Are you there, god? It's me, woman.

What is fit to be a sobering moment? A lurking suspicion of whether the rubber left anything inside you? A suspicion that will last till, and if, you menstruate next. Is that life’s way of reminding you that you were going over-the-top with your happy-go-luckiness and needed to be pulled down a peg or two? Is that its way of reminding you of the other side of life, something you aren't completely unfamiliar with, that needs to be dealt with, the side so many other people have to face daily? People who cannot afford to be heady with reckless joy like yours. Actually, it is a sad idea of a joke, a horrible idea of a punishment if devised by some god. ‘Ah! Now comes the time to remind the woman that her body has been designed for torture, not pleasure.’ A sick idea of teaching someone a lesson. 

And what can you do? Get a surgery done and be done with the possibility of ever conceiving, even if you later decide to? Take pills? How many and for how long? Will you always know if something wasn't left behind insidiously, to remind yourself of your place in the world? To remind you that you are supposed to be the pleasure giver and not the pleasure recipient? True, you can end up getting ‘knocked up’ even if you are not getting any pleasure out of the act. But if you accept the role of the giver and accept sex as a price for the protection of holy matrimony, then you also accept the possible consequences of being quick or not so quick with child, depending on when the wheels of time stop turning on your menstrual cycle. 

But bitches that we are, we go on taking risks with our bodies. We go out at night, or in the day, and risk getting raped. We don't just let the slimy gaze of the lecher slither down us but dare him to look us in the eye and bear the heat of the embers. We have protected sex and risk the one per cent chance of it not being protective enough despite the warnings of condom companies. Even when in unconditional love, we make an exception and have one condition, that we won't put our self-respect at stake.

Such are we. We will laugh, we will throw back our heads to register defiance and coolly gaze at god with smouldering eyes, to let him know that we are existing, surviving, living, actually, despite everything as much as because of everything. We won't beg and plead, for we remember and know that we have only ourselves to fall back upon. But we still hope that he (we agreed long back ‘she’ couldn't have been half as unjust) is up there. For we want him to be listening.

First published in DailyO, 27 Apr 2016.