(This piece is about limitations, both physical and mental on women. It is about a woman dealing with the biology of her own body in an environment that has disgraced and stigmatized it.

This piece has also been accepted as part of the 2024 Women Scream anthology, a platform that unites voices for violence against women and is celebrated on international women’s day across a number of countries).

Give me something to sleep 
Just for a while, a few hours maybe 

What’s bothering you?
This thing, this ungodly thing 
I’m sullied, impure again

Impure again?
My insides are bleeding anew

Why are you whispering? 
Because it’s this dirty secret bound to me 
It keeps violating, assaulting me 
With such ravening regularity
I have to beg my sister to visit
(She has that freedom, that liberty)
So she can come bearing these 
Brazen packs of sordid things
The stigma! the cruel savagery 
Of having my womb constantly
Bleed and weep and shame and sting 

I see the look on my husband’s face 
When I can’t make his meals
In Ramzan, or on eid 
(I can’t even iron his prayerful shalwar kameez*)
I still recall - I cringe and I cry at the memory
I couldn’t attend my little one’s very first Ameen* 
I had taught him his Alif Laam Meem*
I couldn’t say 
I couldn’t tell them to move the day 
How could I! 
I hid in the shadows while my mother-in-law 
Did everything 
Hugging my child 
Lavishing him all the while 
With maternal love, where my love should have been 
Mine I had put away, hidden, unclean 
Until I was done with this bane 
But the occasion has gone like so many others 
When I was stripped of the soul of a mother 
That precious moment passed me by 
Even my father-in-law watched from jaundiced eyes 
His expression… such disappointment - such contempt 
The embarrassment! The torment! 
I wanted to die

The first fast is tomorrow and I bleed again
I’m wretched, repulsive, tainted 
But I’m tired of hiding, melting away 
In the darkest recesses of the house 
I’m tired of playing cat and mouse 
With my dignity, my sense of self 
I’m tired of becoming invisible 
For a week every month, ceasing to be 
A mother, a wife, a human being 
I’m tired of fading, becoming a wraith
I’m tired… I’m tired of this unholy plague
 
Give me something, something to sleep 
Give me something to fly me away
On the quiet wings of eternal release.

*Shalwar kameez: tunic and pants worn by men and women across the greater Indian subcontinent.

*Ameen: term used to signify the event/ celebration when a child has finished reading the whole Quran.

*Alif, Laam, Meem: Alphabets that occur in the Quran. In this context, teaching the Quran with all its semantics.