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Saraswati Biswokarma sits in the dark, rearranging the threadbare cotton sheet and straw bed she is forced to sleep on before bringing her knees up to her chest with a shiver.
It is already mid-morning but she has not been allowed out of the airless brick shed where she has spent every night for the past week.
The 13-year-old was effectively banished to the shed – barely big enough to stand or lie down in — where she must experience her first period alone in a traumatic ordeal.
“I’ve been here eight nights so I have one left,” she says with a nervous smile. “It’s not nice here, it’s scary and I felt very alone on the first night. I was so scared.”
Saraswati’s isolation is part of a centuries-old Hindu ritual known as chhaupadi that has been blamed for prolonged depression and even deaths in remote, impoverished western Nepal.
Under the practice, women are prohibited from participating in normal family activities during menstruation and after childbirth, and can have no contact with men of the household.
“I’m not allowed to touch any cattle or go inside our house. I have to stay in the shed and when my mother calls I have to wait nearby the house with a plate so she can give me food,” Saraswati says.
She is also barred from consuming dairy products or meat or taking a bath. Even looking in the mirror is frowned upon.
The practice stems from the belief that when women have periods they are impure and will bring bad luck on a whole family if they stay in the house and will contaminate anything they touch.
It is already mid-morning but she has not been allowed out of the airless brick shed where she has spent every night for the past week.
The 13-year-old was effectively banished to the shed – barely big enough to stand or lie down in — where she must experience her first period alone in a traumatic ordeal.
“I’ve been here eight nights so I have one left,” she says with a nervous smile. “It’s not nice here, it’s scary and I felt very alone on the first night. I was so scared.”
Saraswati’s isolation is part of a centuries-old Hindu ritual known as chhaupadi that has been blamed for prolonged depression and even deaths in remote, impoverished western Nepal.
Under the practice, women are prohibited from participating in normal family activities during menstruation and after childbirth, and can have no contact with men of the household.
“I’m not allowed to touch any cattle or go inside our house. I have to stay in the shed and when my mother calls I have to wait nearby the house with a plate so she can give me food,” Saraswati says.
She is also barred from consuming dairy products or meat or taking a bath. Even looking in the mirror is frowned upon.
The practice stems from the belief that when women have periods they are impure and will bring bad luck on a whole family if they stay in the house and will contaminate anything they touch.
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