A woman wearing a saree, the fabric — a modest amount of sleek and shine, walks by innocently on a lonesome scary night. Someone pounces on her, and she spontaneously screams with palms over her mouth — of course that is how one would naturally scream, in 90s cinema! Soon, she would walk with her head down quivering with shame, scratches all over, and most importantly her bindi, pottu slashed an acute forty-five degree angle to the right. And that was how, the word karpu, chastity, got added to my vocabulary.
The child in me wondered what exactly the karpu was, since everyone in the movies were making a big deal of and the grownups were mourning the loss of it with dead-drop silences. Initially I thought it was the bindi. If someone slashes it, bam — you lose your karpu, which according to Indian cinema was irrevocable to a woman, and something you should give your life for. Like if someone is bargaining for your karpu, then you gotta say “Over my dead body!” and live it. What I did ? — I stopped wearing pottu, for the time-being, and said “Ippo lottu!”
“…counting the kilo kanakkula losing of my karpu on a daily basis!
As I grew into a young girl, my knowledge of karpu too expanded. When we were children, back in the 90s, we were never taught about bad touch or sexual abuse in general. I instinctively started associating karpu with groping. Every time I took the public bus, I’d lose at least a bulk two kilos of karpu! Then there would be a perusu waiting for his share of half a kilo, that next-street uncle, (pakkathu theru mama), another half! It soon became a hefty ordeal, counting the kilo kanakkula losing of my karpu on a daily basis! I sighed, “Thakkali idhey range’la pona 2 ounce kuda minjadhu!” and started taking desperate measures to safeguard my karpu — covering my body with multiple layers of clothing!
One fine day, I heard from one of my girlfriends about the mysterious one Miss Hymen! There! A lifetime of mystery was solved for me, exactly what I was asking to know from day one ! Karpu at last was a physical being, like everything else in the world! “There is hope for you after all!” I told myself dinging the bells on tip-toe, in a temple, adjusting my culturally appropriate wear (Ahem, ahem!). Now that I knew it was a thing tucked inside me safe and sound, I could stand on guard day and night !
“…which entices an innocent man or two and she gets herself raped,
But there is no shutting the human mind, is there? Mine often popped itself with so many riddling questions. Like for instance, for a virgin woman, if the hymen was torn, the karpu is lost; fine by me, that’s loud and clear! But what happens when a woman is married, she is sexually active which means her hymen is already torn, but then one lonesome scary night wearing a sleek-shiny saree or like now in the 2000s, she’s this modern-woman-drunk-with-feminism, wearing culturally unfit clothes revealing body parts, which entices an innocent man or two and she gets herself raped, does that constitute to her becoming a karpazhindhaval ? I mean, its not like the hymen repairs itself after every tear, or does it?
And that was when I looked up at the sky screaming at my misogynistic ancestors who had founded karpu, “Andha karmo ennanu dha solli tholaingalen da!..” And then a long-forsaken rain drop hit the center of my forehead and forgetting myself I closed my eyes for a moment. Eyes all around body-shamed me and I followed their gaze down to watch my karpu drip down from the hem of my drenched robes, and disappear into the sewers.
Over the years as I evolved into a woman, I learnt that karpu had no identity of its own, different people used it in varied forms and contexts; sometimes it got dragged into relationships, sometimes netizens used it to slut-shame that woman whose physical-karpu they were secretly coveting, sometimes women used it on one another to satiate their petty cravings of jealousy, the rule of thumb being — anybody who wanted to shoot a woman down, loaded karpu in and bang! Amidst all the action though, there was always a man who would throw himself valiantly between the bullet and the woman, and one would think there was a savior after all. But more often than not he had a loaded rifle in his back pocket, and did not blink an eye to point it at her later when needs suited him.
“…a commodity, pitiably, today the most commonly traded one,
But I don’t feel like looking up at the sky again asking the rhetorical question — Why do humans hurt each other? You legalize weapons, you don’t expect people not to use it on one another, of course the piece of metal is not gonna lay there dusting, have you even met humans? Isn’t that the same with karpu? The ammunition here is culturally legalized, lethalized ! People naturally trade with it in clan wars, assert power with it, and ask ridiculous questions like,
“Naa aambala, sattaiya kezhattuven, panta kezhattuven, ponnu unnala mudiyuma?”
“Dei appo nee uruppadiya vera yedhaiyum kezhatradha illa vaazhkaila?”
And getting that counter off my chest is where my lifelong quest for karpu ends. It is not a cultural beacon as the society and filmmakers would lead you to believe, it is not something above and beyond your life (hear! hear! women and men alike!), it is just a commodity, pitiably, today the most commonly traded one, and an expensive one at that, costing lives , from where I come from, at least ! As long as it remains a commodity, it will be trafficked, marketed, groped, paraded!
Footnote: If you liked this post, do check out essays from the book “Pen Yen Adimaiyanal” by Periyar titled “Karpu”, which inspired my post. E.Ve.Ra asks a plenty more than four tongue-tugging questions to the society of 1942, ashamedly 80 years later, most of them still remaining unanswered!
