Good Girls and Bad Postures

When I was about 8 or 9, my father noticed that I had bad posture. Shoulders hunched, spine distorted from reading constantly in unnatural positions. Initially he tried gentle persuasion and preaching the benefits of a well-tended spine in middle age. That didn’t work too well as I slumped further and further down into my books. Compelled to take tougher measures, he started shouting “Seedhi betho!” anytime he discovered me slouching around (which was often). He was a persistent sort of man and by the time I was about 11, his constant refrain to straightness bore fruit – I developed a posture that would have made GI Jane envious.
Sadly, my brand-new straight posture, acquired in roughly three years, lasted only one year. The next year you see, I started … you know … hmmm…how can I say this delicately? … Well, like any other healthy 12 year old female – but much to my mother’s consternation – I sprouted breasts. Initially, my mother tried denial: “It’s a passing phase,” she said dismissively. Then she became accusatory, “Abhi toe tum siraf duss saal ki hoe,” to which I, very sanely reasoned, “but what does that have to do with anything? I am twelve but I could have … er…matured earlier, as has been known to happen, and phir kya?” (You realize, of course, that I was a little too precocious, being a girl and all). Finally, angered by my besharam persistence, my ever-resourceful mother threatened to tie a tight, wide bandage around the invaders. At this point, saner members of the family intervened and the bandage threat was never carried out.

So, my mother resorted to verbal commands and body-language guerilla warfare that went on for years. Soon my father’s constant reminders to straightness were replaced by militant-maternal commands of, “Seedhi khadi hoe!” Which actually meant the exact opposite of what she was saying. My father’s relatively benign pleadings to seedhay bethna withered in comparison to my mother’s menacing looks that promised eternal-maternal disapproval, possibly following me into jahanum, where I was sure to land up.

Every time my shoulders were thrown back and my chest stuck out a bit much, she would give me the deadly-ammi-glare that accused me of being an undesirable sort of girl. (You know the types who laugh too loudly and talk to the boys too freely at weddings and dance unabashedly, shaking it all, in front of aunties.) Well, I certainly did not want to be one of those besharam types. So, my straight posture, developed over years, was abandoned in pretty much a few months. I was young; my spine was supple enough to learn the good-girl-hunch. I was convinced that if I assumed this hunched position, men would go about their important business of raping women, bombing cities and cutting down the rainforests, while aunties with eligible-marriageable sons would beam their approval on me and add me to their list of suitable-sorts-of-girls for their boys. Oh, the rewards of conforming promised to be sweet!

At the age of 16 (you realize, of course, that my earlier precociousness had been replaced by a post-pubescent dullness of the grey matter) I discovered that I was not alone. Every “good” young woman I knew had bad posture. The becharees who were well endowed would go to great lengths to distort their body in any way short of actually crossing their arms across their offending chests (which would only have drawn more attention to them). Having them at all was a threat to and a defiance in the face of our paak-saaf society, but having ones above the respectable-acceptable limit was somehow even more criminal. So among my friends and cousins, big cotton dupattas were carefully arranged and kameezes were artfully stitched to control 16-17 year old anatomies threatening to break free and wreak havoc over good, civilized men. I was lucky, in a manner of speaking, being, hmmm … small boned. But, even my meager endowment could be a deadly menace if unleashed on the unsuspecting Pakistani man.

My chest swelled with pride (but only metaphorically) when I saw those sort of girls standing too straight. Anyone looking at them and at me would guess immediately, I simpered, who the good girl was. Who hated her body. Who cowered in shame. Who thought she was protected because she was not asking for trouble.

But, no dupatta was thick enough to save me from the lecherous looks of the men on the streets and in the offices and drawing rooms of Karachi. I played by the rules, but these men did not seem to think I was a good enough girl not to be leered at.

My own mother, who once probably had a body much like mine, was not comfortable with it. Many times, when I jumped in excitement or swayed involuntarily to a particularly catchy tune, I saw ammi look at my body as if she wished it would go away. I learnt to be ashamed of it. Because it was a woman’s body. A sexual object. A symbol of men’s honour, a museum for social morality, a receptacle for semen that would reproduce the next generation of leering, marauding, murdering men (also women, but the reproduction of women’s bodies is a means, the reproduction of men’s is an end, or so we are taught?).

A woman’s body. Revered and raped. Veiled and stripped. The object of desire that is not permitted to desire. The giver of pleasure that is not permitted to feel it. A woman’s body, that a woman can not – SHOULD NOT – own. Oh how I hated my body. How I wanted to break free from it and what it represented in the eyes of the men on the streets and the men in the classrooms and the respectable drawing rooms. I was nauseated by its reflection in countless writhing, half-clothed women in Hindi movies and Punjabi movies and Hollywood movies, and “She” magazine and Cosmopolitan and, and ...

It took me a long time to realize this. Much, much longer to stop feeling ashamed. Every day I have to remind myself not to be embarrassed. And writing this piece is part of that effort. I try, at least, to run without shame and laugh without shame and dance without shame. But my spine is still bent from having been crushed under the weight of sharam for years. I can’t get my posture back. Theek hai. I accept my imperfect woman’s body.