Getting in Touch with My Feminine Side

I’m glad to have grown up the lone male in a house of amazing women – my mother, sister and, for a short-but-significant while, two sister-like close friends. As a consequence, I have always been deeply suspicious of traditional designations of gender norms and have tried to develop a strong sense of myself without leaning too heavily on the easy crutch of normative male privilege. (You-all can judge how well that’s going.) More importantly, I am one of the few men who reflexively returns the toilet seat to the down position. No one has ever accused me of failing to “get in touch with my feminine side.”

Until last week, that is.

To set the stage, Yoo-Mi and I were hit by a bus a week-or-so ago, on our last day in Bangalore, while riding through heavily congested traffic. Described in this way, the accident sounds pretty dramatic, I’ll admit. In truth, it was not such a big deal, though we were dragged a good five to eight meters by the bus. In the process, we both left a little skin on the pavement. We went to make a police report against the license-less bus driver, then caught an auto-rickshaw to a Friends Without Borders meeting on the Infosys campus, for which we were now running late. The people we were meeting took one look at our bloody, shredded skin, and decided that we would hold our talks, not in their conference room, but at a table opposite the waiting room in the company infirmary. Yoo-Mi and I tag-teamed the meeting, while taking turns ducking in for wound-cleaning, bandaging, and tetanus shots. She was sporting a crimson road-rash on one knee and a nastily bruised ankle, and I’d lost the most of the skin on the top of my left foot and toes.

We returned home to Pondicherry, and to the care of our wonderful friends Puru and Maya, who are members of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Each morning, they would take us to have our abrasions cleaned and bandages changed at the ashram clinic. If this sounds like a nice opportunity to get out and meet people, I assure you it was quite excruciatingly painful, and something I would begin to dread from the time I awoke until the nurse would begin to cut away the gauze of the bandage. Of course, the anticipatory anxiety was downright pleasurable when compared against the actual experience of the treatment, and of getting my ass home with freshly re-enervated raw flesh.

The nurses of the ashram clinic endured our disgusting, oozy wounds with patience, professionalism, and good humor. In fact, with other female staff members often sitting at the perimeter of the treatment area, the scene frequently resembled the hair salon banter of Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Olympia Dukkakis, and Julia Roberts in the film Steel Magnolias.

“Women are so much stronger than men,” offered one member of the clutch, gravely, as Yoo-Mi sat stoically though her ordeal while I, in the seat next to her, nearly crawled out of the skin remaining to me in agony. Yes, it was agreed: men are weak – and I was Exhibit A.

The conversation switched to “Ashram Hindi,” a Bengali-spiced version of the standard language, with just enough English to make clear to us that the discussion would not move past this point until the consensus was affirmed, re-affirmed, and re-re-affirmed by all present. When the group of women finally fell silent, the diminutive, sari-clad Tunu, who was attending to me, looked up from her work – half savior, half torturer – to deliver the collective verdict: “You must bear some pain.”

And here I thought that was exactly what I had been doing. Men are a bit stupid too, it seems.

Yoo-Mi and I laughed so hard, we almost failed to notice that no one else was laughing. One sometimes forgets: most Indian adults are not intentionally funny.

As the days have gone by, my skin has started to re-grow, my wounds look a bit less raw and, with this improvement, I am able to endure the treatment with some vestige of dignity. Yesterday, I commented to Tunu as she finished tying-off the bandage on my foot, “This is really getting a lot better.” “Yes”, she agreed, “You were cooperating today. And not making so many noises.”

Once again, Yoo-Mi and I fell into a delirious laughing fit, leaving the kind women of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Medical Clinic to suspect that we needed psychological help, as well as a good old-fashioned dose of feminine courage.

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