In many parts of Nepal, a girl's first menstruation still means days, sometimes nine, in a dark room. No sunlight. No school. No one explaining what is happening to her body, or why she must go away. This is the story of my sister, my own first period, and the quiet moment that changed my understanding of what dignity looks like for a girl in Nepal.
I don’t remember how old I was when my elder sister first menstruated. What I do remember is her crying heavily and running up the wooden ladder to the dark room upstairs in our Aunt’s home, which stood just beside ours. I remember my cousin asking, “Why is she crying?” Honestly, I had no idea. Partly because I was slow at making sense of things, and partly because it was the first time I had ever seen my sister cry.
She had always been bold-the one who went to the market with my brother to buy goods, the girl who stepped into Mommy’s role whenever needed, caring for her two younger siblings, my brother and me. And yet, there she was, crying and climbing those ladders - ladders we rarely went up, except on rare occasions. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening.
She had to stay there for nine days. During the day, she wasn’t allowed to step outside. Before 4 a.m., she would bathe at the tube-well and return to the same dark room where sunlight never reached. Mommy would bring her meals. We weren’t asked to help, and we didn’t. I don’t remember ever asking if I could.
Nine steady days passed, and Didi came back home. We never spoke about her experience.
As I grew older, I began to wonder what those days in the dark room had felt like for her. When she left for nursing school and Daju went away for higher studies, I was alone. I wondered if she had felt the same way I did - void, vacant, with no one to share feelings with, no one to look at when a question arose.
I don’t remember how old she was, maybe 11 or 12. Did the spiders in the night frighten her? This was a time without electricity. We studied by oil lamps and lanterns. She wasn’t allowed to go to school. She had no books. What did she do all day? Did she peek out the window to see the moon? Was it waxing or waning? Did she cry? Was she given anything to pass the time—books, pens, notebooks, indoor games? I never asked. I never thought to.
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I menstruated at 16. Old enough to see my cousin celebrate her first period at our home—laughing and talking with Mommy. I slept beside her, and she got to sleep in late. My first menstruation came on Bhai Tika day. I had helped Mom prepare everything, and just as the time to put tika approached, I bled. I was disappointed. But it was what it was.
I was sent to our Aunt’s home. During the day, I stayed at my cousin’s place. In the evening, Daddy returned from his sister’s home after putting tika. Then Mommy came to get me. She said, “Daddy refuses to send you away. You’ll stay with us.”
That was a moment of quiet revolution. Not mine, but my father’s. His decision to let me stay home during my first menstruation, surrounded by family, was the change the world needed. I stayed in the warmth of our house, ate nourishing meals, talked with Mommy throughout the day, and sat under the sun when I wished. No dark room. No fear. No hiding from male figures. We had electricity by then. No shadows, no silence. It was a freedom a girl in the late nineties could experience, and I owe it to my father, who chose dignity over tradition for me.
If boys bled the way girls do, would they be sent away to a dark room, forbidden from sunlight and school? And if men gave birth, would managers try to get them off the job when they got pregnant? Or would policies change? Would workplaces offer rest days, hormone leave, and lactation lounges with leather chairs and warm lighting? Would the world bend to accommodate the bleeding, the birthing, the feeding? Or would it still ask for silence?
Lately, I read about Nepal’s HPV vaccine program. Uptake was low in Kathmandu and Madhesh. Why? There was no answer. Who were left behind?
Can schools provide lists of students who got the vaccine and those who didn’t? If the missed girls weren’t in school, who were they? Were they all dropouts? Were they invisible?
The system has failed to uphold basic rights for all genders, no doubt. So in the case of the HPV vaccine, I won’t call it gender-specific isolation. But if nature has shaped girls with unique biological roles, then society must respond with uniquely supportive care. Not isolation. Not shame. Not silence.
And if men were at the same risk of HPV as women, would this still be the scenario? My heart says yes. Because human boundaries are not absolute. Man-made boundaries are not just gendered they are race-specific, class-specific, power-specific, money-specific, language-specific… the list goes on.
We must ask, again and again: who is missing from the lists, the classrooms, the clinics, the conversations? Systems fail many. But they fail girls differently because they were never built with girls at the center.
If girls are shaped by nature to carry cycles, births, and nourishment, then society must be shaped to carry them—with care, with dignity, with celebration. Not just in moments of bleeding or birthing, but in every policy, every prayer, every plan. To treat girls as special is not to isolate them. It is to include them fully, visibly, and tenderly in the architecture of rights.
And that inclusion must begin not with grand reforms, but with quiet revolutions like a father who says, “She will stay with us.”
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