Nine Pints

by Rose George

  He leads me inside, up the stairs, past a child’s bicycle, to his one-bedroom first-floor flat. A polite word for it would be “humble”: a couple of living rooms, a small kitchen, walls covered with child-made scribbles and doodles. Sit, he says, and offers a chair, while he sits cross-legged on the floor, with the ease of Indians who do not have our uptight hip flexors and rigid hamstrings, our chair-formed inability to sit close to the ground without seizing up. He introduces his family: Shanti, a smiling, round-faced woman in a sari. Preeti, their daughter, nine years old, home on a Sunday in a party dress, energetic in her interruptions, her in-and-outing.

  Tea, first, then the story, which began in 1999. I haven’t brought a translator, though my e-mails to Muruga were always met with suspiciously short replies. He laughs. “I taught myself English in 2001. From films.” In Menstrual Man, a documentary about him by Amit Virmani, he says, “If you can’t understand it, that’s your problem. You educated people, your mind is tuned to correct my English for the right tense and verbs.”

  We manage.

  When the story began, Muruga was not long married to Shanti. He had grown up poor, but he had gone to school until his father died in a road accident when his son was fourteen. The family sold all they could, but he had to work to provide for his mother and two sisters. “I was surrounded by women.” (Little did he know how many women would soon surround him.) His marriage to Shanti was an arranged one, as was custom, but “we married and then we loved each other. It is a beautiful system.”

  One day, he saw Shanti holding something behind her back. He thought it was a tease, a thing that young married couples do, so he tried to see what it was. Dipping, darting, pulling. It was a handful of bloodied rags. Muruga called them “nasty cloths.” And Shanti’s shame reminded him of his sisters, who used to hide bloody rags in the thatch of the house near the outdoor latrine. He asked Shanti why she was using such things and she admitted that she couldn’t spare money to buy sanitary pads. It was milk or Always, and they always needed milk. For Muruga, though he had seen his sisters’ rags, as most men had probably seen their womenfolk hiding bloody cloth, this triggered something in him. He wanted to change things. If his wife couldn’t afford sanitary pads, then he would make one that she could afford, that would be easy to produce, that would help all women.

  Cloth is actually a decent option for menstrual bleeding, and rags or cloth are used by most women in developing countries. The latest National Family Health Survey in India found that 77.5 percent of urban women and 48.2 percent of rural women used “hygienic methods of protection during their menstrual period,” namely locally prepared napkins, sanitary napkins (presumably commercial ones), or tampons.1 As two menstrual experts at UNICEF India told me over lunch one day in the office canteen in Delhi, while other diners worked on their food and blocked their ears, rags are often a luxury. In rural areas, people wear polyester now, so women and girls have little access to absorbent cotton cloth. They accommodate. Some things that women and girls have been known to use: socks, newspaper, ash, sand, sawdust, polyethylene bags, torn-up sacks, grass, or leaves. These may seem horrific, but some make sense: in Rajasthan, women use sand as an absorbent, wrapped in cloth. In 2017, Korea discovered the “insole girls”: young women who were making their own sanitary pads by wrapping tissue around shoe insoles, because sanitary pads had increased in price by 42.4 percent in a year (although the price of pulp had fallen).2 A health worker in India told me the story of a young girl in Madhya Pradesh who was too embarrassed to ask her mother for a clean cloth and used one she found without knowing it had lizard eggs in it. Three months later, the subsequent infection meant her ovaries had to be removed at the age of thirteen. She would be forever tainted as a barren woman, a banch, so that people who saw her first in the morning would have to take a bath to wash her stain away. I hear horrible stories from other menstruation activists: a girl who fashioned her sanitary pads from a chocolate box carton stuffed with cotton; another who used a wad of toilet paper, but internally. Women in Kenya who fill a sieve with sand and then sit on it, unmoving, all day.

  The problem is not that women use cloth, but the combination of taboo and laundry: Muruga’s sisters were secreting their cloths into the thatch because they couldn’t dry them openly. The most hygienic way to dry menstrual cloths is openly in sunlight, but millions of girls and women dry their cloths under cots, under other laundry, in roof thatch, because they are ashamed. It is a recipe for infection and bacteria growth. One girl was horrified to see her carefully hidden menstrual cloth being used by her brother to clean his motorbike.

  The day after Shanti showed him her bloody rags, Muruga bought her a pack of sanitary pads from the market. I have done this and watched in some stupefaction as the pads were fetched from behind the counter, where they were hidden—although condoms are openly displayed—and handed to me wrapped in a black plastic bag kept specially for sanitary products (the regular bags were transparent). Muruga noted this subterfuge and shame and wondered why it existed. He also noted the price: 20 rupees ($0.50) in 1998, which was expensive. With 20 rupees you could buy food for a family for days. Because he had always been a curious tinkerer, he took one of the pads and ripped it open. It seemed to be nothing more than cotton, which should cost far less than it did. Why were these pads so expensive that most women could not afford them?

  * * *

  Muruga was hardly educated. He calls himself a ninth-grade dropout but with pride because he knows he is smart. After his father’s death, he had worked delivering lunches, then in an ironsmith’s workshop as a helper and lackey. He learned welding, tinkering, and curiosity. He had no training but he began to think like an engineer, a solver of problems. He fixed things and made other things. If his wife had a problem, he should seek a solution. First, he bought some cotton from a local mill and shaped it into a rudimentary sanitary pad. He offered it to Shanti and his sisters to test, but he knew so little about the menstrual cycle at first that he didn’t realize he had to wait for a month for feedback. “Many boys are becoming men, then husbands and fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, without knowing anything about what is happening to women.” At least he managed to do it before grandfatherhood. So he kept pestering his sisters and wife for feedback and was shooed away. He persisted. He was shooed away again but persisted. Finally, his sisters took to yelling when he approached that Shanti should control her husband and get him to stop bothering them with this sanitary pad nonsense.

  Muruga was not deterred. He was too intrigued. But he thought himself an engineer, and an engineer must test things. He had a workshop for machines and tinkering, but where could he test a sanitary pad if his womenfolk wouldn’t help? He thought of another solution. Medical students. Surely as scientists they would be interested in his experiment? He was right: they took his rudimentary napkins along with a carry bag he provided. He gave them a sheet of questions to answer, but one day he saw that three girls were filling in the forms for all, and he was disillusioned. They weren’t telling the truth, and the basic truth of the menstrual cycle, that it was monthly, meant his research was taking too long. And he was exhausted, traveling so many miles, handing out napkin samples here and there, having to return for feedback, which sometimes was not provided. He had to discover what a pad felt like for himself.

  For his experiment, he needed blood. Cattle in India rarely become beef, so that wasn’t an option. Many of his school classmates by now ran chicken stalls, but chickens are small. Goats, though: goat blood might work. If he filled a rubber vessel with blood, linked it by tube to his underwear, and periodically squeezed blood into his sanitary napkin, he might get some idea. He’d know what being a woman felt like. He didn’t know how much blood a woman discharged on average, nor that it was half tissue and clots, and goat blood wasn’t. But it was good and he thought it viscous enough (he asked “a blood bank guy” what to add to stop it clotting). He fashioned his fake uterus out of a football, and for a week he wor
e his cotton sanitary napkin under his white dhoti, attached to the football that he wore at his hip, a bloodslinger. If he was walking, if he was cycling, now and then, he squeezed.

  I stop him at this point in the story. Are there photographs? And why did he wear white? He laughs at the first question. Cameras cost money. If he had money for a camera, he had money to buy sanitary pads every month for his wife. And white? Because that’s what he wore every day. Because he lived in a hot country. Because he didn’t know better. He was surprised there was staining, when no woman would be. In Menstrual Man, Muruga describes how he was always turning around, checking for leaks. “I’d become a woman.” That was when he began to wash near the burial ground, and when he was seen. Rumors began to spread: he must have a sexually transmitted disease. He must be seeing other women. I don’t blame the rumormongers, really: they were hardly likely to guess the truth. Muruga describes the place where he lives as a village, but it looks like an urban suburb to me, only with a few more fields and tamarind trees. It has the noise of the city, but the structure and character of a village in the ferocity with which chatter spreads.

  The goat-blood uterus taught him about being worried and wet, a combination that every woman knows. It taught him, he says, that “the strongest creature created by god is not the elephant, not the tiger, not the lion, but the woman.” But his experience wasn’t enough to teach him how to reverse engineer a decent, low-cost sanitary pad that his wife could afford. He had an idea: “Why not ask for used pads from a girl? That napkin will speak to me.” By now, village talk about his experiment had pushed Shanti out of the house to stay with her parents for a few days. She was mortified, enough to send him divorce papers two months later and to stay away for five years. He couldn’t ask her for her pads. “If I went to my in-laws’ house and asked for a sanitary pad, they would definitely think, the son-in-law is going to cast black magic on their daughter. He is going to mesmerize her or something.” Who could he ask?

  He tried to fish out a used sanitary napkin from a waste bin on the street. The napkin belonged to a woman whose husband was nearby as he had just deposited the napkin and other rubbish there. Muruga had to pretend he was looking for something else in the bin, but it was a close encounter with serious trouble. He thought it was safer to approach the medical students again. He gave them a selection of his napkins and some commercial sanitary pads for comparison. He says, in a rare instance of his pride sliding into something else, “See the cleverness?” The young women accepted. They knew him by now. They called him brother. They said, yes, you can have our used sanitary napkins.

  I think about this. I wonder what I would have done had a man asked me to give him my used sanitary pads and conclude that my reaction would have been frank and very Yorkshire. The girls were more obliging, and Muruga headed home with his first load of evidence. “I took the first batch of used napkins like a treasure. I tied my hanky over my nose, then I spread them all out in the backyard at my home.” You can imagine the foul smell of dried menstrual blood in Indian heat, so he left them overnight to allow the smell to weaken. He awoke the next morning, excited to pursue his research, and there he must have been, bending over his collection of varied endometrial deposits, when his mother arrived. “She thought I was preparing chicken for Sunday. The moment she realized it wasn’t a country chicken she cried like anything. She said, my son is doing black magic, he is mad.”

  Shanti had already gone. Now his mother was going to leave him as well. The rumors went as mad as her son: he was a vampire, drinking the blood of girls at night. He was dangerous and possessed. “My friends came to tell me that on Friday, after the religious ceremony, they would pronounce a verdict on me.” He would be chained to a holy tree, upside down, and the bad spirits would be beaten from him. Then they might chase him out of the village. So Muruga chased himself out instead, moving to the small city of Coimbatore, then to the larger one of Chennai. “I ran away like a thief in the midnight.” He was without a wife, without a family, without friends, but undeterred. From the used sanitary pads he suspected that the big companies—Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble are the ones he quotes—were not using simple cotton. Their products were far more absorbent. He knew it was something other than cotton and spent many rupees phoning American manufacturers asking for samples. He talks of the public phone booths he used (because this was before mobiles) with nostalgia. They asked him what kind of vessel he had and finally he understood they were asking what machinery he was using. None. They said the minimum order was a ton. This was no use. Finally he got the help of a teacher friend and sent off letters pretending to be a millionaire mill owner asking for samples. In fact, he was living in a hostel in Chennai with itinerant peddlers, with a dog he loved, but who roamed the streets and came and went. “Not like in England. Not tied with a belt.”

  The companies sent a FedEx package. (He still has the envelope.) Inside were ten stiff brown sheets. They didn’t look like Whisper or Always or Stayfree or like anything you would put between your legs for comfort. They looked like cardboard. Here the stories he tells are different. In the film, one day he simply ripped up the card. To me, he tells a long tale of his dog being left in the room all day, and getting angry, and tearing up the sheets. Either way: “A Eureka moment. I understand the whole secret.” It is compressed cellulose. “They compress the fluffy material in a press. Now I have to reclaim the material in a fluffy way.” If he wanted to make affordable sanitary pads, he needed to devise an affordable machine. A kind of grinder, first, that could break up the cellulose, then a press to shape it back again into a pad. Finally, some way of containing the fluffy. Gauze, perhaps. All of this, he thought, should be as manual as possible so that it could be used by the widest number of people and income brackets. His focus grew: rather than producing sanitary pads, he would create a machine that could make them, and that could make them affordably.

  He began his reverse engineering and inventing with a brilliant idea: he realized that hardly any machine plants worked twenty-four hours, so he asked to rent the unused hours. One part was made here, another there, and after eighteen months he had “an easy-to-operate low-cost mini sanitary napkin manufacturing machine,” according to his company website, “in which wood fiber is denigrated, core formed and sealed with soft touch sensitive heat control. It requires single phase electricity for 1HP drive, can be accommodated in a space of 3.5 meters by 3.5 meters and will produce two napkins a minute.” It is made of 243 parts, can be produced in a day, requires no water, only a little power, relies largely on foot pedals and manual operation, and can be operated by anyone. It is very Muruga: difficulty dressed as simplicity. The compact cellulose is ground up, then it is pressed, then the napkin is sealed. Simple. He set up an enterprise to market the machine and called it Jayaashree Industries, after his niece. From start to finish, the development of his low-cost sanitary pad machine took eight and a half years.

  In 2006, it won first prize at the Indian Institute of Technology Awards.3 He was given his prize by India’s president. Other entries, he says, included “how to extract gold from seawater, how to go to the moon.” The machine and Muruga became famous. By now, he has been judged one of Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people, alongside National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden and Beyoncé.4 There is a cupboard in his home where he keeps his awards, which is so crammed that when he opens it they spill out like treasure from a chest. Framed photographs, trophies, gifts, stuff. I notice something: in every picture he is wearing glasses, but he’s not wearing them now. He says, “Once I was being picked up at an airport, and I went over, and the man said, ‘No, no, we are looking for a VIP.’ So now I wear glasses. I don’t have any eye problem, they are just to give some lift so the [drivers] will take me. My VIP glasses.”

  Lunch is nearly ready and though Muruga says I can stay on my chair, I shift to the floor because that is the table and banana leaves are plates. Look around, he says, as my legs go numb.
Look at my home. He delights that he lives in rented accommodation, that behind his fame he is humble and real, just as his eyes behind his VIP glasses have perfect vision. His lack of college is an accidental advantage. “If I’m educated,” he told a documentary maker, “maybe my mind will be crumpled into a fixed concept, nothing but running after money.” To another reporter he says that if he had stayed in school, he would be working in a call center by now. Jayaashree is not a charity: he claims he has never accepted a dollar in donations. He is a businessman, but a particular kind. He has socialized his machine, he says. It does good but it also makes money. Profit means replication and sustainability. The machine costs $1,000 to $3,000, depending on how far it must be shipped. This seems a lot, but it should pay for itself. A detailed breakdown of figures on the Jayaashree website—slogan: “new inventions for a better life”—projects a profit of 25,225 rupees ($425) a month, and a profit margin of 60 percent if the machine produces 480,000 napkins a year.5

  By now, Muruga speaks fluent development, but in the same way he speaks English: as and when he chooses to. One day, he got a call and the caller asked for “Muganatham.” He says, “I knew then that someone educated was calling. They asked, ‘Are you supplying machines only at the bottom of the pyramid?’” and he was surprised. “I know pyramids exist only in Egypt, that’s why I immediately refused. No, no, I’ve never supplied any machine at the pyramid, I’m supplying them only in the plains of India. Then I came to know it is called economic pyramid, bottom of the pyramid.” The interviewer asks him whether it’s fair to say he has come from the bottom of the pyramid.