Red Rainbow & Sunflowers (Part 1)

A Tale of Navigating Queerness and Neurodivergence in Indian Reproductive Healthcare

Something was horribly wrong with my uterus. I had never had my periods regularly since childhood. It refused to function like it should, and I loved that.

I was in 7th standard when I was diagnosed with PCOS, long before I even understood what a period was. Two big ugly words stuck out on the doctor’s prescription in his characteristic ugly handwriting: “Overweight” and “Dieting”. It was the first time I had seen that word—dieting. My mother called an aunt and with her eyebrows raised told her, “Dactar ‘dieting’ likkha dise prescriptione!” (The Doctor wrote ‘dieting’ in the prescription). All I could understand from her tone was that this cursed word carried an air of utter shame.

No diet or workout routine seemed to make a dent. I remained firmly in the ‘overweight’ category, playfully flirting with the threshold line to ‘obesity’ on the BMI chart. I was prescribed the 21-day pills, and only when I had them did I get my periods.

A Diane 35 strip, priced at Rs 342, came neatly packed in a beige and orange paper box. With the days of the week written behind it in a cycle—3 weeks, 21 pills guiding me through the course. Tucked beside the strip in the box, was a booklet—a novella of both short-term and long-term side effects in a font so small, it was as if they hoped you’d ignore reading it. And so I did. After the last pill, I’d wait, and within the next 7 days, as if by magic, my period would arrive.

The pill, a combination of two hormones– Cyproterone (a progestine) and Ethinyl Estradiol (an enstrogen) meant to suppress the amount of androgens in my blood, was supposed to fix one problem, but it started a hundred more.

The acne was full-on eruptions, leaving craters like a lunar landscape. As if high school wasn’t already a battleground for confidence, these scars felt like neon signs pointing right at me, screaming ‘different!’ And in high school, different is the last thing you want to be.

Socializing was a whole other game. It was like everyone else got a manual on how to be cool and I was left navigating it with a brain that didn’t get the rules and a compass that spun all wrong. With undiagnosed neurodivergence, my mind was already a maze, with thoughts running in circles and emotions hiding in shadows. The side effects of the Cyproterone and Ethinyl Estradiol were like throwing a smoke bomb into that maze. Suddenly there were mood swings that came out of nowhere, more weight that clung to me stubbornly, and mind fog that made everything wear a grayscale filter. I felt ugly and unlovable.

The fluctuating moods made it hard to trust my feelings, to know if they were truly mine or just another trick of the hormones.

Every day was a battle, a push and pull between craving normalcy and confronting reality. The reality that this pill was steadying one health seesaw while tipping another into chaos. I was stuck in a cruel cycle– being fat caused PCOS, which made it hard to lose weight, for which I needed the pills, whose side effect in turn was more weight gain. 

In PE class, the teacher had this habit of assigning sports based on what he thought suited us best. For me, it was always shot put. They never said it outright, but the reason was clear: I was the ‘sturdy’ kid, the one with the build they assumed meant strength. As soon as the teacher announced it was time for shot put, the snickers would start. “Batul the Great,” someone would name-call, loud enough for a chorus of giggles to ripple through the class. Batul was a Bengali comic character who was short, stout and strong, the jokes often written at the expense of his physicality. I’d pick up the shot, feeling the weight of it echo the heaviness in my chest. I tried to focus, to block out the laughter. 

I wanted to shout back, to tell them that their words were heavier than any shot put could ever be. But I didn’t. Instead, I let the shot fly, pretending I didn’t care.