Memoirs of My Body

1

How Green Was My Valley

In the hierarchy of summers of discovery, the first scorcher came early.

I had joined ‘proper’ school that year and was in the middle of my first meanderingly long summer break, when I spotted the man who would usher in my coming of age. He walked into my world on a pair of weathered chappals and awakened the woman in me. Yes, in primary school. Don’t jump the gun. Or reach for it. He didn’t touch me. At least, not physically.

I called him ‘Green Boy’ because I didn’t know his name and was never likely to find out. Besides the age difference, there was also class between us. He was from the wrong side of the tracks. Literally. Beyond the little playing field opposite our home in Kolkata were perennially haze-enshrouded railway tracks that wound their way to nowhere.

Nowhere I knew, at any rate. Just turned six, I was on the brink of discovering the world. In the next few years, I would have traipsed all over South East Asia, absorbing everything it had to offer like a sponge. But first, there was another world to discover: my body. Discovered unexpectedly and inadvertently that long, hot, seventies summer of precocious reading. And Green Boy.

My parents were out working all day, my younger sister yet to arrive. So, I whiled away my time with a nanny who was kind but incapable of keeping my quick little brain occupied.

‘Are you reading again?’ she would ask me, concerned.

‘Yes,’ I’d say for the umpteenth time, with growing irritation. I was fond of her but a little girl who could not be fobbed off with her practised bribes of ‘keeleeps’, ‘bishkoot’ or sneaky half-hours of terrible television at the neighbour’s house (because Baba had refused to buy us a set), was beyond her capabilities. ‘Where are the pictures?’ she would then ask suspiciously. She wasn’t wrong to suspect something was afoot. It was a serious case of literary effrontery. I had outgrown picture books years ago, and on that dust-mote dappled afternoon, I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

And that was the least of it. That summer, I started reading books placed on shelves slightly above my head in the many bookcases in our house. These were the shelves for ‘older kids’. As the oldest child in the house (and the only one), I decided that meant me. As I ingested rows of previously inaccessible books, some lines stuck, and I would repeat them to myself with delight. ‘I’d rather take coffee than compliments just now,’ I would say à la Jo March, while tottering through the hall in my mom’s high heels.

The radio was the other constant in my life, but neither Rabindra Sangeet nor filmi tunes did anything for me. Jim Morrison though, heard just once and in passing, left me with a feeling I couldn’t fathom. My ayah, on the other hand, listened to Bollywoodsy warbling from the minute my mother left to teach in the morning to the moment she heard that first footfall outside our door in the late afternoon. Those first footsteps shattering the quiet of the afternoon could have belonged to anyone, including the cleaner who dropped in to shift the dust around twice a day. In the middle of the day, after she had served me a lunch of rice and fish, the ayah would retire to her small room for an hour’s kip, confident in the knowledge that I would happily spend the afternoon doing something quiet. Clearly, she was unaware that being quiet was often the worst thing an inquisitive child could be.

‘If I were to sleep,’ she would say as if she had any choice in the matter, ‘what would you do?’ At first, I would answer her truthfully. ‘I will play with my one-and-a-half dolls.’ (Baba didn’t believe in buying those either) Then I moved on to the books, and mentioning them led to too many questions, even attempts at staying awake on her part. But when I discovered the delights of self-exploration, my answer went back to, ‘I shall play.’ She would nod off, reassured. And I did play, didn’t I?

But for that to happen, Green Boy had to saunter into my life.

Some muggy afternoons, after finishing with the books within reach and the measly music on offer, I had little else to do but swing on the railings of our first-floor balcony, watching the cricket on the little patch of green ahead. Boys from the neighbourhood ran, dived and shouted with glee as I observed them quietly.

‘Oi you monkey, the ball is racing to the boundary!’

‘How do you expect me to see past your brother? He’s bigger than your house!’

Then it would be fisticuffs before dusk, till the sweets shop owner walked over purposefully to clout one of the boys on the ear, which was the agreed signal for close of play.

I would watch all this, occasionally chortling to myself, turning my attention back to a book I was rereading (there was time to read and reread while Babloo, their slowest batsman, was at the crease) or cocking my head to hear the faint strains of music from the radio inside the house. If it was still on the same station, my ayah was asleep. One such afternoon, my eyes alighted on Green Boy and I grew up in nanoseconds.

He was a cricket-playing, little-else-doing young man. At six, even an imaginative six, I could not think of a fancier name than that. But then there was nothing fancy about Green Boy, and the sobriquet fitted him to a T. And it was a tee, his green, long-suffering tee that I named him after. You see, he never wore anything else. It was this, and a pair of khaki flares to go with it. As it was the late seventies, he had bristling sideburns to match. Maybe not green, but still flared and flora-like, taking over his narrow young face. He was in his teens: a distant god.

I watched him from my balcony as he played badly, oblivious to my scrutiny. Our paths only ever crossed at the sweets shop, which I was sent to regularly to stock up on my family’s rosogolla (and related) requirements. Little did they know what danger they were exposing me to. No, not from the fellow himself but from the vistas opening up in my mind. Had they known the overcooked, overblown saga of love and rebellion that my head and heart were spawning, they would have thought twice about sending me to ‘Lapu’r Lyangchas’ so often.

Occasional conversations between me and Green Boy went like this:

‘Dada-Boudi ki kinte pathieyecche?’

‘Rosogolla.’

‘Baah. Rosogollar moton mishti aar hoyena.’

And I would blush a deep red and scurry home with a ‘bhnar’ of rosogolla, convinced he’d indirectly admitted to a soft spot for my sweet nature. He soon entered my dreams by day and by night. The former were innocuous enough to start with. It was in the latter that he started doing strange things to me I couldn’t name. I would toss and turn through the night and find wet streaks in my underpants in the morning. I worried initially that I had gone back to bed-wetting, but then I had a waking dream about him. A daydream, where he did indescribable, but not unlikeable, things to me. And suddenly, I had a whole new set of worries. Including those wet streaks which were now revealed to be not-wee. But also, wonderfully, secret delights to indulge in.

Butterflies in My Tummy

One drowsy afternoon, as I read Daddy-Long-Legs in my secluded corner, I was visited by my nocturnal hauntings. I held my breath as it filled my head, then travelled downwards. Green Boy sits with me under the lonely tree on the cricket field. There is no one else (I am infatuated, not an exhibitionist). He touches me. Then he touches me there. Yes, there. That place that never struck me as a ‘there’ till this moment, when the strangest sensations are triggered by his touch. But not his touch; they are my own. As it had been night after night without my really knowing.

My fingers didn’t do much at first. They just brushed. Then felt. Then brushed again. Finally, fingers inside my little girl pants, which then skittered away as if singed. But delved back in again. How could you not when it made you feel like you didn’t know you could?

And it spread with each stroke. It invaded my tummy. Like butterflies with their wingtips on fire, grazing my insides and setting them alight. Under cover of the dark, and a light sheet that you could just about bear having draped over you in the summer months, I found that positioning my ‘pash baalish’ between my thighs felt rather good. If I moved gently against it, it felt even better. And if I thought of Green Boy while doing that, those flaming butterflies didn’t just flutter, they dive-bombed into my gut like blazing balls of fire.

Suddenly, inanimate objects which could be balled and slid between my legs took on a new life, pushed into a service they hadn’t known before. I didn’t know they were pretend-penises of course. What, after all, was a penis? There were no boys in my home. Nor did I ever introduce anything inside myself. A natural squeamishness stepped in to prevent that. That this was an activity which seemed to scandalize people the world over, I had no idea at all. I quite innocently relished the sensations I’d begun to discover. And then, I couldn’t wait till bedtime anymore. I found nooks and crannies around the house to which I could melt away.

A particular favourite in the somnolent afternoons, when the world stood still, was the space behind the naked bed frame, left leaning on its side against the bright yellow wall of the spare bedroom. I scavenged around the house to make my den comfortable (and not just for that; it was perfect for reading too, especially books that worried my nanny). A purloined ‘madur’ and my trusty ‘paash baalish’ made it a comfortable hideaway for all sorts of activities.

Till I got caught and my pleasurable little world shattered into tiny shards of shame.

Growing Up Guilty

My comeuppance came swiftly, and it was harsh. I was discovered en flagrante delicto with my paash baalish and told in no uncertain terms how unnatural and disgusting it was.

‘Who does that at this age? This, this, MONKEY business!’ my horrified mother scowled forbiddingly at me. At that moment, I just wanted to disappear. Forever. I wanted to dissolve into a dark corner (but not the one I’d just been found in) and never emerge. Suddenly, the splendid feeling I had learnt to give myself became this dirty thing that defined me. It clung to me like a bad smell. Monkey, monkey, monkey, went the voice in my head. And continued for a good twenty years after.

So, I’m not going on Oprah or anything, people (only because she hasn’t asked), but why does this happen? Why is this burden of shame, where nothing shameful has been done, laid on each of us? For years, the whole business of sex, especially my own sexual urges, would be tainted by this view that it was filthy, bestial, and one of my many failings. I would grow up hating my body and worrying about sex. My anxieties ranged from whether it was right to want sex to wondering if anyone would want me at all. I saw myself as a deviant, with a head crammed with unduly sexual thoughts and a body that found those thoughts so pleasurable. I didn’t know I was far from alone because in India, no one discussed such things. The Birds and Bees talk, if it was given, was cursory and explained nothing.

Mumble, mumble, mumble. Much throat clearing and minute finger scrutiny. ‘So, you get that don’t you, son? Anu, dinner! We are done here.’ Head rub and exit. Child stares after his father, aghast. That’s all the dude knows? I know more than him!

If the BB talk skimmed over sex, it certainly never touched upon masturbation. That only came up when a parent angrily stumbled upon the fact that their perfect little girl or boy had discovered its joys. ‘Badmaash bachha!’ they splutter at the cowering child, desperately trying to hide her offending hands behind her back. ‘What are you doing to our good name behaving like that? What gives you these ideas? These looj western ideas? No more Enid Blyton for you!’

At that moment, they screw him or her up forever. This was the point at which they should have said, ‘I know what you’re going through. I’ve been there too. Because no one told me the things I’m about to tell you; I went through half my life unsure about sexual pleasures, especially the ones I give myself. But I don’t want you to go through that. I want you to know now what you’re doing is not just normal, everybody does it. And it certainly doesn’t make you a bad person.’

But they don’t, do they? And heck, what chance have they got of getting it right when the Mother of all Fathers, God, didn’t? If He’d cast an indulgent eye over the snake and apple and a furiously blushing Adam, and decided to be cool about it, it would have been a different story for the billions who followed after. But noooo, he had to go all funny and thunderbolty and get-out-of-paradise-y about it. Playing with your snake or your apple became a sin forever more. And now it’s the norm for parents to frown upon it even when doctors and more importantly, Hollywood, tell them otherwise.

‘I did a fair bit of masturbating when I was young,’ said father to son in American Pie. ‘I used to call it stroking the salami, yeah, you know, pounding the old pud.’

Which is pretty much what Freud said in ‘Three Essays On the Theory of Sexuality’ (1905): ‘One feature of the popular view of the sexual instinct is that it is absent in childhood and only awakens in the period of life described as puberty. This, however, is not merely a simple error but one that has had grave consequences.’

Indeed. But did anyone listen?

Those Kinds of Girls

A friend liked to play turtle. She couldn’t have been more than six either. She liked to curl up over a cushion, and then ducking her head and arching her back, she’d do this weird humping thing like a dog. Just like that, any old time of the day, completely innocently. It could be in the middle of a game of tag or something, and the rest of us who’d gathered to play at her house would carry on with our game, leaving her to it. We weren’t even curious. Many years later, I realized she had been masturbating. And it struck me only because a conversation from long ago floated back across the ether.

‘Why are your palms so red, Reema?’ I asked her one day, rather worried about her. Just turned six, I was at the age when empathy blossoms in children.

‘Mamoni hit them,’ she said unhappily.

‘Why?’ I asked, scared because I knew I was guilty of all sorts of things from sneaking sweets to that new thing I enjoyed. That new thing that I sensed would be disapproved of if it were discovered.

‘I was being a turtle,’ she said, with downturned face and blazing ear-tips. I knew immediately what she meant. I recognized that it was a lot like my own trysts with the paash baalish. I wondered why she was struck for it but then forgot all about it till my own moment of reckoning.

We were told we were freaks and we believed it. We certainly never compared notes on it, not in the India I grew up in. A chance encounter in a London bar with an old school friend finally started us off on the subject of youthful indiscretions. Liberated women as we had by then become, we began laughing about male and then female wanking. We talked of girls who had let it slip that they’d slipped things in when the urge overtook them, like us, at a relatively young age. And the disproportionately harsh chastisement that inevitably followed. ‘They found me with my hand up my pants,’ she cackled about her own experience. Then sobering, she said, ‘I wasn’t laughing then. I got the dressing down of a lifetime. Everything was thrown at me, from how unnatural it was to … how natural, in a strange way. That animals did it, so, I shouldn’t.’

As a result of the condemnation, we grow into adults seriously screwed up about sex. In India, the ‘don’t talk about it, don’t do it in a consensual, open, grown-up way’ approach to sex has ruined it for far too many, for-effing-ever. Sex is ‘bad’, so it has to be done surreptitiously. It’s wicked, so it has to be pushed upon unwilling partners as punishment. And instead of happy, openly loving couples, we wind up with rapidly multiplying cases of rape and molestation. The National Crime Records Bureau found that in 2014, ninety-three women were raped every day, up significantly from the previous year, despite all the promises made after the infamous Delhi rape of 2012. Yay.

What’s bizarre though is that in the sexually liberated west, masturbation is not talked about much either. Parents continue to skim over it as best as they can. Little boys may get a token talk but little girls get nada. And although popular Western culture is hardly puritanical, female masturbation is a no-go zone. As if it doesn’t happen or is only practised by the depraved. Popular sitcoms Family Guy or The Inbetweeners are famous for their obsession with male masturbation, but stop a minute to think about the mainstream female equivalent and what do you get? Nup.

Men masturbating is all in a day’s work, and a staple of many a crass, mainstream comedy. A woman masturbating, however, is sinister, unnatural and unhealthy. Why else don’t we see it on everyday TV or in films? You’re thinking about it, aren’t you? You’re thinking hard. It’s … erm … rather obvious. What’s not obvious is why masturbating women are considered such a threat to humanity. Two consecutive sex scenes were shot for Reign, the American teen television show on Mary, Queen of Scots. The first involved a girl masturbating, and the second, her coercion into sex by an older, powerful man who discovers her touching herself. But only one got the chop – no prizes for guessing which one.

Masturbation, especially of the feminine kind, is clearly a greater evil than rape or paedophilia. TV critic Rachel Grate fumed, ‘It’s time we as a society discuss why we’re concerned a masturbation scene in a show for teens would create awkward conversations for parents, while a rape scene would apparently need no explanation at all.’ Why is it such a taboo topic still? Tracy Clark-Flory on the news site Salon explains it as society being ‘thoroughly comfortable with women’s bodies being sexualized – but not so much with women being sexual.’¹

In other words, men want us for sex but won’t have us want sex for ourselves. Besides, sexual pleasure without a man isn’t even possible.

Or is it?

Mad-sturbation

We’ve established that a wanker (I mean a masturbating man) is funny at worst. A woman doing ‘it’ is dirty, demonic or hysterical. Hysteria itself, derived from the word ‘hyster’ or uterus in Greek, was regarded by the Ancients as an exclusively feminine mental disorder that sprang from a ‘sex-starved womb’. Go forward many hundreds of years to the Victorian Age and they were no wiser (by choice, don’t you know). Sexual emancipation in women was seen as madness, and masturbation one of its symptoms. Isaac Baker-Brown, erstwhile president of the Medical Society of London proposed, persuasively at the time, clitoridectomies as the remedy. Joseph Howe agreed, claiming masturbation mangled women’s bits, ‘I have seen cases where the labia resembled the ear of a small spaniel.’ He was convinced masturbating women were not only prone to hysteria but nymphomania as well. The only cure for this ‘uncontrollable appetite for lascivious pleasures, exhibited in public and private, without regard to time, place, or surroundings was marriage, or the amputation of the clitoris.’² Since such women already had their legs spread at all times, they were practically begging the good doctor to reach in and … snip.

Another school of quackery decided the answer lay in feeding the need of the questing fanny with artificially induced orgasms. Joseph Granville invented the first vibrator, a clunky contraption that these men used to control and even damage women with scary, wanton wombs³. But boy, did they end up with egg on their faces! Today, smoother, softer, gentler versions give women so much pleasure. From the oh-my-how-large-is-that (but I’ll try it on for size) dildos to tiny vibrators-in-underwear for women-on-the-go, sex toys come in all shapes, sizes, textures, temperatures and flavours. Use it any time of the day, anywhere at all. And without any involvement from a man (oh except the George Clooneys and Orlando Blooms blossoming in your head). So, in an appropriately Mary Shelley-esque turn of events, the monster is now our slave and its creator out in the cold, unless we let him in. Orgasmic justice, eh?

And now we’re talkin’. Amidst a right-wing backlash to her candid account of youthful experimentation in her book Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham took to Twitter to slug it out, ‘If you were a little kid and never looked at another little kid’s vagina, well, congrats to you. I told a story about being a weird seven-year-old. I bet you have some too, Old Men, that I’d rather not hear.’⁴ A popular social media movement followed, overflowing with masturbating women who would not be muzzled anymore. An Arab Spring of the vagina. They called it Those Kinds of Girls. Because we all are. Even men.

Birds Do It, Bees Do It

Maybe not, but I have it on good authority that primates, our nearest cousins, most certainly do. Perhaps Ma was just being scientifically correct when she called it ‘monkey business’ rather than trying to shame me. But, in fact, it’s not restricted to monkeys or even mammals. Pretty much everything that walks (flies/swims) the earth does it. They fondle their bits, use implements, even do each other. Professor David Linden gleefully recorded ‘the most creative form of animal masturbation’ as that of the male bottlenose dolphin, which ‘wrapped live, wriggling eels around its penis’⁵.

When we wank, we are