BY: PRASHNA
When we talk about the restrictions placed on women during their periods, don’t enter the kitchen, don’t go to the temple, don’t touch the plants, don’t worship until the seventh day, most of us imagine a patriarchal figure enforcing these rules. A man. A father. A husband. But in my experience, it was never the men in my life who held me back. It was the women.
My mother left when I was young. And it was my father without hesitation, without awkwardness, who sat me down and made sure I understood what was happening to my body. He gave me books that explained the changes of adolescence clearly and honestly. It was in those pages that I first read what I had always quietly felt: that the restrictions placed on menstruating women barring them from temples, kitchens, gardens, and religious rituals were not divine law. They were superstitions. Reading that didn’t create my resistance. It confirmed it.
I had always felt my blood boil when I watched the women around me enforce these beliefs on themselves and each other. Women telling other women. “It’s only my third day, I cannot go near the garden or it will ruin.” Said with such certainty as if the plants themselves would wither from their presence. I never understood it. I still don’t.
The moment that stays with me most happened during Tihar. It was Laxmi Puja, one of the most sacred evenings of the year and I was on my fourth day. I had done everything that day. Cooked, cleaned, made rangoli, and decorated the house. And when the time came to worship Goddess Laxmi, my father stood beside me and said I could. Every other female member of my family said I couldn’t. I spent a whole day preparing. But worship? That was where the line was drawn. By women. Against a woman.
I did not worship that evening. But I never forgot how that felt.
Here is what I keep coming back to: why are women so often the ones who carry these beliefs forward? Is it fear? A need to belong to something larger than themselves, even if that something diminishes them? I don’t say this with anger toward those women. I say it with grief. Because these are not their rules. They inherited them. And somewhere along the way, inheritance became identity.
I sometimes ask myself, “Am I doing the right thing by rejecting these traditions?” “Will something bad happen if I worship during my period, enter a temple, live my life without these restrictions?” And honestly, I have sat with that fear too. But then I think of Goddess Laxmi herself, a symbol of prosperity, power, and grace and I refuse to believe she would turn away a devoted woman simply because her body was doing what bodies do.
Menstruation is not impure. It never was. I made promise to myself that I will never pass this to the coming generation.
