Why do Indian gynaecologists talk dirty?

Gynaecology or gynecology: The medical practice dealing with the health of the female reproductive systems – vagina, uterus, ovaries and breasts. Literally, outside medicine, it means “the science of women”. 

Are you single?

When do you intend to get married?

Are you a virgin?

When was the last time you had sex?

Are you married?

When do you wish to start a family?

Is your sex life normal?

Do you have a high-stress job?

How many times do you have sex in a week?

What do you mean you don’t want kids? Want or can’t?

Have you ever had an abortion?

Before marriage?

Did your mother ever miscarry?

Have you always been this fat?

Do you use protection?

Work out?

Smoke?

Have you tried any of these marriage websites? Shaadi.com?

Every woman in India, at some point, has faced these questions. Sitting in front of another woman. On a green chair at a hospital or a diagnostic centre. Meeting a pair of deep-set eyes. With a streak of vermillion conspicuous between the tresses. She has had to think of quick answers, vis a via her legs spread wide open, her ankles pushed through two stirrups. A greasy gel smeared over her privates.

She’s wet. Smarting.

As a pair of gloved hands are inserted in her. Dispassionately. Sans care. An expressionless nurse removing her inners, watching the spectacle – as she squirms uncomfortably, writhing in pain, as the probe, with a condom on it, is pushed further up. All her life lessons flash before her eyes in that one defining moment – the first time she had her periods; the way she wasn’t allowed to wear shorts anymore, or bathe with her father; the age when she called it "chums"; the first time she stained her white school uniform; the first time she ever had sex; the clumsiness of losing her virginity; the same pain coming back in short waves now; the first night, the way she stood with a glass of lukewarm milk, the years in between when she popped in the pill and craved to be touched and tasted; the child she never bore, the taunts. The rawness. The reactions.

Even here.

"This is the fifth gynae I am coming to in Delhi. It never ends. I’ve always had a history of irregular periods and have had to undergo hormonal therapy and regular scans from time to time. I lose weight. Put it back on. I am constantly on medication, and always getting blood tests done. Despite never having sugar or thyroid, I am perennially asked to get tested. Just in case, I'm told. Sometimes I just want to get my damn uterus and freaking ovaries, or whatever else that’s inside, removed. I’m tired of being asked why I am single at 43. That too by a female doctor, who then turns to my mother or sister accompanying me, asking them the same thing. Like they are responsible for my relationship status. I am told I may never conceive, implying in a way that I have missed the bus. And that, with my present medical condition, I may miscarry later. I get into depression thinking of my gynae’s glum face, her double chin, the way she always frowns while staring at my insides. Like she disapproves of my life… it’s humiliating at some level… her well-meaning advice that I’d rather she shove up her own ill-shaped ass!" says 43-year-old advocate Sujata Lal, battling the same problem I’ve grappled with since I was 19.

The charade gets worse for a woman who has made a conscious choice to never have children. "Imagine the lectures I get from gynaecs, radiologists, along with neighbourhood aunties, taxi drivers and random people just about everywhere when they hear I’m a married woman who has decided not to have kids! Three different doctors tried cajoling me into a conceiving, saying I’d regret it later. I can now predict which version of the argument and cajoling I’m going to get! Their basic unwillingness to accept my adult decision, terming it as immature when I’ve thought it through carefully, with my partner," says Priya Pathiyan, a Mumbai based-journalist in her mid 30s.

My first gynaecologist was a pot-bellied, bespectacled Bengali man in his late 40s, who after a thorough investigation of my privates, announced rather sternly: Get her married by her early 20s or she may never bear a child - staring blankly at my mother who looked like she may cry. Asking her to get me admitted into a reputed south Kolkata hospital. On an unconscious ill informed teenager, they performed a complicated laparoscopy to remove an ovarian capsule that could have been, looking back, treated medicinally. He did not even pick up my mother’s frantic calls when hours after my surgery I slipped into a coma. Bleeding to death, literally. He was at a wedding. We’d later come to hear.

I don’t remember much of that night. Except, Dr Dutta was perhaps prophetic. I did not get hitched in my early 20s. I’m 37. Still single. I had sex when I was 23. It sucked the first time. My boyfriend’s touch as harsh as the gynaecologist's. His words coming back to me. Would Ganesh marry me now? I ached to know. Would I ever be a mother? Would I need any more invasive procedures? More needles, drips, operation theatres… things that scared me. That I could never talk about openly. Would there be any more blood…

Are doctors who treat a woman’s insides tuned into the woman's innermost feelings? Or does calling the profession "woman’s science" invariably discount the above? Making them callous, clinical, calculating... every woman a project, a prognosis, a prescription? Giving the gynae the absolute right to ask a woman something as private as whether she was a virgin or not? Or details about her sex life? Counsel her, coax her into seeing the perks of marriage if she’s still single, making it synonymous with childbirth. The highest justification of our lives – both the patient’s, and the doctor’s – sans which the science wouldn’t sell, perhaps. Making the Indian gynae the perennial outsider, despite the licence we give them to probe our privates mercilessly – dig deeper, push harder… find a cure. At any cost.

"You must get her uterus removed," my third female gynae at Delhi’s prestigious Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research announced, without batting as much as an eyelid. When I kept going back to her every Wednesday at 4pm, waiting patiently on the claustrophobic ground floor, complaining how my menstrual pain having gotten extremely severe in the last few cycles. I think I used the word unbearable, a couple of times. My mother, accompanying me on most, vouching for the same, a lingering sadness in her tired eyes. Perhaps she was just as fragile as I was. Somewhere. In ways, that we could never show each other. Somehow...

"But, she’s so young," was all she could say, protesting, as if, to a death warrant.

The doctor in question conversing with the nurse in the meanwhile, asking about a woman she’d just induced into labour. Making so little of another and the ones that didn’t qualify - make the final cut - in her eyes. The ones who kept coming back – same complaint, same pain. Same marital status.

"Why don’t you find a boy? With her history…" was the last thing the gynae uttered, before I pushed my chair back. The sound of wood on mosaic, a strange noise.

"Shall we try Elite matrimony? Bablumama called from Kolkata saying it’s what he’s doing for Saurav…" Ma said to me on our way back. As I looked away.

Beleaguered. Belittled. Barren?

What is it about our power to procreate that gives a complete stranger the license to take away our self worth? Dent it, using one casual scathing remark.

What gives the right to a gynae to take a decision on my uterus? To ask me to remove it when I don’t even have a tumour. Just a condition she can’t fix? Make any more money out of? Scaring me once after a pap smear, telling me I may even have cervical cancer. Why don’t we sue such medical practioners serving in swish nursing homes? Isn’t invading my womb a service I have paid for? Why shouldn’t I want answers? Slowness? Care? What if my uterus had a voice? What would it say in response? Why couldn’t my clitoris be a consumer? Pissed off?

Why aren’t we taught to fight for our womb? Not just when we are pushing out a child or preparing for one. But when we wait. Why can’t we stand up to defend its emptiness, its plight, its losses? Give it a voice?

This afternoon again, while undergoing a trans-vaginal ultra scan, the radiologist asked me a question that I now consider standard operating procedure. "My marriage plans." Only this time, I smiled saying, "I know what you will say. I am 37. I have PCO. Endometriosis. I may never conceive in the future, right?"

She looked surprised, before going on to narrate how she had decided during her medical college itself that she would conceive before 30. At least, her first born.

"Nature has designed a woman’s body in such a way, we are at our fertility wise best in our early to mid 20s," she added, with the same smugness I have now come to associate with married women with kids.

"Well, I’d just adopt then," I laughed, on purpose.

The radiologist, a mother of two, stopped her probe.

"You know raising kids is such a thankless, tiring job. The only reason that justifies it is that they are your own blood, sometimes..." she rationalised.

There was a lengthy pause.

As she pushed my thighs apart, I thought of all my friends who were mothers, those trying desperately, and those like me, single. But someday wanted a child. I thought of nature, the way we always venerated her as "mother". Wondering why she then singled out some, and punished others, while keeping scores of women waiting?

If motherhood was the only logical conclusion to our cycle of life? Is it really the most valid justification for our painful present tense - periods, menstrual cramps, mood swings, silly PMS digs, PCO problems, weight gain and loss, cysts, tumours, hormonal pills, ugly medicines, expensive tests, vaginal probes, et all. Even marriage.

Why birthing inevitably won over adoption? Why scores of childless couples still nurse a narrow-minded stereotype, in a country swarming with destitute children, in need of a home. The way so many husbands and in-laws resisted this decision, depriving a woman of a chance to be a natural care-giver? I remembered my mother who miscarried in her fourth month. What if it was a boy? I tried to piece together the pieces of the way I must have been born?

Hopes... dreams... blood tests... placenta... nights after nights of staying awake... my mother, a young widow, a single parent for a long time. Or, Shantimashi, my childhood nanny, who reared me in ways more powerful than a biological mother. A child widow. Her womb a void. Or a woman who sat on the pavement near my home in Kolkata, whom people called "pagli". Who played with the street dogs, turned out of her home, having lost every child she ever conceived. Her loss. Their lies…

I asked myself if all the advancements in medicine had made a woman's life choices simpler? Or were they the same, in some way?

A sentence? A trial? A decision? A fate?

An aloneness.

That sometimes started in the bland tube-light of a gynae’s chamber.