrage. Just like Radhika Yadav, all these girls had been given a handful of headlines that I knew would be circulated amongst the socially conscious for a few days, perhaps even weeks, but in the following months there would be other, new atrocities on our social media feeds, in our newspapers; even as Indian women cross the boundaries and social confines that have limited them in the past, there will always be some shame that will bring them down. And though not all women menstruate, the shame that comes with even a tangential association to menstruation is carried by us all, in some form or the other. 

Early on in my adolescence, I learned to never say the word “period” after I added it to my vocabulary, to never acknowledge that such a thing existed in my own life, let alone the lives of all the women around me. When we eventually started using sanitary pads because the shopkeeper started carrying plastic black bags in which to hide our contraband, I remember having to stuff them in the back of my closet, hidden under an unassuming pile of clothes so as not to be casually uncovered by any other family member. I remember a time when my brother was still young—perhaps three or four years old—in the hallway as I unfolded a sanitary pad in the bathroom, the loud crackle-snap of the packaging sending a rush of warmth to the space behind my ears. When I stepped outside, he was there, waiting for me, asking me “What were you eating?” just as my mother walked by and told me that it was a dirty thing to talk about, nothing to be mentioned by boys. But of course, my home was not the limit of this unspeakability. It permeated the rest of my life, conversations with friends and cousins and within the hallways at school, a collective secret that each girl-turned-woman I knew participated in because we had been raised to know such a time as a period of shame, an unspoken repentance our gender suffered and had to keep hidden from the men in our lives. It was not that I wanted to go about my day shouting “I’m on my period” to every person I passed, but there were times when I felt lesser, afraid, ignored, because of how little the world around me recognized it as a natural part of being alive and how much it was associated with the concept of “impurity” that circled and surrounded our communal spaces.

It is this idea of impurity that led the principal of a private school in Thane to project a picture of a few stray drops of blood to a group of adolescent girls in an attempt to find the culprit who had left the toilet “unclean.” Although I often write fiction, this is a situation into which I cannot find a way to insert myself as a character, facing such a dehumanizing display of what technology—lauded as the path to a progressive future—is being used for in a school, an institution that is for many, synonymous with safety. I think about how it must feel to be a girl of maybe eleven, twelve, thirteen, of being separated from male classmates and herded into a room to be reprimanded for a bodily function that I am still growing into, of being admonished for something that is hardly a crime and then treated like a criminal anyway as an older woman demands for me to take my clothes off, to strip and show that I am not the one who is unclean on this day, and yet know that the day is not far when I, too, will join the fray. That this is something I cannot escape once it has descended upon me, and the world around me will never let me think of it in any way other than something negative, unwanted, impure, and wicked. 

A menstruating Hindu woman must never step foot within a temple, must never sit on an asana and pray to gods, even at home, must never accept offerings or wash used plates and diyas in any aarti. In recent years, I have seen many gurus and rishis on the internet claiming that this is actually rooted in the ancient science and spiritual teachings detailed in Vedic scriptures. One of the most far-fetched of these claims is that sitting amidst others in a temple and praying would cause a woman to experience an absorption of energy from the gods themselves, which would in turn leave the temples’ idols empty, or that there is something about the vibrations that permeates the air during prayer which might be harmful to the internal energy of a menstruating woman. I wonder if the women I know can see this for the thin falsitude that it is; why then would my mother tell me to wait outside when we travelled days to see the sun temple in Pushkar? There was no prayer we were participating in. From the time that I waited outside, it was hardly even a few seconds that the rest of my family spent in front of the idol of Brahma, after nearly an hour waiting in line—no prayers, no vibrations felt, no prolonged contact with the ground beyond the smooth marble against their bare feet. I remember, too, a pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi: three cars piled with my aunts and their husbands and all their children, a journey that took us three days before we even began to climb the mountain, our bare feet on the paved path, hiking sticks dragging us along for hours. One of my aunts had begun menstruating the night before we climbed and I remember her trailing behind us, determined not to let the pain pull against her features, drawing down the corners of her mouth or furrowing the inner edges of her brows. For anyone who has made this journey, it is familiar to note that although it is only 13 kilometers, the slope and the coarseness of the ground are enough to make it feel twice the distance. At the top sits the naturally-formed idol of the goddess wrapped in a rocky cave, no even floors to conduct sound or music or touch or any form of energy. And yet, I remember my aunt waiting outside the cave, her eyes afraid to meet the gaze of so many other worshippers in line to view the holy formation, cast outside from the resting place of Mahalaksmi, the avatar of the trinity goddesses that govern our faith. Is one mortal woman enough to absorb the energy of three divine goddesses?

In my time poring over everything I could find about the incident in Thane, I came across an interview with some of the girls’ parents. What I remember most is the outrage etched into their features, the anger dripping from their words, the betrayal that they may never be able to let go of on behalf of their daughters, on behalf of themselves. In one interview, a father talked about his daughter revealing the humiliation to him the evening after, his wordlessness and grief for what she had been faced with in what was supposed to be a safe space evident in the dip of his brow, the downturned curve of his lips. In a way, I am amazed by this man, this father who asked the interviewer if he could speak in Hindi before he let loose a cascade of syllables that fully spelled out his disgust. This is not a role I can ever imagine my father taking, my father who is probably too ashamed to know that his daughter is a woman, that his daughter sometimes bleeds, that his daughter spends days where she is unclean, unfit to touch anything considered holy. 

By far, this is not the first of such incidents and I am terrified it may not be the last. Every time the outrage rises, it falls again until there is another reason to remember it, until a new narrative takes its place. This is a globally documented fact, not conjecture on my part, or pessimism in my understanding. In 2017, the BBC reported on 70 children at a residential school in Uttar Pradesh who were stripped naked by a female warden when she discovered blood on a bathroom door. In 2020, 68 college girls in a hostel in Gujarat were strip searched after they refrained from reporting their periods to authorities. Why would they need to make such a report, one would ask, and the answer is even more unbelievable than the headline itself. They were segregated during their periods, forced to sit away from others during mealtimes, forced to sit in the back of their classrooms, denied from entering kitchens and temples and even from touching other students. In the news, I often see the Prime Minister touting his claim for a “Viksit Bharat”—a “Developed India”—by 2047, alongside claims of how India is the greatest democracy because of its unique traditions and culture, how the greatest threat to the nation is the “terrorists” within, those who fall outside the saffron-flag-waving Hindu majority. And yet, his home state of Gujarat, a place that he governed as the Chief Minister from 2001 until his ascendancy to Prime Minister in 2014, is one of the largest culprits of what could be considered the opposite of development. How can we strive for the title of “developed” when an entire population is shamed, segregated, held accountable against no fault of their own. This is not a religious battle as so many of the current headlines coming out of India claim everything seems to be. This is a battle that condemns every community within India’s borders—regardless of race, identity, caste, class, or religion—to the infirmary. A decade ago, perhaps I would have said this reckless sexism, the normalized shaming of women and girls and minorities is a problem that only thrives within communities like my own people, my country, the Global South. But now it is clearer, this is more dangerous than a localized thunderstorm; it has the destructive capabilities of something far greater, the effects of which can be felt all around the globe, infiltrating nearly every street of this modern world. I feel it now, in the people and communities physically closest to me, as women fight for bodily autonomy in a country where the value of an unborn, hardly-developed fetus is greater than the living, breathing woman inside which it grows. 
It is interesting to me that both shame and sharam start with the same fricative ‘sh,’ a sound we associate with a need to stay silent, a command to maintain whatever precedes or follows as a secret. And where once, in 2012, Jyothi Singh’s rape in Delhi caused global outrage, people in countries all across the world protested in favor of “Nirbhaya,” this recent plight of so many impressionable young girls barely made it across state borders from Maharashtra to my parents only one state over in Madhya Pradesh. But still, I am heartened, made hopeful by the knowledge that these young girls from Thane didn’t remain silent about their treatment. I am hopeful that this is the result of some sort of change—even if it is barely legible in the longer expanse of the decades that such taboos have persevered—allowing them to feel brave enough to expose what they feel, what they know to be wrong. I myself am ashamed to think that there is no doubt I would have remained silent in their position, too afraid to mention such an incident to my parents, too afraid of what I might hear from my mother in return, the admonishment she would crown me with for having been careless with my dirty blood. And so, there is perhaps a ray of hope in all this, in this understanding that we as women will no longer tolerate such outrageous treatment, that we will not be cast aside because of fabricated myths and taboos that hold no place in science nor in the holy scriptures of the Vedas. That we will persevere and take the shame that we are surrounded with and spin it into something that will allow future generations—daughters, mothers, women—-to live in a world lacking the embarrassments that so many of us have carried for so long.