Ganjkaran pulled out a packet from underneath the display counter that was filled with bars of Lux
soap, blue plastic Parachute oil bottles and bundles of pens and pencils.
Wrinkling his nose distastefully as if he was handling the day-old carcass of a mangy cat, he
quickly wrapped the packet in an old newspaper, looping a string around it several times before
knotting it, and slipped it into a black plastic packet. Bablu was startled at the exorbitant price and
dutifully took out forty rupees from his shirt pocket and paid him.
He began cycling towards his sister Rachna’s house when it occurred to him that he should go and
collect some neem leaves for his nephew Pintu, who had contracted chickenpox.
He recalled the time he had been ill with the dreaded infection as a child. He shuddered now at the
memory of those ugly red scabs which had never stopped itching. His father had boiled some neem
leaves in water and given Bablu a bath with the decoction. The neem leaves and his father’s
gentleness had soothed his irritated skin.
Ram Kewat had been a handloom weaver who worked primarily from home and unlike Bhairavi,
who dominated the household with both affection and her fierce temper, he had been a softer soul.
Nine years had passed since his father’s death but rarely did a week go by without Bablu thinking
of him.
He turned on to a narrow dirt road, the wild shrubs and vegetation getting denser as he ventured
further. He reached the little clearing filled with neem trees and plucked two large handfuls of the
small spiky leaves, stuffing them in the black packet holding the sanitary napkins.
As his hand brushed against the bulky packet, curiosity overtook him. He unwrapped the
newspaper, tore open the plastic packaging and pulled out one of the cotton pads.
He examined the pad gingerly at first, like it was a strange new animal, one that would suddenly
wake up and bite his hand. After turning it one way and the other, he decided that it seemed to be
just plain cotton wrapped with a gauze sheet. He placed it on his palm, trying to calculate the
approximate weight of the pad. ‘Ten grams,’ he said to himself.
Having seen his father working with cotton yarn through his childhood, he knew that ten grams of
cotton would barely cost ten paise. But here he was paying four rupees for each of these pads. He
put the sanitary pad back in its packet.
Bhairavi Kewat and Rachna were sitting on the porch steps. They were looking out at Rachna’s
little garden, past her broken gate, into the busy evening road filled with honking two-wheelers.
Rachna grumbled, ‘When is this Bablu ever on time? From our schooldays till now. I have to
always wait for him.’
When her mother made a soothing gesture, Rachna continued, ‘Oh Ma, I forgot to tell you – last
Tuesday, when you had gone to Durga Masi’s house, I was on my way to the market and stopped by
the house.
‘Gowri was just sitting and listening to the radio. I tell you, Ma – you should pull her up a little.
You know how particular I am. When she was getting me water, I quickly ran my hand around the
door jamb and on the windowsill and, will you believe it, my fingers were covered with dirt and
grime. God knows what that woman does all day besides daydreaming!’
Before Bhairavi Kewat could reply, they spotted Bablu. He pushed open the broken gate and
moved it back and forth before he walked up to the house. He said, ‘The whole metal plate has
broken into two. You should have told me, I will get the welding tools from the workshop and do it
tomorrow. Now show me your precious boiler.’
He thrust the neem leaves into his mother’s hands, examined the boiler and after fiddling with it for
a few moments told his sister with a smile, ‘It will work for now but I can’t guarantee when it will
break down again. I suggest you fast every Monday for its long life, only God can help your boiler
after this.’
After reassuring his nephew who was playing Ludo with Shalu that soon all the itching, even
inside his ears and nostrils, would subside, he made an excuse and quickly left Rachna’s house. He
was eager to get home and give his new wife her present.
5
‘Close your eyes and give me your hand,’ Bablu said. ‘Here, now guess what I have got for you.’
it a sari, is it the same blue one I showed you in the window at Jagannath Saris?’ And she excitedly
tore the newspaper wrapping and opened her eyes.
‘Sanitary pads? And why is the packet torn?’ she asked, perplexed.
Bablu was dismayed by Gowri’s reaction. He mumbled, ‘I opened the packet, had never seen a
pad before. I thought you didn’t know about sanitary pads. I got it for you, Gowri, so that you could
use these only and not those dirty pieces of cloth.’
Gowri hesitantly replied, ‘Of course I know about pads. I have seen the same advertisements like
you, a girl in a white dress jumping on the grass, but if Shalu and I start buying these packets every
month, then let alone curd and ghee, we will not even have enough money to buy milk.’
Bablu looked at her dejectedly, his spirits sinking. Then she suddenly laughed, and her hand,
almost of its own accord, reached towards him, touching his cheek delicately.
It had taken Gowri a few minutes to understand that Bablu in his own idiosyncratic way was trying
to fill her life with small moments of joy that he could both envision and afford.
And disregarding all the old wives’ tales about not being intimate during the days of menstruation,
they made good use of Ma’s and Shalu’s absence, on the thick mattress, behind the floral bed sheet
that served as the partition wall of their tiny bedroom.
The next day while the sun was still shining fiercely in the summer sky, Bablu pulled down and
padlocked the metal shutters of the workshop. He then set off towards the main market.
On his way back, he took the diversion to the clearing with the neem trees to get some more leaves
for his nephew and decided to sit there and work on his new project.
He pulled out a pair of scissors, a needle and some thread, cotton and muslin cloth from his bag
and began flattening the cotton between his hands as if he were spreading out dough to make a
chapatti. Taking two large leaves from a nearby tree, he placed the cotton between them, pressing
firmly with his hands till it was flattened. He then wrapped the flattened cotton in the muslin cloth
and stitched up all the corners. Within twenty-four hours of first touching a sanitary napkin, Bablu
had managed to make his own.
Excited, he rushed home. Seeing his wife standing on the porch, waiting for him, he bounded up to
her and placed his ingeniously crafted sanitary napkin in her hand. ‘Gowri, go quickly, try this and
tell me how it is. Those rascal multinationals are bloodsucking parasites, charging a fortune for
just a bit of cotton. I have made this pad in less than fifty paise. Go on, try it!’
Gowri looked surprised but nodded. ‘All right, but not now, maybe after a few weeks,’ she said
and walked towards the kitchen.
Bablu was bewildered. Walking behind her he pleaded, ‘No, no, why after a few weeks, try it
now!’
She turned towards him and replied, ‘It is not a ceiling fan that I can
switch on and off. It is over
now, yesterday was the last day. You just have to wait till next month.’
6
The smoke from the effigy of Ravana and the sound of exploding fireworks filled the evening sky.
It was Dussehra. The lanes of Mohana were crowded with people dressed in their finery, returning
home after seeing the annual Ramlila performance.
Gowri was walking back home with Bablu and his friend Akram. The streets were dark and Bablu
pointed out the silhouette of the moon hidden behind the clouds to Gowri. Akram, who along with
being the neighbourhood butcher also happened to be its resident poet, began spouting one of his
inane limericks:
‘The beauty of the moon,
I say I am immune,
Because without the sun,
It is only a pebble, you baboon.’
Akram, realizing that his audience seemed unmoved, added, ‘Bablu, now no one gives me my due
importance but if I get my poems printed in the Dainik Bhaskar, by God, my name will be on
everyone’s lips in this town!’
Bablu put his arm around Akram’s shoulder and replied, ‘Akram Bhai, that is not a difficult
accomplishment. Go borrow money from whomsoever you meet and then disappear. Hordes of
people will walk around the market, saying, “Where is that bloody Akram?”, “If you see that
bastard Akram, let me know!”, “If I catch Akram, I will stab him with his own knife!”’
Gowri, spotting Akram’s dismayed face, stifled a giggle and Bablu, unable to control himself,
burst out laughing as well.
After Akram had turned towards his house, Bablu and Gowri walked quietly together to their
home. Their shoulders sometimes touched, their hands occasionally brushed against each other.
The night felt quiet and intimate. The autumn wind was cool, making Gowri wish she had carried a
shawl.
She asked Bablu, ‘Achha, what is your favourite colour? I am thinking of making a sweater for
you, sleeveless or should I make one with long sleeves?’ And she told him about her grandmother
who would sit with her spooling ball of coloured wool, using the needles to both knit and poke
people mercilessly when they were not paying attention to her.
Bablu laughed along with her. As they talked and teased one another, he realized that in the last
few weeks he had completely forgotten to ask Gowri about his homemade pad. ‘Gowri, did you try
it? The pad?’ he asked.
She didn’t reply at first and then eventually said, ‘Suno ji,’ the way she always referred to him,
‘yes, I tried it, it doesn’t work, I had to wash my clothes in less than ten minutes. I know you are
doing it to make me happy but please stop asking me about these things. It makes me very
uncomfortable. These are women’s matters, leave them to us.’
Bablu was astounded. Of all the eventualities that he had imagined as he amused himself while
cycling up and down to his workshop – Gowri declaring that she could never have imagined that
her husband was such a genius, of women all over India using sanitary napkins with his face
printed on the packet and even having a temple made in his honour like they did of so many South
Indian movie stars – he had not foreseen this easy dismissal of his creation.
‘But why?’ he spluttered. ‘How can you feel comfortable using a dirty rag?’
Gowri murmured, ‘Leave it. I am satisfied with my cloth – after all I have been using it all these
years. It’s what your mother and sisters do, what my mother does. Why think so much?’
‘But do you like it, Gowri?’ asked Bablu softly. ‘Why should you feel satisfied? Isn’t it unfair that
you can’t afford a simple…’
Gowri interrupted him, ‘Let’s stop fighting over this. I know you mean well. But these are not
things that you should concern yourself with. Bas, no more now. Please? Promise me?’
He nodded at her and continued walking, seemingly undisturbed, changing the subject to the
Ramlila performance. ‘Did you notice, the man who played Lakshman’s part was completely
drunk, just stood there swaying on the side of the stage?’ he asked his wife.
But the conversation had planted a seed in his mind.
The next day as Bablu unlocked the padlock that secured his cycle, he saw his neighbour’s wife
Parul in the small courtyard outside her house. She had a thin towel wrapped around her freshly
washed hair as she took circles around the tulsi planted in a dingy white pedestal in the middle of
her small garden. He called out a greeting to her and she nodded sullenly.
Six months ago, Choti had ventured into her garden and pulled out some of her marigold plants.
Parul had come screaming into his house, threatening him, brandishing a broom in her hand like it
was Tipu Sultan’s sword.
Bablu tried to assure her that the incident would not be repeated, but Choti, fearing that the portly
woman in the green sari with the broom raised in the air was posing a serious threat to her master,
lunged at her, knocking her down. After that, despite Bablu’s repeated apologies, she had refused
to talk to him. A grudging nod with an under-the-breath cuss word was the most she would offer.
But his problems with Parul did not bother him today because he had something more important on
his mind. Bablu with the same uncompromising determination that had taken him from being an
errand boy to the owner of the workshop had just made a grand announcement to his wife, ‘These
rascal big corporations are only trying to cheat people, charging so much money for a simple
cotton pad. You wait and see, Gowri, I will find a way to make a pad for you at quarter the price.’
7
Months passed with Bablu procuring different qualities of cotton and various materials to make
new pads. He would then give each one to Gowri in the manner of a courtier presenting rare
jewels to a king, only to watch Gowri proclaim all his experiments as wholly inadequate.
One evening as she was sitting on the back seat of his cycle, he broached the topic again. Gowri
had tried to understand her husband but she was beginning to get impatient and upset about this
unnatural obsession of his.
Trying hard not to show her annoyance, she said, ‘Suno ji, would it not be more sensible to put in
that much effort into earning more money so that we can just afford to buy sanitary pads every
month?’
Bablu replied, ‘I can try and earn more and buy an expensive packet of sanitary pads for my wife,
but what about everyone else’s wives?’ He continued, ‘I started with doing this just for you,
Gowri, but after you rejected four pads I made with different grades of cotton, I went to a doctor’s
clinic in Dewas. I asked the compounder there for a sample of the cotton they used for dressings.
‘I thought that perhaps it would be more absorbent than the samples I was finding. The compounder
asked me what I wanted the cotton for and when I explained, he said, “Bhai saab, you are the first
husband I have seen who has come into this clinic and even spoken about sanitary pads. Most
women use dirty cloth, leaves and even straw and you know what – they have seventy per cent
more chances of getting diseases. But no one seems to be bothered about these things.”
‘Seventy per cent, Gowri. It’s such a big number. I thought about his words for days as I looked at
the little girls running around our neighbourhood
. They can’t even buy an extra pair of slippers –
how will they ever be able to afford sanitary pads from the market month after month?’
Gowri was silent for a few moments and then said, ‘I pray that no such diseases will come upon
those girls but let their fathers and husbands look after them. Your responsibility lies towards our
family, our future.’
And trying to avoid any further discussion, she said, ‘Suno ji, this Sunday let’s go see a movie in
the cinema, please,’ and Bablu nodded and cycled on. He didn’t raise the subject all evening and
Gowri hoped his silence was a good sign.
But Bablu remained single-minded, despite her best efforts. Each month he would present her a
new pad to try, each month she would ask him to discontinue his experiments.
Once this man had come bearing her sweet gifts, small tokens that had opened the doors of her
heart to him. But now continually dealing with the onslaught of his unseemly obsession, she felt
that she didn’t know him any more.
Slowly, the delicate intimacy that had begun to grow between the couple began to turn into an
invisible chasm instead.
But Bablu faced a larger problem than his wife’s mounting frustration – and this was her menstrual
cycle. In order to get feedback on his pads he had to wait an entire month. One day, he loudly
exclaimed, ‘Gowri! At this rate it will take me decades to get this right.’
Unable to take it any more, she began sobbing. ‘I don’t know what sins I must have done in my past
life that all this is happening! I am not going to try any pad or anything any more. At least then you
will have to stop this madness.’
Bablu then began pestering his sisters to try his sanitary pads. Unfortunately, during a family lunch,
his nephew Pintu accidentally pulled a sanitary pad out of Bablu’s bag and began waving it like a
flag in front of the entire gathering, including Uma ji, an elderly lady from the neighbourhood who
had dropped in to invite Bhairavi Kewat to her granddaughter’s wedding.
Bhairavi tried to make light of the matter not wanting to create a scene in front of an outsider, but
after Uma ji left, Rachna berated her brother and along with their mother beseeched him to stop his
experiments saying that the whole family would be disgraced due to his sordid interest in women’s