Bookstrapping: Of glass cliffs, menstruation and missing trees

I was reading ‘The Menstrual Coupe’, a collection of 23 short stories by Malayali author Shahina K Rafiq, when I heard about the doctors rape in Kolkata. On August 9, a trainee doctor on 36 hour duty dozed off in the seminar room at RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata. She was subject to rape and murder and her body was discovered by colleagues the next morning. She has taken up a profession meant to serve people irrespective of their gender, caste and creed. And she faced the most heinous of gender crimes!

I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the ‘trapped’ women Shahina K Rafiq writes about in ‘The Menstrual Coupe’, and the doctor’s case. Shahina crafts a world of imagination for her female characters- perhaps imagination is the only place where they can escape patriarchy!

Here’s an alleged situational joke from the book! “On her wedding night, a bride confessed that she was in love with someone else. The groom said, “ at least let me make some use of the money I have spent on the pandal. You can leave tomorrow!” Some joke? The author crafts images of men raised in families in an entitled way, sitting around passing judgements about women in the extreme; makes one uncomfortable! “What about the men destroyed by women” asks a character in the book. Are we equating a woman’s right to love a person, other than her lovelorn admirer, with rape? Another question- do snakes coil themselves around menstruating women because they like the smell of blood? What! Clearly, much to ponder about.

I turned the page to another book, The Glass Cliff, by Sophie Williams. Make no mistakes, this is a very hard-hitting book for career women. It poses questions like -

1. Are women being hired in leadership roles, only after the business is already underperforming? Like Marissa Mayer’s shift to Yahoo from Google.

2. Is this a trend no one is talking about?

3. Are women being brought in as stopgaps till the company finds the right male candidate?

4. Worse, are women being brought in as scapegoats? So even if nothing works, the company can shrug off the blame on her?

There’s an observation that political parties field women in ‘unwinnable’ seats. Reading this book, made me realise that its high time we spoke about mental abuse against women, as much as physical abuse. Borrowing a leaf from the Kolkata case, a question arises-is elevating women deliberately when its time to fail, equivalent to ‘abuse of’ a woman’s career? “For would-be female leaders, the choice is often between the poisoned chalice or nothing at all,” quotes author Sophie Williams in the book.

In the Menstrual Coupe, the trauma of compulsory female servitude may often be passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. And the women who want leadership roles ( despite all odds being stacked against them) take a fatal risk- they go all in! They prepare to perish, while taking the minutest off-chance that they may actually rise.

This theme- of trauma passing down generations reminded me of Elif Shafaq’s ‘The Island of Missing Trees.’ “We are afraid of happiness. From a tender age we are taught … that for every morsel of contentment, there will follow … suffering …” says the book. Another line goes thus about a scene in a pub; “both women were laughing so hard … the other customers began to look … no one imagining it was pain they were setting free.”

The Island of Missing Trees is not a feminist story, unlike ‘The Glass Cliff’ and “The Menstrual Coupe.’ But it deserves to be mentioned in our review of women’s writing because of its deep empathy with the human need to find connections.

We crave human connection. But every time a woman is violated, especially by someone she is connected to and knows, we destroy her faith and years of human progress! Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta is a columnist and bestselling biographer. She is credited with the internationally acclaimed Red Dot Experiment, a decadal six-nation study on how ‘culture impacts communication.’ Asia's first reading coach, you can find her on Instagram @OfficialReetaGupta