An article on Facebook led me to The Blouse, author Perumal Murugan’s short story available on Juggernaut Books. It’s the story of a doctor, who embarrassed by his mother’s exposed breasts is on a quest to cover them with a blouse. As the entire village waits for the blouse to arrive, the mother whose breasts have nurtured, pleasured, and flailed about unclothed all the years of her life, withdraws in wonderment.The story is set in a village at a time when ‘everyone was infected by the conceit that they were about to weed out an obscene practice’, but that neither the preference nor consent of the mother is sought in a matter regarding her body mirrors today’s world — one in which everyone has an opinion on breasts and how much covering they require. The Blouse made me trace my own Breast Anecdotes, or ours collectively.
Of first noticing them, or having them noticed, before they were swiftly hidden behind shimmies and then ‘slips’. When I outgrew them all, came the bra, which served as an indictor of growing up. Why we were so excited to be fitted into one I wonder, as I am grown, grown-up and still too broke to buy them expensive ones.This is also when I began asking why feminists would burn bras, only to realise that the infamous bra burning never happened.
They are too expensive to burn literally but figuratively still worth burning the idea of the bra, as it remains to this day what we know most women wear, but that which should never be seen. I think now of all the giggles shared with the girls over ‘Your boyfriend is peeping out jokes’ and all the strangers who have rushed over to protect bra straps from being seen. This continues to happen all around. And every time it does, a meme comes to my mind — ‘The things people cannot see — poverty, misogyny, hunger, inequality, ableism, sexism, corruption, privilege, casteism; the thing they can see — a bra strap.”
I can’t place, when it dawned upon me that a part of my body could elicit opinion and ownership from outside. The first time I was molested, in my own street by a man whose face I’ll never forget, the one who zoomed away on a bike after pinching my breast, me caught unawares but too afraid to tell my parents, hugging myself in consolation because I’d until then never seen a person nurse a painful breast.
Then the years spent convincing myself that the dupatta was indeed a beautiful addition to the dress, to shun it altogether. And all the girls, standing in front of the mirror, looking at what’s too big, too small but never perfect, shaming themselves. There are mothers who cannot feed without layers of covering and as many shame them. We are also in which breast cancer rates are high, and reporting low because well, breasts.
Even now to me there’s my mother, whose eyebrows work overtime at the sight of my cleavage, the sweet akka on the street who runs to bring me a shawl, the tailor who raises my neckline without asking me. To others are other ammas, and akkas, and society who take it upon themselves to cover, clothe, and control our breasts. And then there are these lines from Kutti Revathy’s poem Breasts, Never Speaking to anyone else/they are with me always/singing/of quiet sorrow/of love/of ecstacy’. So proudly to a body part, skin, organ of nurturing and pleasuring, inspiration of lyrical mountains and valleys — breasts.