Venus
By Triya Chakravorty
Twelve-year-old Aisha was standing with one foot up on the toilet seat, craning down to get a better look at the patch of thick black hair between her legs. It had spread across her thighs and onto her stomach.
Her knickers lay discarded on the floor behind her. She was in the guest bathroom, the only room in the entire house that had a lock.
She’d swiped a razor from auntie Poppy’s medicine cabinet and bundled it into the bottom of her suitcase before she left Kolkata. Thankfully, it had made it back to Heathrow in one piece.
Aisha reached down and pulled her skin taught. She scraped and scraped until the toilet bowl became a nest of tiny hairs and spots of blood.
She pulled the flush and watched them all swirl away.
Hobbling out of the bathroom with a vulva full of scratches, she felt that she was finally a woman. She could have punched the wall with happiness.
*
“Last year’s campaign was a bit… white, wasn’t it?”
Bryony, the middle-aged team leader with sunspots all over her cheeks, looks at Aisha expectantly, as if waiting for her to laugh.
Aisha offers up a half-shrug-half-smile. She glances over at Mirabel, the only other POC person in the room, who stifles a smirk.
“They’ve asked us to create an ad campaign for their new line of feminine razors. I’m thinking Tiktoks, all under ten seconds, a bit more relatable and,” her eyes flit over to the brown and black girl in the corner of the room, “ethnic, you know?”
She asks everyone in the room to put forward a concept. The person with the best idea will get to lead a small group of people and design the campaign. There’s no extra money in it, but she dangles the promise of a promotion somewhere down the line.
“We want to empower women to make their own choices about body hair, but we also need to sell these razors. Any ideas?”
There’s a long pause.
No one offers up any suggestions. The men pick pieces of invisible lint from their trousers.
“How about a POV series from teenage girls who are athletes?” Lucy, the recent addition to the copywriting team offers. “We could get them to use the razor and film a video about it.”
The boss chews her pen. “It’s a bit… clean. What about you, Aisha? What does body hair make you think of?”
The first time Aisha realised she was hairy was in year seven, during her first PE lesson of the year. Her mum had died the summer before, leaving little advice for her only daughter.
It was cancer. Endometrial. When her mum went through her first round of chemo, there was hair all over the house. Aisha got used to picking out the long black strands from the shower drain, and once, even, from her breakfast cereal.
But then her mum did the selfish thing and died. A house that had been floating along in gender equilibrium had now tipped in favor of the men. Her father and brother left her to her own devices most of the time, and no one had bothered to tell her that body hair was bad.
Aisha had walked out onto the frozen football pitch, shivering in her too-tight sports T-shirt and shorts. She realised that didn’t look like the other girls, who boasted creamy legs with halos of pale fuzz that glowed in the light.
“It is true what they say about Indians, then?”
A classmate pointed at the forest of dark hairs that grew on her shins. She had wide calves that were dense with black and flecks of dry skin.
There was laughter.
Mr Bowman, the PE teacher, put a hand on her shoulder.
“Might want to sort that out before next time.”
He winked and Aisha felt a wave of nausea rush up from her stomach.
Later that night, Aisha went into her parents’ bathroom and stuffed her father’s razor, with its thick blue handle and shiny blades, under her top. She took it to her bedroom and barricaded the door with the desk chair (Why do you need a lock, shona? We never had them back home).
Then, she scraped the razor across her legs and shaved quickly, for the first time. She wasn’t gentle. Desperate to get rid of it all, she pulled off flakes of skin and drew blood.
The hair grew back quickly. It tunnelled out onto the surface of her legs with a new determination, thicker and darker than before. Aisha hobbled around with hundreds of tiny scabs for weeks.
*
At the meeting, Bryony asks if they can “make the campaign more Gen Z.”
“Maybe we can get influencers to talk about their first shave,” someone offers. “Play a Sabrina Carpenter song over the clip and call it ironic feminism.”
The room laughs.
*
“Aisha, we need to talk.”
The hairs on Aisha’s neck bristled. Her father never usually called her that, it was always Lolly or Lol.
He called her into the kitchen, which had bright green walls that their mum had insisted made the food taste better. He was standing at the hob, with his back to her. The air smelt like fried garlic and salt.
“I’m sending you to stay with my sister. It’s for the best.”
He had his back to her as he spoke. The freshly chopped onions made her eyes prickle.
Aisha gulped.
He knew. He had to have known. She tried her best to clean her hairs out of his razor, but she couldn’t get them all. She kept cutting her fingers trying to dig in between the blades.
She wanted to buy her own, but she couldn’t risk being found out. There were only five brown families in her town, so she was easy to spot. What if word got back to dad? Or worse, what if her cousins up in Newcastle found out? Nice Indian girls don’t need to shave. Who are they shaving for?
Her father kept his promise and sent her to Kolkata the following summer. Whilst her brother got to go to Santorini with his mates, she was forced to live in the sweaty confines of her aunt Poppy’s Salt Lake apartment.
“She needs to be around women.” She’d heard her father whispering down the phone in Bangla one evening.
Poppy had invited a woman round to the flat to wax her legs. Aisha lay on the stone floor of the side room, watching a green tiktiki scamper across the ceiling as the woman began her work.
It was mid-July and the heat was stifling. Sweat slid out of every pore on her body; it stung her eyes and obscured her vision. Aisha hated going to India. She couldn’t speak Bangla well, and her cousins treated her like a dirty foreigner with no respect for tradition.
The beautician pressed Aisha’s calf against the table and ripped away a strip of wax paper. She worked up her right leg, to the top of her thigh.
She pointed at the tufts of black that poked out of her underwear. “Shall I do there also?”
Aisha shook her head.
“It’s cleaner. Better for hygiene.”
Aisha snapped her legs and ran out, half waxed, before the lady could finish her work. She stayed like that all summer, one leg hairy, one leg bare. She was suddenly grateful for the floaty salwar kameeses that Poppy insisted she wore, which hid every inch of skin.
The day she got home from India she decided she needed to do something about her pubes.
*
At her company, Aisha spends her lunch hour in the disabled toilets. The fine hairs on her upper lip look thick and prickly in the unforgiving bathroom light. She plucked them only yesterday, but they were already back with a newfound vigour.
She spends all day staring at the computer, mind completely void of ideas. It’s hard to concentrate with hundreds of emails pinging onto her screen and the notion that she will have to maybe (definitely) sell out to win this project. For a job that she doesn’t really even want.
She feels Asian in a way that’s uncool. She’s not petite and pale, and her hair isn’t glossy like the Kpop idols and anime girls that everyone’s so obsessed with. It’s not trendy to be her kind of Asian.
So she’s worried that it may not even work, even if she does peddle her heritage like a genuine-fake shawl at a Gariahat market stall.
*
Her first boyfriend Anton was a medical student and a swimmer. He was also white. The kind of white that glowed when you paired it with the deep blue of a borrowed kurta – the one he wore when she brought him as a plus one to her Geordie cousin’s wedding.
He was the kind of white that made the other brown girls burn with envy and the brown boys whisper “slut” as she walked past.
Aisha didn’t care; she was flying. Because Anton’s biceps had biceps, and with him by her side, her course mates finally cared enough to learn how to pronounce her name.
That first hurried night in her university halls, she’d insisted they keep the light off. Anton had never slept with a brown girl before, and she didn’t want him to have any nasty surprises.
Afterward, he laughed and said, “you should really shave down there. You don’t want to live up to the reputation of… you know, your lot.”
She cut herself deep trying to get it all off later that night, and walked around spotting her underwear for a week.
The second time they slept together, he put his hand around her throat and whispered, “you like that?”.
She didn’t. But she moaned like a porn star and hoped he wouldn’t mention the way the stubble on her pubic mound kept scratching against his skin.
*
Sometimes, when she’s alone and she’s sure no one will disturb her, Aisha fantasises about being Medusa. Beautiful but cursed, with serpents for hair. The snakes would whisper to her in a language only she could understand. Men would turn to rock and shatter at her feet.
Maybe there’s a Tiktok campaign in that?
*
Her current boyfriend Jacob calls to ask if she wants to come over to his place for dinner.
He’s nice enough. He gets his news from Al Jazeera and is generous with his back rubs. He even says he likes her pixie cut more than the long hair she grew for years. But Aisha can’t help but feel trapped, like she’s sleepwalking into forever with him.
Once, during sex, Jacob coughed and pulled away, saying, “I think I swallowed one of your hairs.”
His voice was kind, but he stopped going down on her after that. Aisha never spoke of it to him again.
*
“I appreciate the opportunity, but I can’t work here anymore.”
Aisha cites her elderly grandparents and says she wants to spend more time in India before they pass. That sounds better than the truth, which is that she doesn’t want to fight with herself anymore, or be part of passing that fight onto other women.
Bryony doesn’t try to stop her from resigning. She just nods and wishes her well. Aisha doesn’t know if she should be happy or insulted at the realisation of just how replaceable she is.
On her way out, she passes Mirabel, who’s balancing a cardboard tray of Costa coffees on a heaving ring binder.
“Congrats. I heard you got the razor gig. What’s your angle?”
Mirabel looks at the floor. “Own your roots. Black girl magic.”
A moment passes.
Mirabel rushes to fill the silence, almost spilling her coffee. “I know how it sounds but I’ve got a mortgage to pay and Dave can’t work because of-”
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.” Aisha squeezes her shoulder. “I get it.”
*
Aisha is awoken in the middle of the night by a noise outside her window. It’s a heavy, thumping sound, like what the tail of a snake might make when hitting against glass.
Something feels different.
She rolls out of bed and pulls the blinds open. There she sees a long black plait floating in the air. It stretches up into the night sky and disappears above the clouds.
She pushes her foot into one of the twists and hoists herself onto it. The smell of coconut oil wafts in the darkness around her.
The plait lurches forwards and suddenly she’s in the air.
Clinging on, she rises with it, leaving London behind, then Earth too. She floats in the serene darkness.
She knows she’s dreaming, but for the first time in a long time, she feels free.
The following morning, she pulls out a long black hair from her Weetabix and smiles.
Hi mum, she thinks. Are you looking down on me now?
Triya Chakravorty is an Oxford graduate and a doctor training in psychiatry. She is interested in intersectional feminism, mental health and the diasporic experience.