When I Hit You Read online

  She stretches up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek and they walk back together, shutting the door behind them.

  Int. She takes his bag from his shoulders and deposits it carefully on a shelf. She looks at him, smiles, holds herself in that position for a few seconds, and then hurries to the fridge to pour a glass of orange juice. She remembers to wipe the condensation from the glass with the hem of her shirt. She kisses him, almost reverentially, on the neck. She pulls back, smiles. What follows is his reciprocal kiss, a hug, a clumsy grabbing. She is still smiling. Everything about her radiates the happiness of receiving her husband who has returned home after a long day at work.

  Now, when the action has fallen into place, it is the time for dialogue, the time to reel off her well-rehearsed lines.

  She asks him how his day at the college was. She keeps talking as he undresses, keeps talking as she wads his clothes in the washing basket. She tells him that she missed him. She asks him if he has papers to grade. She talks of how she was reading Lenin, or Mao, or Samir Amin (or some other ancient Communist dignitary) and how she was tempted to fetch the book and actually read a passage aloud to him, to know what he thought, to clarify some doubt, to see if such-and-such theory could be applicable to India. She is working on the principle that to consult a man is to make him feel like a king, and to report to him is to make him feel like a god. She tells him that she was ironing his clothes. Or, that she scrubbed the toilet clean. She continues to enumerate her list with a note of requisite humility until a look of satisfaction flashes across his face.

  He tells her something that happened during his day but his words are muted. The camera only sees, only shows, how attentively she listens. What he says can be anything really: how he came to the rescue of his department head, how he managed to solve a problem with the student body, how he discovered amazing talent in a young man, how he saved his colleague from making a blunder in her research hypothesis, how he presented The Wretched of the Earth in a mind-blowing fashion to his class. Whatever exploit is recounted with gentle false-modesty she hangs on every word; she borders on rapture.

  Soon, he settles in with his laptop, begins making phone calls to his friends. She fetches him a cup of coffee. She asks him what he wants to eat, and, in the meantime, fixes him a quick snack of dosa with peanut chutney. She goes to the kitchen, begins preparing an elaborate dinner. The scene fades out on a cutting board piling up with red slivers of chopped onion. In the background, we hear her hum a Tamil song, ‘Yaaro, yaarodi, unnoda purushan?’

  * *

  And cut! I am the wife playing the role of an actress playing out the role of a dutiful wife watching my husband pretend to be the hero of the everyday. I play the role with flair.

  The longer I stretch the act of the happily married couple, the more I dodge his anger. It’s not a test of talent alone. My life depends upon it.

  * *

  It’s not just the acting that I have to consider, though. I’m responsible for the whole, flattened film that has become my life. I think of camera angles. I think of how I should preserve the intricacies of the set. I must manage to capture what it means for a once-nomad to be confined to the four walls of a house. I must figure out a way to show on screen how even a small space of confinement begins to grow in the mind of the woman who inhabits it with her sorrows, how the walk from the bedroom to the door of the house becomes a Herculean task, or how the thought of checking on the slow-cooking chicken Chettinad curry when she is busy reading a book becomes an impossible chore. I also have to find out the technique to show its exact opposite, how the rooms begin to close in on this woman when she is being violated, how the walls chase her into corners, how the house appears to shrink the minute her husband is home, how there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nowhere to evade his presence.

  I am tone-deaf, but as the composer I need to consider mood-music. Church bells, the early morning on the move, the drop-dead stillness of afternoons, the chaos of every evening, the cawing of crows that mark the dying of the light, the slow way the grating noise of crickets seeps in to announce the night, broken only by the heavy trucks that take to the empty streets. This is how the world outside sneaks up to her, this is how she feels herself transported outside. I decide that among other domestic noises, the incessant patter of falling rain will be crucial to the soundtrack. This rainsong will have to be modulated to suit each scene where it is being used. Thunder rolling in the distance to accentuate marital tensions. The gradual showdown of a drizzle to signal the end of a moment of despair. Lightning, blue or pink or purple or blinding white, a sensory warning lighting up her sleeping figure before the rumbling skies jolt her awake. Electricity that plays truant, leaving the bickering couple drenched in darkness from one moment to the next. I contemplate the right response to every provocation, I cross out lines of dialogue when I realize that silence sinks in better. Here, I am the actress, the self-anointed director, the cinematographer and the screenplay writer. Every role that falls outside of being a wife affords me creative freedom. The story changes every day, every hour, every single time I sit and chart it out. The actors do not change, I cannot escape the set, but with every shift in my perspective, a different story is born. For a movie that will never be made and never hit the screen, I have already prepared the publicity material.

  TWELVE ANGRY MEN (IN BED)

  This movie shows a young, bohemian writer being recruited by her desperate husband to campaign in favour of a Communist Revolution. He unwittingly believes that sex involves more than body fluids, and convinced that he is injecting ideology into his crazy wife, he brings eleven angry men to bed each night, inadvertently jeopardizing his own position as the object of her desire.

  Sometimes terrific, sometimes tedious, the company of Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Edward Said, Gramsci, Zizek, Fanon and the quintessential Che Guevara proves to be a bad influence. Quickly realizing that the more she changes, the more things remain the same, the writer begins to essay the mock role of an intellectual in a bid to save her marriage. Faking orgasmic delight in discussing the orthodoxy of the Second International, or dismissing the postmodern idea of deconstruction, she coasts along with aplomb. As a spoof, combining pretentious intellectual orgies and humdrum domesticity, this bawdy bedside romp features twelve angry men and one bewitching writer who is busy plotting her escape from their ideological clutches.

  Showcasing fearless acting and dialogue that is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, this comic avalanche is guaranteed to be a crowd-pleaser.

  III

  Men are worthless, to trap them

  Use the cheapest bait of all, but never

  Love, which in a woman must mean tears

  And a silence in the blood.

  KAMALA DAS, ‘A LOSING BATTLE’

  Like a lot of writers, I thought of myself as someone belonging to the broad Left. I did not know where exactly this broad Left was, but I knew that I was there. I was the type who had bought a Che Guevara badge as a fifteen-year-old, and would have slept with him had I not been underage and had he not been long dead. I loved Bob Marley the same way. I had fallen in love with the rolling Rs of Spanish listening to Fidel Castro’s ‘History Will Absolve Me’ speech. I belonged to that 1980s generation of Indian kids who were brought up on Soviet children’s literature and magazines. Ants and astronauts and painted foxes and firebirds and sunbeam bunnies and humpbacked horses and little soldiers and magical creatures with flaming hair, all working for the common good and crusading against the evils of greed and selfishness. I knew these stories better than any of my own land. I loved Russia and her bitter cold that killed the Nazis, her Soviet snows that saved the world.

  And then we watched it all melt away. My parents mourned for a week when the USSR fell, they called Gorbachev every murderous Tamil slur they could think of, until the news moved on and the Soviet dream moved into memory. But I didn’t give up hope so easily. My blood still ran red.

  I attended a youth
camp about Cuba and watched a documentary on its young doctors. I filled two entire shelves with all the titles I could find in Chennai that were from Progress Publishers, Moscow. I read and even reread the Communist Manifesto. I lived in a dream that had long been left behind as dead. The dream had to be resurrected. Capitalism was ruining the world, there was no question about it. We needed an alternative way of living, a different way of organizing society. I was twenty-six, I thought I was doing all I could.

  And then, in the course of running an online campaign against the death penalty, I met the man who was going to become my husband. I was enchanted. He was a college lecturer, but as far Left as they came and as orthodox as it was possible to be. He wore his outlaw air with charm, his Communist credentials without guile. He had been a Naxalite guerrilla (‘Maoist’, he corrected me). An underground revolutionary. He had assumed at least ten different names in less than three years. He spoke many languages, but he wouldn’t tell me which, for fear of giving away too much information over the phone. He told me that I would learn all the little details in the course of our comradeship. The element of danger provided an irresistible aura around him. I loved this sense of adventure. I loved his idealism, I found the dogmatic obsession endearing. To fight the evils of capitalism, we required the staunchest warriors. He was one, and he could make one out of me.

  In one of our earliest phone conversations he said we should be fighting LPG. I knew about Liquefied Petroleum Gas, the red, fourteen-kilo cylinders that were door-delivered twice every month and allowed us to cook at home. I agreed readily, and spoke of the need for organic bio-fuel. He did not seem impressed. Perhaps he assumed I was a hippy. It must have been the way I mentioned the word organic, dwelling inside each of its consonants, building myself a treehouse in one and a raft on another. I was wrong. Do you not know that LPG stands for Liberalization-Privatization-Globalization? Really?

  To his credit, he was a man who gave me chances. Because of my stupid response in the first round, he asked me if I at least knew what MLM stood for. The man was fastidious with his acronyms, that much I could see. This time I cheated. I did not want my ignorance to come between him and me. I Googled. And I was convinced that Google was right because this seemed to be something to do with capitalist economics, and I replied, ‘Multi-Level Marketing.’ He laughed and, after what seemed like an interminable pause on the phone, said he wished he had the courage to cry instead.

  MLM, or ma-le-ma, stood for Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and it was the only politics that would liberate people. He sighed. I was too caught up in a middle-class lifestyle to know about issues that were affecting the people, he solemnly informed me. I had to leave all that behind if my writing was going to be for the sake of the people’s betterment. I was willing to learn, I said.

  * *

  ‘Have you read A Glass of Water and Loveless Kisses?’ he once asked me in a text. Was he trying to flirt with me? Why else would he drop a word like kiss in the middle of a serious Communist conversation?

  ‘No. I haven’t. Did you write it?’

  A barrage of LMAOs, ROFLs.

  ‘NO. No way. That’s Lenin and Clara Zetkin.’

  ‘Oh! But that’s just Lenin on the Women’s Question. It was his conversations with Zetkin, wasn’t it? Of course I have read it. And had issues, comrade.’

  ‘Oh. What did the feminist find there that offended her?’

  ‘I think he had some unpleasant things to say about women when he talked about the sex-is-as-trivial-as-drinking-a-glass-of-water theory.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Wait, let me pull out the exact quote for you. Here: “To be sure, thirst has to be quenched. But would a normal person normally lie down in the gutter and drink from a puddle? Or even from a glass whose edge has been greased by many lips?” Now, I find that very offensive. As a feminist, I would never look at myself as a gutter, or a glass greased by many lips.’

  ‘Hmm. Interesting.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say?’

  ‘Well, Comrade Lenin offends you. I may not share your view, but I can recognize it. But when I read this book for the first time, I realized how much my actions were offending Lenin, his theory, and Communism itself. This book made me a better man, a better comrade.’

  ‘How did you end up offending your Comrade Lenin?’

  ‘There’s a part where Lenin talks about how men, even so-called Marxists, take advantage of the idea of emancipation of love which is nothing but the emancipation of the flesh, to have one love affair after another. And Lenin condemns such promiscuity in sexual matters as nothing but bourgeois. And that made me feel guilty – feel guilty as to whether all my talk of emancipation and freedom with my women comrades had only been with the motive of making them fall in love with me. Was my talk of their sexual freedom only an excuse that would allow me to sleep with them? I realized the liberties I had taken with Communism. I felt like a cheat, an imposter.’

  I was stunned and impressed. What he felt was not anger at Lenin, as I had, but anger at himself. He had a combination of introspection and honesty that burned with the violence of fire.

  That conversation was the clincher.

  This man is the real deal, I thought.

  He was going to make me look at everything differently.

  * *

  Soon after my marriage I realized that my husband did not hate the Bill Gates and the Warren Buffetts and the Ambani Brothers of this world and the Indian state as much as he hated petit bourgeois writers (read, me). As a self-proclaimed ‘true Maoist’, he embarked upon a thorough class analysis of me and, based upon his disappointed findings, decided to set me on the right path. Marriage became a Re-education camp. He transformed into a teacher, and I became the wife-student learning from this Communist crusader.

  Q: Where does the sun set?

  A: On the ruling classes, who exploit the working masses.

  Q: What does the sky hold?

  A: The red star.

  Q: And who holds up the sky?

  A: Women hold up half the sky.

  Q: What do we live for?

  A: The Revolution.

  Q: What is the Revolution?

  A: The Revolution is not a dinner party. The Revolution is not writing an essay. The Revolution is not painting a picture. The Revolution is not doing embroidery. A Revolution cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate and kind and courteous and restrained and magnanimous. The Revolution is like tasting a pear. If you want to know what a pear tastes like, you must eat it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of Revolution, you must take part in Revolution because all genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.

  Q: Where does one gain direct experience?

  A: By learning from the masses and by teaching them.

  Q: What is love?

  A: …

  Q: I said, what is love?

  A: Communism?

  Q: Correct! And what is Communism?

  A: Love?

  A: No! Communism is not love; it is a hammer we use to correct ourselves and to crush our enemies.

  So, in the end, it adds up to this: I must learn, and I must change. There is no other way. The scorching criticism that I once admiringly saw him deploy on himself had now found a new target. Throughout the period of instruction, my husband tells me that it’s not sufficient to know the written word alone. That’s what differentiates religions relying on the dogma of holy books and Communism. It is not only the Little Red Book that I must learn and imbibe. I must learn from the people around me. I must learn that walking to the grocery store without a dupatta on top of my tunic makes people frown because I am not respecting their standards of decency; I must learn that my husband does not hold my hand in public out of respect for the people’s social mores; I must learn that a Communist only ever takes the bus because it is the transport of the people (unless he is late for a seminar he is giving and then he can take an auto-rickshaw); I must remember that the respo
nsibility of the female body belongs to me, and that I must not move or walk in such a fashion that makes others feel it is an object of allurement and enjoyment (although I should respectfully tolerate the gropes, the whistles, the hissed invitations); I must learn that a Communist woman is treated equally and respectfully by comrades in public but can be slapped and called a whore behind closed doors. This is dialectics.

  * *

  Long before I signed up for Communism 101 (Marriage Course), I led a fairly normal, fairly eventless, fairly middle-class life, with very little drama – no starvation, no orphanage, no refugee crisis, no asylum-seeking, no incest, no jail term, no ISIS, no jihadi boyfriend, no Tamil Tiger husband, no child marriage, no semi-successful suicide attempts, no precocious achievements, no parents undergoing divorce or unemployment or affairs or bankruptcy. In the middle of all that non-drama, what kept me occupied as a teenager was the Quest for One True Love, the kind of love that happened only in Tamil movies where the man is a hero of the people, the underdog who takes down the bad guys, the stammering-shy-orphan who cannot contain his anger in the face of injustice, the undercover-cop-with-a-heart, the misunderstood student-activist, the stylish go-getter who never gives a fuck about what happens in the world until someone threatens his girl. Try as hard as I might, however, it was not going to be an easy task for a young woman like me to find a young man like that.

  Having said that, even for someone whose lack of good looks had to be compensated and placated by vague compliments such as ‘hot’ and ‘sultry’ and ‘smouldering’ – all of which are better suited to describe Chennai’s weather than one of its women – I left behind a long chain of broken hearts and bruised egos and devdases and majnus and romeos and salims and kattabommans and atthai payyans. Men offered themselves up, eager garlanded goats, all ready for sacrifice. They came to me with juvenile verse, with funny jokes, with unlikely calculus doubts, with a month’s used bus tickets I had carelessly discarded and they had dutifully collected, with a sheepish grin on their faces and a love letter hidden in a textbook they had borrowed from me. They asked me for my phone number, dialled home and stayed silent when they heard my father on the other end. They added me on Yahoo Messenger and died their little deaths when they saw the small round user-status next to my screenname turn green and by the time they had plucked up the courage to type something, I was offline again, absent-mindedly pondering on the strange men from around the world who were flirting with me, who were confiding in me their deepest secrets, who trusted me because they believed that I was a 36D who wore red-lace panties.