By Bevu Bella
I was 11 or 12 when I was taken home from the badminton court by my father.
Word had spread that I was still on my period. It was the fifth or sixth day, and after having waited for a polite amount of time, I had enough of sitting at home and went to play. I had quietly told my sister that I was still bleeding, but it was a secret. Word got around somehow, and my father came to the court and took me home. “There’s something seriously wrong if you’re still bleeding,” he said, while I protested.
It was still my third or fourth month of having periods. And the inconveniences it presented me felt considerable: I wasn’t allowed to swim, run, cycle, or play badminton.
* * *
Moana is about many things. Disney’s newest film is winning over some audiences with its joyful breathtakingly-animated story of a young girl who embarks on a giant, ancient quest — and succeeds. (I acknowledge, but don’t speak for the deeper questions of heritage, predatory colonialism and cultural appropriation: others have done that already.)
Moana has many soul-searching conversations with her grandmother, the self-described “crazy village lady” — who, by the way, embodies the idea that madness is a kind of freedom, and who gently nudges her into herself. These conversations — which mean that the film passes the Bechdel test with ease — lend it an especially rich subtext.
But for the most part, Moana is not allowed to leave the island. She’s thwarted, many times, by her ever-present father. Then, one day, driven by force of circumstance, she leaves. And what follows is the stuff of the film itself.
I know that island — I grew up on some version of it. When I lived in a small campus surrounded by the big, bad outside world, we would joke that my parents would tie my cycle to a long, three-kilometre leash so that I could never go outside — even accidentally.
I didn’t go intending to write about it. Some friends wanted to watch it; I rarely watch films so I went sulkingly. But that changed when I heard Lin-Manuel Miranda’s voice, or felt my love of the sea return. In the moment when Moana stands at the boats, looking longingly at the ocean, forgotten things began to angrily knock on the closed door of my brain.
Moana is the daughter of a powerful man. She’s repeatedly told that she’s meant for great things. She is also, like a normal human being, curious and playful about the world around her. So, after some soul-searching, she leaves.
On one level, Moana is about a quest. On another, Moana is about women being excellent at things, at so many things. I’m surrounded by examples of it. This particular nook of the internet is filled with it.
* * *
Moana makes me think of Doreen Massey. The British Marxist geographer died earlier this year, and is one of the few academics I’ve grieved. She lucidly put into words what I had only dimly felt — that the way we occupy and transact with space is not a geographical abstraction (as initial theorists of globalisation excitedly put it), but instead a living contested process.
The degree to which we can move between countries, or walk about the streets at night, or venture out of hotels in foreign cities, is not just influenced by ‘capital’. Survey after survey has shown how women’s mobility, for instance, is restricted — in a thousand different ways, from physical violence to being ogled at or made to feel quite simply ‘out of place’ — not by ‘capital’, but by men.
I think of this when I read pieces about the deep, dark, mysterious freedom that the night offers.
* * *
As a grown woman, I now have the sweet freedom of playing badminton when I’m on my period or when I’m not, and of indulging in other such previously forbidden activities. These days I book a cab late at night and head to a local badminton club to play for a bit. There’s a moment when I’m on the court, watching for the shuttlecock to land, when the sky goes quiet. More remarkably, my brain — my tangled anxious brain — goes quiet. All I hear is my breath, and then the music of the racquet making contact. Then the screeching boisterous men whose shoes squeak against the wooden courts; my own expletives when I net a shot.
Is that what Moana feels in the ocean? I don’t know. It’s too early for me to write a retrospective of my adventures, but I’ve had a few. Enough that I’ve yammered on about them to my friends and now need to write about them to exorcise. For one, men never allow me to lift heavy objects around them, but one chilly winter morning in September, I woke up at 4 am and wheeled two suitcases heavier than my own bodyweight on to the London Tube and to Heathrow.
* * *
One day earlier this year I had to meet someone, and got off a bus at Queen’s Road in Bangalore. It was oddly quiet and pleasantly windy, I was wearing my comfortable chappals and I was about five minutes late. I broke into a run at that corner where Lavelle Road turns into St. Marks’ Road, and told my companion between huffs and puffs about how I ran here feeling like Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha from the film.
That — and now my version of it — is one of the iconic images of my personal media universe, and for good reason. That sweet, sweet moment of feeling free for just a second, taking the earth as one’s own, even if just for a second.
Bevu Bella lives, bittersweetly, in Bangalore.