Sitting on a cot outside her house, 40-year-old Malan is waiting for her mother to come home. She is wearing her favourite floral blouse and an ankle-length skirt. She looks at me, her face lighting up. She has recognised me from a previous visit. “Aai nahi ghari [Mother is not at home],” she tells me as I sit on the doorstep to the family’s two-room house of bricks, stone and mud.
Malan More lives in Wadi village with her mother, 63-year-old Rahibai, and 83-year-old father Nana (their names, and the name of the village, have been changed). The village is in Mulshi taluka of Pune district, where the family cultivates paddy, wheat and vegetables on roughly three acres of land.
When Malan was around 18, she was diagnosed with ‘borderline mental retardation’ at the Sassoon General Hospital in Pune.
For 12 years before that, she had attended the local state-run primary school. “All her classmates cleared Class 4 and moved ahead, but she did not go beyond scribbling on the ground,” says Rahibai. “Finally, the class teacher asked me to take her out of school.” Malan was then around 15 years old.
Since then, Malan spends her days doing small chores in the house along with her mother, but only at whim. She barely talks, and when she does, it is usually only with Rahibai and few others. But she can comprehend and communicate. When I spoke with her, she nodded, smiled and spoke fleetingly.
At the age of 18, Malan was diagnosed with ‘borderline mental retardation’; she spends her days doing small chores in the house along with her mother Rahibai
Malan had her first period when she was around 12 years old. "There is blood," is how she described it to Rahibai that first time. Her mother taught her how to use cloth pads. "But my son was getting married and there were wedding rituals being conducted in the house. So, like me, she also started ‘sitting outside’ [during her periods],” Rahibai says, referring to restrictions like not entering the kitchen and remaining in one corner of a room. Her mother was Malan's only source of information on handling periods, so she simply followed Rahibai's example.
Over time, Rahibai was advised a hysterectomy for her daughter. “Sometimes, Malan would not get her period for five or six months, and I would be extremely anxious [fearing a pregnancy]. She does not speak much. How would I know if something had happened?” Rahibai explains. “I took her to the family planning [Family Planning Association of India] clinic in Pune [around 50 kilometres from Wadi village] twice to get her tested, the second time in 2018.” A pregnancy test kit is easily available at chemists, but it would have been difficult for Rahibai to access it for Malan.
A hysterectomy or surgical removal of the reproductive organs of girls with disabilities is one of the outcomes of widespread social attitudes that view menstruation as katkat or a problem, along with a scarcity of training on sexuality and a lack of institutional support for disabled girls and women.
The practice first made the headlines in 1994, when hysterectomies were conducted at Sassoon General Hospital in Pune, on intellectually disabled women aged 18 to 35. They were brought there from the Government Certified School for Mentally Deficient Girls, a residential facility in Shirur taluka of Pune district. The authorities argued that this was a way to manage menstruation and the consequences of any sexual abuse of the women.
AUTHOR- MEDHA KALE
