Manahil Tahira
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They say she left the university premises at noon, just before the priest called for prayers, wearing a peach scarf too light to mean obedience and lipstick the colour of a martyr’s dying breath. No one saw her leave except the gardener, who claimed he saw a white cat run out of the gates at the same time. The cat had one eye and limped like it had known war.

 

She returned three hours later, through the same side gate — past the new surveillance pole installed after the student protests. The pole was one of seven, ascending into a tight, messy grid of wires cast across the sky. Its advanced technology kept a strict watch on posture, proximity and pigment — the three fundamental Ps of modest bodies —  and had quickly become the university’s proud accomplishment. The cameras on the pole blinked in Morse code when girls passed by. That day, too, the grid surveilled with pleasure, though it failed to see her leave. The footage was reviewed twice, but no one could explain the static in that brief window when she slipped through.

 

The driver, Abdul Wahid, who had worked for her family since before her birth, waited outside the Arts Block and smoked a cigarette, muttering that girls these days were not like the women he remembered — the ones who possessed glass bangles and shame. He was supposed to collect her from the university once her classes ended and transport her safely back home.

 

What happened in that interim — who she saw when she sneaked out, what he said, and how much of her he took — was something she would never admit. Not to her friends. Not to god.

 

But what did happen is this:

 

At 3:17 PM, she walked into the second women’s washroom behind the Philosophy Department, the one rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of a girl who had once bled for forty days and forty nights and still topped her exam. 

 

She entered a stall and locked it.

 

She sat on the toilet and tried to urinate.

 

Instead, she felt something ancient slip inside her. It was older than pain. Something with the texture of memory and the smell of rusted coins.

 

Like a breath held underwater, a cord of blood slithered out of her vagina.

 

It was not a clot. It was not a period.

 

It was a rope.

 

Red at first. Then deep maroon. Then the exact colour of the velvet rug her grandmother had brought from Iraq during the war. It had weight. It pulsed. She pulled at it, and it resisted, connected to something alive inside her.

 

She kept tugging at it with her heart pounding and hands trembling.

 

Outside, the cleaner banged on the door. Time passed. Minutes turned into years and fell into abandon.

 

By the time she emerged, the bathroom had flooded, the walls were streaked with blood, and the cleaner had quit.

 

Rumours grew wide and loud that the mirror fogged every time she looked into it since her return. They said she carried the blood rope in a small tin box lined with cotton and placed it beneath her bed. Some said she had been expelled for “indecent conduct.” Others said she died after the Morality Committee refused her request for sanitary leave. Only a few insisted with wide eyes that she buried the rope under the banyan tree in the university courtyard — the one that once shaded suffragettes and later, uniformed women ensuring modesty. After that, the tree began to blossom with strange red flowers that smelled like burnt sugar and cough syrup.

 

Her parents never found out. But the Dean’s office issued a quiet directive: all scarves must now cover the chest, and coloured lipsticks were to be discouraged “in light of recent moral confusion.”

 

On nights when the wind blows through the campus in just the right way, the bathroom hums. If you think that is plumbing or electricity, you are no wiser than the cleaner. The wisdom is a miracle. Only the blessed ones can hear a girl unbecoming.

 

They say the blood never stopped.

 

They say she never wanted it to.

 

They say she didn’t tell anyone what happened, but she started waking up at odd hours, her sheets twisted and her heart pounding like someone else’s heartbeat had given birth in her chest. Her skin grew sensitive to touch. Her voice changed register. It slipped off a ledge and built home in another octave.

 

One morning, the mirror in the bathroom had words scrawled across it in steam, though no one had showered and the water had never been hot : You are not the first.

 

A few days later, a girl from the Sociology Department — who was always seen wearing oversized kurtas and never prayed when the rest of them did — passed her a note during a group presentation. It was folded into a triangle. On the inside, it sang in tears: Did yours come with teeth?

 

And so it began.

 

There was no formal society. No WhatsApp group. Only a faint knowing. They started leaving messages for each other under toilet tanks and behind sanitary bins. One girl said the rope came out of her during a wedding and turned into a bird that perched on her shoulder and wouldn’t stop whispering names of forgotten goddesses. Another said hers smelled like burning milk and shrieked every time someone tried to touch her.

 

They started meeting in abandoned lecture halls at dusk. There were seven of them by then. Or maybe eight.

 

No one kept a list.

 

They shared chai and samosas and memories they didn’t know they had: of drowning in wells before they were born, of stitching their bodies together out of red thread and river mud, of waking up mid-dream to find themselves in someone else’s shape.

 

She learned that the blood rope came not from her womb, if she ever had one, but from an unnamed place between the past and its origin. That it wasn’t a punishment or a pregnancy or a sign of illness. It was a redacted history returning to the body, uncensored and ungoverned.

 

One of the older girls — a tall, sharp-shouldered one with eyes like storm drains — hesitantly confessed to her one night: The rope comes for bodies that have forgotten how to lie. It’s not menstruation. It’s memory.

 

That was the night she took the rope out again, not by force, but invitation.

 

She returned to the same stall. She wore her father’s prayer cap and a lipstick the colour of old rust. She sat and waited. Sang a little.

 

The blood came willingly this time, the strands dissolving into syllables.

 

And this time, at the end of it, something dropped into the bowl with a soft plop. It glowed faintly and mimicked all the contours of a banyan seed. Light brown, oval, and pea sized. When she reached for it, it was warm and pulsing.

 

She didn’t tell anyone what she found.

 

But the next morning, a banyan tree had sprouted from the sink. Its roots coiled in the ceramic and it spoke a foreign dialect all of them understood.

 

After the banyan sprouted, construction tape wrapped the Philosophy Department. A press release blamed termites. Security was tripled. New monitors installed above every toilet stall. The administration shut down the bathroom shortly after. The job vacancy for a new cleaner was rewritten to seek a resident exorcist. A hidden memo was circulated to all staff: report any students exhibiting signs of spiritual disturbance or menstruation outside official dates.

 

But the girls kept meeting. The bathroom changed locations. The rope, they said, would always find its way.

 

And the girl, who was not a girl, or not only a girl, no longer flinched when someone called her by a name that wasn’t hers. For in the darkest hours of every night, she knew there would be others.

 

And when they came, wet with shame and unknowing, she would hold out her hand and tell them to pull.