The world of vaginas

CHENNAI:  The evening started with chants of the word ‘vagina’. Timidly at first; with a lot more gusto thereafter. Men and women — even those who admitted to not being comfortable saying the word out loud — lending voices to what has long since been filed under the category of taboo.

For when The Vagina Monologues is in town, you don’t hesitate or hold back, there’s no place for squeamishness or euphemism.

You learn to accept the vagina — the word, its world and the stories it has to tell — in all its musk-scented glory. And the stories were aplenty — a young victim of abuse finding her sexual awakening (politically incorrectly) and acceptance in the hands of an older woman, the brutal assault of a Bosnian woman by Serbian soldiers, an old woman’s recollection of never-spoken of wet dreams and flooding-prone vagina, a young one finding delight in hers after watching her lover devour the piece of heaven between her thighs. Stories of discovery, of pleasure and pain, of shame and torment, of delight and birth.

Four astoundingly brilliant women — Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal, Dolly Thakore, Dilnaz Irani and Swati Das — played hosts to the stories of hundreds of women from around the world. Working off of the narrative created by American playwright and performer Eve Ensler, these stories were interspersed with hilarious yet hard-hitting commentary on the everyday travails of vaginas like yours and mine.

When they talk about women not having seen their vagina in years, you know how true that can be. Being shamed for pubic hair isn’t a foreign concept either. Your vagina has clamped up too in preparation for those dreaded visits to the gynecologist. And pleasure — the elusive world of pleasure and a vagina-bearer’s much-judged tryst with it makes you want to stand up and scream “me too!”. Falling short of that, the awe-struck watchers laughed, applauded, flinched, cringed, flushed and blushed as story after familiar story was presented to them in the breezy courtyard of Phoenix MarketCity on a regular Saturday evening. 

While Mahabanoo — with her band of trusted, talented artistes — has been taking this play to many corners of the country (battling stigma, bans and legal notices along the way) since 2003, it has taken 18 years for Chennai’s public to savour it on our turf. Like with every performance, this one too came with certain variations tailor-made for the local audience. This time around, it was through the story of a Tamizh woman who gave up a career in corporate law and took up prostitution to spend her time pleasuring women and bringing out their ‘power moan’. 

The, perhaps, not-so-prepared audience were then regaled with demonstrations of the different kinds of moans — from hard metal, semi-religious to Carnatic and Simi Garewal variations. If the watchers had not been cured of their squeamishness by then, well...bad luck! The play began with the artistes acting out some of the responses to a standard question in the interviews that later gave birth to Monologues. One prominent response to “what would your vagina say if it could talk?” was a woman pausing mid-moan to exclaim “don’t stop!”. Now that Chennai has gotten a glimpse of this opus, that’s exactly what it has to say Mahabanoo and crew. Don’t stop!