Nine Pints by Rose George

Author:Rose George
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Arunachalam Muruganantham at home

SEVEN

NASTY CLOTHS

To change his sanitary napkin and clean himself up, Muruga thought the public well near the burial ground was the best option. People avoided the well as they avoided the dead; he could remove his pad, rinse his stained clothing, and be safe. But Muruga was wrong. People saw, and they talked. This strange man, washing blood from his clothes, wearing a sanitary pad like a woman: What was he doing? The shame of it. The disgrace.

He was doing something revolutionary. It counted as revolutionary in his village, but also in his state, his country, and worldwide. Arunachalam Muruganantham, a poorly educated workshop helper and son of a handloom weaver, was on his way to becoming Menstrual Man.

* * *

In the predawn hours, Delhi Airport is packed. Heaving packed. Small children everywhere. The city has been hotter than a heat wave, with temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). To stand outside for more than a few seconds is dreadful. One newspaper is running a regular column called Death by Breath, because the temperatures are making the city’s air pollution worse than ever. Most people are going north to the cool of the hills, but I’m going south, to a town I’d never heard of a year before. To Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. When the plane lands, a woman behind me says to her daughter: Look! Red soil and coconut trees.

The air is fresher than I am. I’m tired and traveled and smell like it. But I have a meeting, and I have to wake up: I make a phone call and am told to come for one o’clock, for lunch. (In fact, he tells me later, he never eats before three. He was trying to be considerate of a Westerner’s lunchtime and didn’t realize this was a Westerner in desperate need of a nap.) His home is only a half-hour drive from Coimbatore center, but the taxi driver gets lost: narrow lanes, no house numbers. I’m sulky-tired and slumping in the taxi when I see him. He stands in the street, looking for his guest, his posture erect, his skin the darker one of South Indians, his clothes white like his house, a smile beneath his mustache. Suddenly I am alert, because I’m about to meet a celebrity. This is Muruga, as he shortens his name, friend of presidents and Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, and a sanitary pad superstar.

He leads me inside, up the stairs, past a child’s bicycle, to his one-bedroom first-floor flat. A polite word for it would be “humble”: a couple of living rooms, a small kitchen, walls covered with child-made scribbles and doodles. Sit, he says, and offers a chair, while he sits cross-legged on the floor, with the ease of Indians who do not have our uptight hip flexors and rigid hamstrings, our chair-formed inability to sit close to the ground without seizing up. He introduces his family: Shanti, a smiling, round-faced woman in a sari. Preeti, their daughter,

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