When I Acknowledged My Breasts
You know why we love basketball?”
“Why?”
“Because we can watch girls run!”
“What is there to watch?”
“A lot, if you know where to look.”
I looked. I saw. Suddenly I was not a child anymore.
Having grown up in a joint family, I was the only girl amongst 8 male cousins and a male sibling. I understood boys better than I understood girls. Therefore, automatically , I made more male friends than female. What you read above was a conversation between my best friend and I. Amir was the typical backbencher-type, and obviously, so was I.
We had been classmates since Playground, and had essentially grown up together. But so was the case with most of our other classmates. We had all grown up together. What was so special with me, you ask? I was LIKE Amir and other boys of my class.
I shunned dolls, I fought with my hands and legs, and I oozed profanity at the slightest simulation. I was, what they call, a ‘Tomboy’. Just like my male friends, my idea of a fun filled afternoon game was torturing the life out of each other with the most pain-inflicting techniques known to mankind.
I grew up unaware of my gender identity, or that my body was different from theirs. A late bloomer that I was, my friends forgot that too. The result was that I was taken into confidence in all adolescent male conversations. Until the day that I realised the difference.
We played basketball in our school on Sunday evenings. I had managed to put myself in a brawl with a boy twice my size. So obviously, I was thrown out of the court by the coach and I sat in a corner nursing my precious wounds, and coming up with excuses to get out of trouble when my parents see my broken elbows and knees.
Amir was my best friend. Everyone thought that he loved so basketball so much that he just comes to watch, even though he was not a part of the school team and was therefore not liable to show up on Sunday evenings. It was then that my genius best friend open a pandora’s box of opportunities and revelations!
You know how girls have breasts? Yeah. So gravity works on them as it does on any object dangling outside a fixed framework.
When we women run, our breasts run wild, apparently. And I was unwittingly subjected to this piece of information that changed something in me forever. I suddenly realised that I had breasts too. Amir, in being blind to my gender, might not even see them. But I did.
That day I went home and while taking a shower, I looked in the mirror. For the first time, I real saw myself. I saw what I had. I saw how it curved. I saw how tender I looked, despite all my tough-guy behaviour. I also felt vulnerable. I felt vulnerable to the male gaze. I had organs that can be looked at for pleasure, without consent, and there was nothing I can do about them.
After this baptismal discovery, things escalated quickly. I began to see how much I had in my body, and I found out that ALL of it was absolutely wrong. I needed to tweeze hair, wax underarms and legs, push up my breasts, hide my bra straps and etc.
Life has not been kind to the womankind. We live as if every inch of our bodies is unwanted and must be corrected and accentuated. We are also taught that we must hide our bodies from the world.
The society owns the female body, and that is that. What we wear, what we do, and who we do… the society watches, and it waits like a ticking time bomb. Our bodies become our character.
At the age of 15, I suddenly saw the segregation on the basis of my gender. Girls were called to separate seminars and meetings where we were told exactly what should be the length of our skirts and how we should wear only white bras under our shirts.
We were given lectures on how to conduct ourselves on the staircase that had an open railing (because a person walking below us could look up our skirts). There were no such segregated seminars for boys. My male friends we never asked to avert their gaze or stop looking at us sleazily, though.
Over the years I have come to love my body as it is. I have full round breast and I now accept them. No matter who tells me that I should wear higher necklines, I find myself able to dismiss them. I have learned to accept myself as I am, and I believe that my body belongs to me, and me alone.
I have grown up and I now fight with words instead of limbs. But when a man watches me run, I stare back. I watch him look at my breast, and I make sure he sees the indignant reflection of his gaping mouth in my eyes. Sometimes, just sometimes, I also brawl. The good thing is, so does Amir.
He unlearned his prejudice and he shed his perverse ways as he grew up with me. My friends saw me struggle with my body-image and emerge victorious. As I accepted my body, my male friends accepted womankind.
Take charge of yourself, ladies. Respect and love your bodies, so that men fear to ever do otherwise!
