“I was twelve years old and had no desire to tell anyone that I’d got my period.”

Meera Vijayann looks back on being a reluctant participant in a coming-of-age ceremony to celebrate her first period. Years later, the impact of the incident would define an important moment in her life.

On a December morning in 1998, when I came home for the holidays from boarding school, my mother told me there would be a small ceremony. I didn’t know what kind of ceremony it was going to be or what it was called—only that it would involve some sort of ritual to symbolize my coming of age. I had got my first period a few months ago and I was a mess of emotions. Thrust into a life of blood-stained underwear and maxi pads and cramps, I made no sense of my body. But as a child who grew up in a Tamil home in Sivakasi, an industrial town near Madurai, I knew that puberty ceremonies were common around the region. My classmates from Erode and Tirupur sometimes brought back fat, mammoth-sized photo albums capturing moments from their Manjal Neeratu Vizha or Turmeric bath ceremony. In each of these albums there were photos of them seated on gaudy, ornamental thrones, dressed in saris, false braids, and heavy gold jewellery. In one photo, women marched on a busy road alongside a horse-drawn chariot carrying plates of fruits and silk. Inside the chariot was my classmate seated solemnly like a bride, demure, her eyes tired. In another photo was a huge billboard, a sign announcing her puberty ceremony to the town. When I saw these photos, I shuddered, worried that my parents would also do something like this.

I was twelve years old and had no desire to tell anyone that I’d got my period. Yet, there it was, this bewildering announcement from my mother that she’d invited our relatives to the ceremony. Would I be marched through town? Would I be dressed head to toe in Kanjeevaram silks and gold? I had no idea.

On the day of the ceremony, when I was seated on a bench in our backyard in a blue nightdress, I was in disbelief. My worst nightmare was unfolding. I was happy to see my uncles and aunts but I was terribly upset. I wasn’t asked if I would be okay with the ceremony. I didn’t know what the ritual symbolized or asked if I consented to it. I didn’t even understand why my parents—both of whom were a bit more progressive than the others in town—decided to observe it. All I knew was that the ceremony meant to celebrate that I’d become a woman, which implied that I would soon be ready to marry. But I was twelve years old and angry and ashamed. I didn’t feel like celebrating anything.

Unlike my classmates who seemed to have accepted, and even enjoyed, their ceremonies, I felt as if I’d lost control of my own body. There  I was, on display, coming of age in front of curious faces. There I was, reduced to a vessel that would prolong life. I was excited to become a woman, and wanted so badly to enter womanhood, but I despised the focus on my bleeding vagina and ability to give birth. It was the late 90s and as a teenager, I just wanted to buy cute skirts, date and wear real bras. Womanhood for me was desire and love and beauty. Nothing about the ritual felt like an initiation into the real world of women—my mother and I didn’t talk about what periods meant or what sex was or why my stomach cramped or how often I had to change sanitary pads.    

The ritual was considered enough and that was that. 

The Tamil tradition of holding puberty rituals is hazy—some communities consider menstruating women unclean and exclude them from daily life, others shower them with gifts to prepare them for marriage, but the central idea has always remained the same. A fertile woman is a gift from the gods. For young girls, their first period meant that they would now be able to put away their paavadai-chattais, skirts and blouses, and wear dhaavanis, half-saris that symbolized they were young, unmarried women. In some orthodox communities, the youngest maternal uncle of the girl is usually considered first in line to marry her. (Although this practice of consanguinity is slowly fading away, it is still common in communities like my own.) At my ceremony, my mother’s first cousin and a family priest performed the bath, pouring a pot of water over my head while everyone watched.

When I felt the first gush of cold, turmeric-filled water on me, I shivered. I hated myself. The turmeric bath symbolized purification, a cleansing. It is commonplace in temples to bathe deities with hot turmeric water before they are adorned in silk and flowers. Yet, when I felt all their hands rub turmeric and sandalwood paste on my face, I felt anything but clean. I hated myself. When my parents placed a garland over my neck and asked me to touch the feet of my relatives, I bent down, annoyed. I hated myself. The self-loathing came in fits and starts, mostly because I felt so insignificant. It felt utterly disrespectful to be ‘celebrated’ without being included. So later that afternoon, as some of them handed gifts to my parents, I swore to myself that when the time came for me to marry, I would never touch anyone’s feet ever again. In that single afternoon, something inside me snapped. 

For years after the ceremony, I questioned every traditional ritual I witnessed. I wanted nothing to do with any of it. My family moved to Chennai, where the dynamism of city life left them with little desire to follow through with all the rituals that accompanied Hindu womanhood in our hometown. So, none of my younger sisters had the turmeric-bath ceremony. I watched my cousins return home after we graduated, marry once their marriages were arranged, and observe the traditional ceremonies of my childhood all over again: the Valaikaappu, a baby shower, the Mottai Addithal, tonsuring an infant’s birth hair from their head, Kaadhu Kuthudal, the ear-piercing ceremony. I, on the other hand, was adamant that any ritual I observed had to reflect my values. I wanted to embrace my identity on my own terms.

 I met my husband, Dan, in my twenties, found work, and moved to the United States. We decided to plan our wedding without help from our families. In doing so, I knew I was breaking tradition, but I felt a deep anxiety that if I allowed anyone in the process of decision-making, I’d have to compromise on my personhood. I was terrified that on my wedding day, I’d become small and invisible again. I was thirty-one years old, but the scars of my childhood had not healed. All through 2016, I spent time looking up Hindu or Tamil priests in the Vancouver area who would be able to perform marriage rites that treated me as an equal. 

I couldn’t find anyone. 

When a priest finally replied, I called him from a café and told him that we’d like a wedding where our Sanskrit rites were translated, and our vows treated us as equals. To my horror, he agreed to perform our rites but refused to listen to me.

“Let me talk to your father or your soon-to-be husband,” he said, when I told him I didn’t want the Kanyadaanam, a ritual where the bride’s father gives her away to the groom. “Let them tell me they don’t want to do that.” The Tamil word “daanam” (a donation) infuriated me. It took an entire afternoon for Dan to explain to the priest that our wedding rituals had to be equal because he saw me as an equal partner in marriage—and that I would have a say in it. 

“We want to exchange vows that reflect our values,” he said, “We don’t want to do rites that we don’t believe in.”

The priest reluctantly agreed.

On the day of the wedding, my mother helped me put on a silk sari and a red blouse. My mother-in-law brought me a rose that I tucked in my hair. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw in it a young woman who was terrified and eager to take the first steps into married life. No one knew that the previous night I had told Dan a million times over that, we would not fall on anyone’s feet after the ceremony. I was so overcome with anxiety that I’d be judged for breaking the traditions of my childhood that I hadn’t slept.

When I walked down the aisle and sat near him that morning, all I could think of was the priest. The garden we were in was bursting with flowers. June was blue and bright and scented. My sisters and parents stood by my side. But the priest kept his word. He read the vows just as we’d asked him to and laughed when he translated texts that were archaic. 

After the ceremony, Dan and I stood there, our hands folded while we received wishes from our guests. We didn’t bend over and touch anyone’s feet. 

“See?” Dan said, turning to me. “I told you no one cared.”

“That’s not true.” I replied, “I did.”

I had reclaimed a part of myself that I’d lost as a little girl.

Meera Vijayann is a writer based in Seattle, Washington. She is now working on her debut novel as a Hugo House Fellow.