Arunachalam Muruganantham had seen the mysterious bloodstained rags before, left discreetly in a corner of his family’s thatched outdoor bathroom. As a teenager growing up in a village near Coimbatore in southern India, he found them unsettling and at times tried to avoid the bathroom, preferring the open fields instead. He finally deduced that the rags were left by his sisters, but what they used them for remained unclear until the time he noticed Shanthi, his wife, hiding one from him. He was in his mid-30s then, and newly married, when Shanthi explained that women menstruate, and that most of them — at least in the developing world — use rags to absorb the blood that accompanies the beginning of each menstrual cycle.

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