3.Aisha Paul

So now I was like everyone else. I missed my pre-period self. These past few years had always been about me not getting my period.

  Who am I if not the girl who's waiting to get her period and finally be a woman?

  The last time I felt this uneasiness in my chest was when I was in the seventh standard and someone remarked at my boobs, or rather about the lack of them. Was I my boobs? I had asked myself then.

  But God! The year before my breasts sprouted was torture!

  'Have they come yet?' asked the boys in class one day, then giggled and scampered away like little mice. And believe you me, following that day I had slept clutching my chest every night, hoping they would sprout the next morning. As if being left out in the period-race wasn't enough, my chest was in no mood to comply with my prayers.

  'I will take good care of them! Even small, perky boobs will do,' I used to say.

  This was also the time I discovered masturbation, the pastime of the gods. Touching myself, thinking of a naked Michael Douglas, was fun, tingly, and sent me to sleep quicker. I never shared about this secret pleasure-giving pastime with my friends, not even with Megha, whose boobs had come at the same time as her period, because I thought it was dirty.

  But my relationship with my fingers didn't last long.

  I started getting acne and I thought it was just punishment for having touched myself. My face was suddenly a battleground of red hills and craters. I rallied with my entire arsenal of toothpastes, creams, face washes and Dettol but the acnes emerged victorious.

  And I still didn't have boobs.

  In the eighth standard, slowly and thankfully, my chest started to grow and quite soon I needed a bra the size of two salad bowls. The boys shut up. Now they would keep staring at my tremendous chest, which was a victory of sorts in the beginning. I would strut about proudly, the buttons of my shirt tested for strain. But soon it started to feel like an invasion of privacy. True, the eyes were theirs but these were my boobs—the results of my prayers.

  Just stop looking, will you!

  With the sprouting of the twins, my popularity rose. Rumour mills worked overtime.

  'She has sex all the time. That's why the big boobs!' the girls would say in hushed tones.

  Sometimes it made me want to take my prayers back and just be a normal size again. But that never happens, does it?

  'You're like an Indian Beyonce,' my mother used to say.

  'Easy for you to say! You're so fair and cute!'

  I'd got my complexion, my height, my thick thighs and muscular calves from my father, and absolutely nothing from my mother who was a little, plump, aged-out brunette Barbie.

  To distract people from my breasts and my face, the hemline of my skirt kept riding up.

  I was popular but also hated, I used to be stared at (strictly below my face though) and ignored, talked politely to but also often subjected to vicious rumours about my sex life—which didn't exist. I had friends to talk to but never really had friends who I could talk to.

  I slowly learned to enjoy the attention, and weed out the bad parts.

  Though the questions still haunted me.

  Am I my boobs? Am I my pimples? Am I my unfertilized eggs? Why am I even thinking about this?

  I checked online if I were insane and found nothing.

  After I got my period, the uneasiness returned. Like where do I go from here as a woman? Like where was the manual for that?

  Life was much easier before the incident that changed everything. Before the incident all I wanted to be was to magically turn into my mother some day but then everything changed. Now all I wanted was to find and be my own woman.

  I grappled with the questions for days on end . . . And then it struck me. I knew the first step.

  I had to lose my virginity.

  Later that night, standing in front of a mirror, naked and inspecting my body, I called up Megha. 'What do you think about sex? Like do you think it makes you into a different person?'

  'I don't get you.'

  'If I'm sexually wanted by a man, wouldn't that be like the final frontier for my womanhood?'

  'Do you have a boyfriend?' asked Megha, her voice suddenly gleeful.

  'No.'

  'Then, why are you asking? And moreover, sex is not the last step in womanhood. The last step is getting married and having kids. That's what defines you finally. That's what being a woman is about. Like our mothers.'

  'That doesn't sound exciting at all,' I said. I disconnected the phone soon after. Regardless of what Megha had said, I decided to go ahead with my plan of ticking off sex from my checklist.

  But what if not being a virgin any more didn't make me a woman, too? I knew of a few girls who had supposedly had sex with their boyfriends and they didn't quite look or behave any different. Maybe it was more of an internalized change, something only the girl could feel herself. But, of course, I wouldn't know that for certain till the time I actually lost my virginity to a man who deserved it.

  So I started compiling a checklist of qualities I would want in the man (it had to be a man not a boy from my class who would gloat about having sex with me) who I would want to lose it to, and since I wanted to gloat about it, the list started with the words rich and successful.