The schoolday I’ll never forget: ‘We were told about periods – and I wanted to disappear’

Were any of us really ready for the news that we would bleed each month? Only one reaction made sense. Destroy all the sanitary towels

Let me take you back to south-west London circa 1988. Eddi Reader singing, “It’s got to be-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee perrrrrrrr-fect” on the radio and Margaret Thatcher in No 10 for all eternity. A time when internalised misogyny is so deeply internalised that no one knows it exists. I’m nine-ish, sporting a dark-blue checked dress and a nonchalant expression – and at school we’re learning about periods.

By this point, everything I know about menstruation, nay life, probably comes from the author Judy Blume. My best friend Galia and I start writing letters to one another that begin “Are You There God? It’s Me, CHITRA!” In a few years copies of Forever will be traded in the playground with a vigour currently only applied to Garbage Pail Kids cards. It’s a difficult period (the other kind). I’m one of those children who loves being a child and – spoiler alert – will turn into an adult who, in fundamental ways, remains one. I’m deeply unhappy about the dark hair sprouting in places I don’t want to know about and the budding discs of tenderness in my chest. The word puberty makes me dissolve into giggles or pull faces. Time, as far as I’m concerned, can be rewound as easily as a pencil inserted into a C-90 cassette tape. I don’t want to grow up.

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