Anatomy And History

This is a part of my autobiography which I had circulated as an e-mail among many friends. The e-mail was provoked by frequent heated exchange of words in get-togethers, parties and canteen chats in which most women participants would argue that a man has to take a woman's word for it when she claims she is a virgin or accepts she is not and then wants to be appreciated for 'honesty'. This is to prove that a woman's virginity is evident even when she is draped in clothes from neck to ankle, if not from head to toe. And yes, this article is not meant to justify the act of the sexually active, hypocrite man who makes his newly wedded wife undergo virginity tests, often in ways that show his superstition and ignorance rather than his knowledge of science

I am sometimes miserable. Someone close to me should some day explain what is it in me or my appearance that makes people tell me things about themselves that they are expected to tell none. I have been so bogged down by histories of reckless behaviour and the following horrifying aftermath by narrators that nowadays I pretend I am absolutely closed to such people and hate them from the depth of my heart, so that I have no more of such tales to hear. Actually though, I am closed to none – from sinners to saints.

But then, I must say I don't believe in the adage, "Every saint has a past, and every sinner a future." If true, what past did Ramakrishna Paramahansa have? And what future is in store for Charles Sobraj?

Till 2000, women have told me about abortions they had had after pre-marital sex, something they hid from their husbands. About half a dozen men in their 50s have confided in me that there used to be a time in their youth when they would frequent brothels. One of them, Narayan Sanyal, said so even after initiating the dialogue with me at Calcutta's Gole Park bus stand thus, "You are my son's age." I still wonder how that Sanyal, who considered me at par with his son, could confide in me minutes later that he had slept with many women at a certain stage of his life.

Among the less spine-chilling stories are admissions by a friend that his upper teeth are false; a language teacher's sharing with me the fact that she had met menopause at 35 (she wanted to know the treatment for osteoporosis, a typical post-menopause ailment); one of my marketing managers' lament that he was impotent…

People's sharing their pasts with me was incessant. Now with the off-beat education I pursued parallel to my regular academics, I don't need to be told by a person what he/she has been through. The character's appearance says it all, and spares me the trauma of listening through one's misery, going back home and crying to the Lord, "My God, what has become of this world!"

Among the new students of Std XII – Holy Cross School, there was Anit (not Anita) Chaurasia. Next year when we were in Standard XII, a girl called Shefali (I am not able to recollect her surname) took admission to Std XI. The two were respectively from Chinmaya Mission School and St Xavier's Convent. Why I have named these two in the same breath is the marked resemblance in physique and behaviour that they had.

Anit was one girl in the class who never indulged in politics. This is particularly worth a mention because she was a bosom of Soni Gautam, her classmate since their Chinmaya days. Soni was not liked by anyone in our school. Either it was for her low-neck kameez or for her bellicose temperament, or for her flaunt-all attitude, or for any two or all of these three attributes.

Anit's voice was mellifluous. Her dialogue delivery was more like minstrelsy. The boys loved to think of her as an elder sister and never targeted her in their schemes against the girls. Our affection for Anit even went to the extent of complaining like kids to her when other girls appeared non-cooperating.

Ditto was our attitude vis-à-vis Shefali. The students of Standards XI and XII would have no qualms in considering her as a mother figure. Indeed, in the six dramas enacted on stage in two years, both Anit and Shefali bagged the roles of the protagonists' mothers.

Sadly, given the prejudice of our conditioned eyes, neither Anit nor Shefali was a part of the school's fashion statement. They were – if I'm excused for not using any euphemism – fat. I bet two or three Trandrimas (the thinnest of the lot of newly admitted students) could fit in the salwar-kameez Anit or Shefali wore. I had neither the requisite education till then nor any experience to be able to draw a link between the anatomy of a girl and her person. But that was the stage in my life when the impression that heavy-built women are more amiable than their thinner counterparts was slowly gaining ground in my comprehension of the society around.

When Anit or Shefali appeared either alone in a melancholic mood, or in company of other girls but with a pale smile contrasted with the frivolous giggles of others, we would reach out to them and talk of lighter things in life. On asking about their low vibrancy, they would always try to change the topic of discussion. When deliberately alone, Shefali would literally run for cover if anybody approached her. With both a lack of experience and wisdom, typical of adolescence, we could not have been obtrusively inquisitive and ask, "Why?"

26 August 1988. We started rehearsing for a one-act play to be staged on 5 September that year, the Teacher's Day. With us was Bijoy Krishna Mukherjee, a student who had seen more of the school than any teacher had, owing to his successive failures in class-graduation exams every alternate year. He was then in Std XI, though by age about five years senior to us.

The students who were regularly seen on stage had become veterans of the game. We could memorise our parts in no time. It hardly took us a week to know our dialogues by heart. The subsequent phase was devoted to improvisations like relative positioning of characters on stage, voice modulation, appropriate impersonation and all. The time allotted to us was a couple of hours per working day. However, the rehearsal would hardly take us veterans half an hour.

That was the beginning of a half-baked sex education for most of us. Bijoy had long crossed the age of puberty. He must have had a fling or two, a few sexual escapades, as was apparent from the authority with which he spoke. Due to a self-motivated rigorous exploration of books on gynaecology and obstetrics for about a decade thereon, I can now distinguish between right and wrong information that Bijoy imparted as 'education' to us; but not back then in 1987.

Bijoy said he was not as enamoured with the characters, Anit and Shefali, as the rest of us were. That was quite a ruthless rejoinder to our collective opinion. Nobody likes being told that his object of admiration is bunkum. We protested but also got curious for an explanation.

Bijoy talked of Anit and Shefali's past, a past that was not spicy for us; it was nauseating. We cannot be blamed for being judgmental. Human judgment is dictated by experience, upbringing and environment. The first we had none. The second and the third we had were of an orthodox variety. Bijoy was often in the company of boys his age from various parts of Bokaro because of his notable parts in soccer and cricket. It was from the ex-students of Chinmaya Mission and St Xavier's that he had come to know of the two girls.

Not very long before she was a student of our Std XI, Shefali was a bubbly young girl as slim as any of her peers. With bursts of youthful laughter if a teardrop of joy were to trickle down her cheeks, it would not deviate at all in its trajectory. She fitted in the latest trendy outfits of the time. Her parents had sent her to a school of repute that had hardly been in news for any untoward incident. The girl studied and played. The second she did a bit too much. So much so – she played with her life. And reasons were none. Amidst mere frolicking with boys and exploiting the freedom offered by the parents to the fullest, she got the first taste of "acid".

"Acid" is slang for the hallucinogenic drug, LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). LSD is odourless, colourless, and has a slightly bitter taste and is usually taken by mouth. Such is the camouflage in which the drug is served, if a peddler uses it on newer and newer people to increase the size of his market of addicts, the victims, at least at the first instance, would not know they are being drugged. In case of Shefali, the peddler had added LSD to an absorbent paper; it was a blotter paper as she recalled one day eventually towards the end of my Std XII session to me. Shefali gave me technical inputs for Zamaane Ka Rukh (The Path The Times Are Treading), a play on the scourge of drug addiction written and directed by me: my swan song in Holy Cross School.

The drug, after being added to the blotter paper, was divided into small, decorated squares (each square representing one dose).

The effects of LSD are unpredictable. They depend on the amount taken; the user's personality, mood, and expectations; and the surroundings in which the drug is used. It was the house of one of the classmates of Shefali; not a squalid dungeon where she could have grown suspicious. She felt the first effects of the drug about an hour after taking it.

The occasions when we found her separating herself from the crowd, she was actually expecting changes in her that were too obvious to be hidden amidst a crowd. Suddenly, she would have dilated pupils and would sweat profusely in the biting cold of the wilderness-infested Chhotanagpur region that Bokaro was a part of.

In 1987, I used to be the kind of person the modernist media of today exhorts everyone to be. A compassion for the whole world with malice for none was my motto. I was the best unpaid counsellor a psychotic patient could have.

[One day my mother was shocked to see this entry in my diary. It read: "I dream of marrying a girl who is on her way to commit suicide. The attempt to suicide would indicate she has had a traumatic past. I'd soothe her; let her see the brighter side of life. I'd convince her that the reason to live far outweighed those to die. She will get rejuvenated. She will see me as the ultimate messiah. And the love she would shower on me would surpass the love she has had for anyone before. I shall thus find a meaning to my existence. And another life would syncopate in my life's lexicon."]

So, rather than being a part of an ostracism drive that ensued after Bijoy's narration of Shefali's past, my heart filled with pity for her. Any other boy in my place as the director of the said play, and she would not have uttered a word about her past and the play would have become anything but realistic.

It was early November 1988. The script of my play had to be submitted to the principal for her approval. But my technical guide, Shefali, had not been reporting to school for a week. Time was running out. Shibnath Mitra (one of my best friends in school and also a phenomenal actor, his tale will appear in another episode) and I went to her house once when we heard of her ailment. Fortunately for our knowledge, we found a doctor attending a bed-ridden Shefali. He explained the symptoms of prolonged use of LSD: Higher body temperature, increased heart rate and blood pressure, sweating, loss of appetite, sleeplessness, dry mouth, and tremors.

During such bouts, sensations and feelings change much more dramatically than the physical signs. Shefali felt several different emotions at once and swung rapidly from one emotion to another. Her sense of time and self changed during the bouts. She had auditory delusions and visual hallucinations. Sensations seemed to cross over, giving her the feeling of hearing colours and seeing sounds. Never, not even in a hospital full of the ailing, have I again seen a scene as frightening as a neurotic Shefali's.

LSD trips are long; typically they begin to clear after about 12 hours. On coming back to school three days after we witnessed the horror of Shefali in delirium, she said she was having terrifying thoughts and feelings, fear of losing control, fear of insanity and death, and despair while using LSD. But the body had got so used to the drug, even the doctor prescribed light doses of it while she was under his treatment, in fear of severe withdrawal symptoms. Twice that fortnight, she had almost fatal accidents during states of LSD intoxication. We saw her right elbow scorched. She had fallen on the gas stove while getting herself the morning tea. Her parents were in their respective offices. The domestic helps had not yet arrived.

I chanced upon Shefali's father in Calcutta College Street once in 1992. He said Shefali had flashbacks, recurrence of certain aspects of her experience, without her having taken the drug again. A flashback occurred suddenly, often without warning, and was continuing more than a year after LSD use. Doctors said she had an underlying personality problem. Some students of St Xavier's shared with us that the girl was raped repeatedly in her inebriated state. Later she had to be aborted of the child she did not know the father of. [However, otherwise healthy people who use LSD occasionally may also have flashbacks. Bad trips and flashbacks are only part of the risks of LSD use. LSD users may manifest relatively long-lasting psychoses, such as schizophrenia or severe depression. It is difficult to determine the extent and mechanism of the LSD involvement in these illnesses.]

I met Mrs. Anit Browne (Chaurasia when I'd last seen her), who had become of 28 years when I saw her in London in 1996. Mrs. Browne spoke at length of the mental anguish, anger and guilt she had wrestled for 10 years before finding 'forgiveness' and the first stages of healing.

Now married and the mother of a young son, Mrs. Browne said that her life changed dramatically immediately after an abortion in 1986, a year before we became classmates in Holy Cross.

"I was going to school, planning on a career in education. My life was okay. I was just a regular student," she said.

Her boyfriend was planning to become a doctor and, although they were dating seriously, the sudden news of a baby seemed impossible to work into their plans for medical school and its financial and emotional demands. When she went to consider an abortion, she asked what "it" looked like.

"They told me it was a blob," she said. As she told her story, anger and wisdom won temporarily, although the pain kept spilling over, not only for herself but also for other women who had not yet got the courage and healing she had received.

"I was lied to. I was taken for a ride" by the abortion clinic. She said piquantly, "They left me ignorant on the grounds that it would make me badly upset" if she knew anything about the size and development of the foetus.

Instead, when she did get the information 10 years later, Mrs. Browne felt that she had been "robbed of dignity and self-worth" by the abortion counsellor who prevented her from making an informed and intelligent decision.

I understood why at school Anit used to be so friendly with boys when her history – as was related by Bijoy – should have made her a man-hater. The counsellor was a woman. Her mother too had forced her to abort.

Despite her ignorance, immediately after she had the abortion she was emotionally devastated.

"Within two or three weeks, I dropped out of school," she recalled. "I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't study. My boyfriend helped me and counselled me when I took admission to Holy Cross and throughout in my two years there."

She moved back to her parent's house after Std XII and took a job as a file clerk. Her mother quickly discerned what had taken place, "You know how mothers are" – but, so far, she and her father have not spoken of her abortion.

In addition to ignorance, there were cultural factors that contributed to her decision and similar ones made by other young women, she recalled. "Back then it was a real stigma to be an unwedded pregnant kid," she said. And, in most families, parents and children were not allowed to talk openly about sex. So, like others, Anit did not ask her parents for advice. She wished it had been different. "If you can't come to them when you're in trouble, they're not doing their jobs," she said.

I agreed that primarily it was the job of parents to create or develop such an atmosphere at home that in dire times, they were the first to be approached by the wretched child.

She and the young man eventually got married, but she believes now that they married "out of guilt, not really because we should have gotten married." After several years, the marriage failed. She also began to drink and have problems with alcohol abuse. She had chronic bouts of depression that sapped her strength.

"I had nightmares of a baby crying and I looking for a lost child… things none of you could know when I was your batchmate," she said.

"We did know something," I interrupted forgetting for a while that spilling the beans could embarrass her unnecessarily.

"Don't tell me!" she was incredulous.

"Your 'friends' at the Chinmaya Mission told Bijoy and he relayed the info to all of us," I explained.

"O that lech!" Anit said as she momentarily sank in herself, almost trying to tell me what stuff Bijoy was made of. But she desisted.

A while of pause and then she continued. "Depression came to be a part of my life."

Eventually, she married again, happily, and had a baby; but even in the midst of great joy, "I grieved for the child I would never hold."

"I never wanted to go to a minister (religious) because I was ashamed," she said. On the other hand, "I felt like if I went to a regular counsellor, they would just tell me I did the right thing" by having an abortion. "The friends that I had just reinforced it because they'd had abortions."

The breakthrough came about a year and a half earlier when she walked into her house one night; turned on a Christian television show she had never watched before or seen since and heard a talk on "God's forgiveness".

Watching the show, she sake forgiveness for what she had done. A few weeks later, she saw another show on the effects of abortion on women and made contact with a pro-life organisation, not admitting at first why she wanted to become informed. "I think a lot of women who are pro-choice" hold that view because they fear "the pro-life movement hates them" for having had abortions, she said.

But, Mrs. Browne said that when she did tell her pro-life friends that she had had an abortion and was suffering from its effects, "they were very warm and loving to me. They treated me with graciousness."

She encouraged others who might be holding back from contacting a pro-life group to overcome their fears and make the first attempt. "The Lord can take something very bad and make it good. He can do that for everyone," she said.

Now let me elucidate the reason behind my entitling this chapter, "Anatomy and History". At this age when I come across women who look like Anit or Shefali, I calculate backward immediately and more or less fathom their history successfully. In 1987-'88-'89, I could not relate a person's physique with his/her history.

Nevertheless, it would be gross generalisation and over-simplification of facts if one were to presume that every fat person has a dubious past. The fatness needs to be observed with the keen eyes of a scientist. I shall use lucid language devoid of jargon here for the lay to appreciate the fine differences between a virgin and a sexually active woman and those in between (they think of sex passionately but may dare not indulge in it).

Fat and flab are different. If you were always fat, well, you are just fat. If you have grown fat after an incident, you have flab.

In both the cases – Anit's and Shefali's – cucumber-shaped flab hung loose beneath the arms as is the case with old women. The ear-lobes bent backward due to the pressure of the cheeks overloaded with fat. It is the dream of many women to have a curvy figure with the waistline pronounced clearly broader out of the belly-line. But this typical shape of a woman's anatomy does not disrupt her poise and posture while walking if she is a virgin. Right after a single session of sex, however, the feet fall further apart as the woman walks, resembling a goose's waterhole-bound pageant.

Anit had dark circles. Shefali had fluffy eyes. About a decade and a half more of observation has led me to a few more conclusions that I checked with the famous sexologist, Delhi-based Dr Kothari, during my tenure as the Science Correspondent with The Statesman. Most of them stood the scrutiny of science.

Geography dictates a woman's external anatomy first. In Hawaii Islands, women have conical breasts. Central and western European women have been the inspiration for Michelangelo's portraits with hemispherical feminine chest protrusions. Almost all Mongoloid women are flat- or small-breasted. But it is Indian women whose breasts tell their history in no uncertain terms.

They are melon-shaped. The tip of the convex structure is supposed to be right at the centre of the circle that the foot of the 'mountains' draw. Once fiddled or fondled with, it is about 1-3 centimetres below the centre of the hemisphere (instead of the centre itself) where you see maximum bulge, somewhat like an inverted question mark. Further, they spread outwards. And then, creating a cleavage that could allure men becomes difficult without push-up bras. The lowermost periphery of the hemispheres is above the level of the elbows – pre-sex. If they are aligned with the elbow-level, the woman should not get away with telling her current partner that it happened because of long hours everyday without proper brassieres (or any at all) while at home. That never happens unless a woman, notwithstanding her virginity, is approaching menopause.

In short, observe the location of a woman's breasts with respect to her thorax. If a virgin, the breasts' elevation will start from (the imaginary horizontal line that joins) her two armpits; if not, the elevation begins one or two inches lower. And all these can be observed in a given woman with all her clothes on.


Clothed, yet naked: (From left to right) When this snap was taken, the fifth and the eighth girl hadn't had sex. In the first, second, fourth and seventh, notice the flat portion between the armpits and the spot from where the breasts' elevation starts. No such comment can be made about the third girl who is flat chested and the ninth, the contours of whose chest are completely covered by the dupatta. The sexual status of the sixth girl, being eclipsed by the fifth and the seventh, cannot be determined from this photograph*

One who has always been fat does not have stretch marks. The ones with depression-driven obesity do. Obese virgins walk like pendulum. You may see the weight of the entire body mass tilting alternately with each stride, perpendicular to the direction of her walk. On the contrary, in case of the ones who have had sex, the weight moves either way at an angle of about 60-75 degrees with respect to the direction of the walk.

I had to wait till October 2004 for a chance meeting with Sam Lister, Science Correspondent, The Times, London, to know why nature has been so 'unfair' to women. Why doesn't a man's history get exposed by his anatomy?

"It does," Lister affirmed, adding, "men's nipples harden due to sexual arousal as do women's."

– So ? What's the difference?

– Men who aren't virgins have permanently hardened nipples. And this never happens with women.

– But still… the symptoms aren't as many in case of men. You cannot figure out the state in which a man's nipples are until he sheds his shirt and vest.

– That's true. But going by anthropological evolutionary trends, there was a reason why women had to be 'marked' with more tell-tale signs.

Lister included in his postulate the percentage-wise size of male testicles. Among all animals, chimpanzees and humans have the largest, as a proportion of their entire body mass. This ensures that the semen they release is quite an amount, and is thick.

– Why thick?

– So that the semen of the next man the woman has sex with cannot push through the entire vaginal route to the uterus. This ensures that the woman's ovum fertilises with the spermatozoa of the first man she has sex with.

"The science of evolution ensures a checking mechanism for any extreme behaviour. And chimp and human women have been the most promiscuous," Lister concluded his theory.

"Given the ferocity of feminism around the world and this era of political correctness, would you dare publish such an analysis?" I asked Lister, rather dismissing his journalistic fervour.

"It's not my analysis," Lister clarified, "It's scientist Baker's. We published it long back in 1996."

Baker (1996) discovered evidence that human male sexual psychology has evolved to respond to the prospect that his mate has been inseminated by another man during his absence. He found that the volume of sperm a man ejaculates while having sex with his partner is unrelated to how long it has been since he last had an ejaculation; the important variable is the length of time that has passed since he last had sex with his wife. The volume of sperm may be as much as three times that of normal if the man has been separated from his wife for a long period of time. If the men were in proximity of their wives during a similar period and were sexually abstinent, their subsequent ejaculation did not show the same rise in volume. Baker & Bellis (1993, 1995) also found that female orgasm plays a role in sperm competition. When a woman has an orgasm the uterus starts to contract rhythmically, causing sperm to be drawn into the cervix; a kind of vacuuming effect. (It is this contraction in prostrate position (mostly) that distorts the shape of the woman's pelvic muscles; and what happened in the confines of a room becomes evident to all in the society when she steps out of her house walking.) If a woman has had intercourse with several men within a short period of time, the sperm of the man associated with her orgasm has a much higher probability of fertilising her ovum than that of men whose copulation did not result in orgasm.

* Disclaimer:
1. This photograph has been downloaded from the Internet. The author of this article does not know the people (whose faces have been blacked out to safeguard their privacy) seen here. He has merely opined about their sexual status without any motive other than scientific inquiry.
2. "Sexually active" does not mean indulgence in sexual activities with another person alone; the term also includes self-indulgence like fondling and masturbation.

Addendum

Some readers have asked for a clearer description of the shape of the breasts/armpits region to understand women's sexual activity status. I think words cannot do the job of pictures. Therefore...



A tell-tale sign: Notice the 'W'-like crease of skin at the junction of the left armpit and the thorax; these folds appear in a sexually active woman when her breasts are pushed upward with brassieres. Especially the lowermost crease develops only after the breasts are fondled. With more and more sexual activity, this crease increases in length in the direction towards the centre of the chest. And without the support of a push-up bra, the appearance of the chest is like that of the girl in the next photograph*.
When a sexually active woman is clothed, the 'W'-like portion appears flat from above the cover.

Another giveaway: Several inches below the level of this woman's armpits, her breasts' elevation still hasn't started. Clearly, the spheres turned cucumber-like and sagged after being handled... not so softly*

* (The faces of these two women have not been hidden/shaded off because they openly talk about their sex lives, not claiming to be virgins)

How and where the sphere ruptures