My broken hymen is still a practicing Muslim
Being a teenage girl with a boyfriend was momentous enough. The hormone crazy, insomnia, depression, mania, and self-doubt left little room in my little womanly brain for much else.
I roused myself from a dream about him, about a freshly painted front door with a neat doormat out front, a lawn, a grill on the back porch, and windows with shutters drawn back. Curious that the dream had nothing at all to do with him, and in fact, he wasn’t there, but the romance preceded him. Hushed voices were whispering about me outside my door. They were my mom and dad, apparently they had overheard me talking with my best friend about having sex with my boyfriend for the first time.
My heart stopped. I pulled the covers up to just beneath my nose and counted the stitches of my duvet as if they would be my last earthly sight. She opened the door a crack and saw my eyes reflexively flutter before I snapped them shut again. She said she knew what I did, and then condemned me to hell. In no small words did she describe the punishment I would receive shortly in the hereafter. By breaking that preciously thin barrier, that piece of me that by birth was never mine, that was lain claim to by my husband before I had been born, I had ruined everything. I had infuriated them, and betrayed God.
The threats of God’s wrath held no real conceptualization for me, but I trembled at having so deeply dishonored my family. I had disqualified myself from a normal life — college, graduation, career, independence, stability, marriage — From then on I was the scourge of the community, this scarlet lettered daughter of her parents.
After she left, he came in. He sat on the edge of the bed as far away from me as possible but still close enough to command my view. He softly echoed her sentiments, and added that I had so horribly disappointed him. Then he cried. That part was the worst.
I was dumbstruck. How could my body symbolize so much? How could that single membrane break so much that I had to break? I had always assumed that, like the rest of my friends, I was a person responsible for my own actions, who would never hurt anyone more than herself by them. I stayed in my room for two days and did not eat or sleep. I didn’t dare call him or anyone else. I was furious and confused and terrified. My head pounded with the condemnations bestowed upon me. My body shook even when I buckled my arms tight around my knees. I considered running away. I counted the friends I had to depend on. I weighed the most valuable of my belongings I could bundle and sell off, if necessary. I even wondered how much the metal space retainer inside my mouth could be worth.
They summoned me upstairs and gave me a scarf to cover my hair. My parents and I prostrated ourselves in prayer, supplicating to The Almighty for my sins. I took shallow breaths the entire time, with tears quietly streaming down. I felt like I was being ripped apart from the inside, as though nobody had warned me about this dangerous sequence. I knew I wouldn’t be honour killed, but did I? If not my parents then would another member of the community or even a relative try to kill me? Or, in some ways worse, was I to be sequestered in the house until a suitor could so piteously take me away? Was my price being lowered by the passing second? Was my Islam being scrubbed away from me entirely?
What gives us the right to police a woman’s sexuality? Traditional society overhypes her constructing a fortress around her and calling it a palace of her own, building a moat of unfulfilled promise that her purity is the honor of the family. A modern society promises that sexualization is a conveyance of celebrating her femininity. Either way, a girl is raised on the idea that she represents way more than the confused and ever-changing human being she actually is.
My mistake was this: I always thought growing up that I was a person first, and my parents’ daughter second. I always thought that I was as free as every other autonomous individual, and that cultural differences were there to color me, not restrict me. They were my ornaments that I could choose to honor, not restraints that I had to cherish by force. When I became aware that there was already a cast of me set around who I was going to be, everything felt worse. Personal liberty and the faculty of choice were abstract terms there just to decorate an unreality.
Years later, everyone grew up and we all moved on. But did we actually?
After the incident, I saw my family doctor for a routine annual checkup during a vacation after my term in Manchester. She did a shit job at addressing the elephant I had paraded into the room. She is, as I’ve mentioned before, a lovely, chatty lady close with my family, but she can’t help being limited as they are in scope. When the topic of contraception came up she became awkward and nervously asked why I still needed it. Was she hoping I would say because of acne or irregular periods or uncontrollable PMS? I’m not about talking around the truth. She brought up my brother’s upcoming wedding and his future family with a nice girl of our ilk. She asked if I was interested in settling down as well with a nice brown boy like us, because her daughter is round about my age and had just decided on Berkeley and was just so overjoyed because there’s a significant South Asian American student population there. How happy she and her husband would be when she came home with her chosen one! How happy my parents would be if I came home and saw them as often as she would be seeing her daughter!
For all the innocence that she still fought on to hold, I loved her for speaking to me like this. She didn’t have to protect me because I was coming to her for my own safety. I told her that yes, I am still taking contraceptives, and no, I am not coming home for a very long while yet, and in fact I needed as long a refill to carry with me as my insurance could afford.
I like to think that after this petit drame I am impervious to judgment but I wouldn’t be sharing this story if it were true.
Sick men commit horrible sexual offenses unto women they deem beneath them for doing something scandalous, like living while being female. I am not comparing situations of such obviously dissimilar severity, but sexual transgression is rooted in the same ignorance, just at a different bandwidth. My parents assumed that my brother lost his virginity when he did, and they neither instigated nor cared. I resented them so much when I learned this, before we all decided to leave it where it was and move forward.
I regret now that I once regarded my only home and my only family with hostility. I was young and ruthlessness was my best weapon. But the times they change: they know now of dating apps and one night stands, motherless women who can stand on both their feet, of Zayn Malik and Gigi Hadid, of Quantico and The Mindy Show, of marriage that survives on communication and not your “flavor of Muslim”. Girls are just as young and stupid as boys are, and parents are just as new to it all as their kids. Add blind idealism and we’re all doomed.
We created SHEzaadi in order to take away the shame and annoyance surrounding the topic of our own sexuality as women in our homes and in our culture. I’m looking wistfully at my bookshelf, at such powerful titles as Sexual Personae, The Second Sex, Granta F Word edition, Pink Sari Revolution, The Hidden Face of Eve, and Manifesta, and I’m lamenting why I can’t just climb up there with them. In my criticism of slut shaming I’m wondering if it really makes any difference to share at all. I wanted to retain as much angst in this piece as it felt like to go through, and what I’m left with is still more regret. Regret that things do not change, not enough, anyway. My shelves are stocked with titles to remind me daily that one day there will be more and more diversity of women’s voices on sexuality, and that one day I’ll be up there with them.
