i have been borrowing books from a wooden cupboard in a faculty lounge, where the books seem mostly untouched by the people who work there. dusty and some even mouldy. there are more than a few historical books, some very good ones, especially those i would not have come across otherwise. i am reading one that i will now probably not return; instead i put a different book back to thank the nameless mysterious donors to this library. the author of this book says Jawahar and Edwina met first in Singapore, on an occasion when all three of them (Dickie included) were mobbed by an admiring audience to the extent that there was almost but not quite a stampede of sorts and they had to rescue each other from being trampled upon, which they apparently did laughingly. that kinda explains the informality J&E shared, but also all three of them were part of. 

for the last few years i had been worrying but also procrastinating to get my body checked up healthwise, especially my reproductive system. this last week or so i finally found the time. it had been more than a couple years since my last full blood tests, and i had never before visited a gynae. my sister in law had once joked that i must be virgin if i had never been to a gynaecologist. and given how we still have a lot of trouble with the explicit act of sexual intercourse, and how enjoy other forms of sex a lot more, that felt like not too far from the facts. moreover i believe i am finally in perimenopausal stage, petering out slowly but steadily to losing my reproductory powers.

so i finally went to a doctor. and she recommended a bunch of tests, ultrasounds, sonograms, etc. one of the sonograms was TVS (trans vaginal sonogram) and naive me didn't know what it implied. i have many years before had some ultrasounds done, when i was sick or recovering from jaundice and my body skipped a couple periods. i remembered the gel on my tummy, and thought the TVS would be similar but might go lower down and closer to my panty line. despite the whispered warnings by the doc or her helper (i forget which) that that hospital's TVS technician was a man and if i didn't like that i could go elsewhere for it. 

i did go elsewhere without googling what TVS really was, and noticed that everyone kept repeating those letters - at billing and in the supply chain of humans who finally took me to the testing bed - with a special emphasis suggesting both extra care but also some degree of secrecy to it. for the ultrasound before the TVS they need you to sit around and drink bottles of water to bloat your bladder as they said. "ab lag raha hai? zyaada der to rok nahi paoge naa aap?!" anyway the ultrasound technician rubbed that gel with the wand in her hand, made me turn on either side to get scans of my ovaries etc. and then said "urinate now and then we will do the TVS". i was so full of what had the potential of urine, that the sound of that word and the permission to finally let it go made me believe i could do it right then and there, and it took me a minute to realize what she meant and to stop my muscles from relaxing. the loo was surprisingly very clean and i thankfully did my job. when i was back on the bed i was asked to strip waist down and the word 'panty' was mentioned in hushed tones both as a question and an answer. the technician realized i had never had TVS done to me before. and she explained it, asking as a second thought if i was sexually active. i responded in the affirmative with the qualification that i did not enjoy penetration much, hoping that would excuse me if i were found to be a virgin. she said most women don't. and then she inserted a phallic thing coated in a condom and lube into me. i felt it probe only when it entered and then when it exited. and later relating it to him, explaining how simply it went in unlike our personal escapades, we joked about the angle and how we could use this learning when we next tried. he said i wasn't supposed to have enjoyed the medical test - rape in my words with some prewarning and partial consent - to which i replied that would be better than the pain/discomfort most women feel, and that the fact that i didn't feel it within me precluded enjoyment. was it just me or did most women not enjoy penetration?! and maybe biology meant it that way??!! i asked the technician if most women did not like it, and her answer was she had meant that most women didn't like TVS; as far as the real thing was concerned of course it depended on personal preference. we smiled. 

i had another medical rape a day later, when my doc asked me to go in happy baby position, while nude waist down, and either punched something in multiple times or sucked something out in a syringe multiple times, for a pap smear. he and i joked about that later too. and the doc looking down into me said almost laughingly that my cervix looked healthy and that it was usually pregnancies and childbirth that injured it and left it otherwise. one of his cousins had told me that i would possibly have a harder menopausal transition because i had not had children. i asked my doc this at this moment and she refuted that matter of factly, confirming what i had once read somewhere that procreating kills our bodies partially or wholly (in some species). 

the doc was surprised that i was married and had been so for more than a decade because i hadn't liked giving my name as a Mrs. and she was more surprised after inquiring whether i was thinking of having children when i said, well all these years we did never decide in favor of that.

that same evening we went for a play. by rural women in MP. and we took one of his younger colleagues, a woman, along. the women who were actors had also conceptualized the scenes, based on their personal experiences - what being a woman felt to them. they had been helped by some social workers and theatre experts to realize their ideas into theatre form, without a written script (cos the women were not literate) and with pictorial storyboards instead. the theatrical advice given to them had been put your bodies in the center of it all. it was mindblowing how they had done just that. with minimal dialogue, out of which most were songs, they strung their bodies into the scenes to create a very visceral experience for four rows of us the audience in that intimate theatre. we, especially the women in the audience, laughed, danced, cried, and shook with the anguish that their bodies related. and then after the performance they sat down and wanted to talk with us. a man asked the first question, a plain stupid question about some water bottle used in a scene that seemed from another world that the women inhabited. but his stupid and unselfconscious loquaciousness served the necessary service of breaking the ice, making us laugh and open up. we talked about how it had moved us. and i thought back to my doc visits, to the community and customs (older than science) of gynaecology, to my travels in metro these last few months in the women's coach (to swim and back), to my relationships with my sister and mother and mother in law (and her rejection of feminism), and all the ways in which women are the same everywhere in the world and how we sometimes band together and understand each other without words, how we stand for each other, and how at other times we beat each other down. most men in the audience didn't fully get the performance, and i realized even some women did not - the younger colleague with us took the cannibalism scene, when one woman eats the others alive, literally, till i gave her my understanding of it. 

these women who were both creators and actors in the play had wanted to communicate how their bodies felt when they were decorated by other women on their weddings but how they were chastised when they wanted to look beautiful otherwise when they felt so. various other universal emotions. in one scene, one woman repeatedly says that she couldn't meet your eyes because she knew how you usually looked at her. that's when i started to become water. 

a couple days before that i had texted him. and he had rejected my asking for his company. but now he is in my phone and i in his.