When I Hit You Read online

  Diplomacy helped me get rid of most male attention, but it did not help me in the Quest for One True Love. Not having found this man was a big curse in itself – I had handled male admiration rather ruthlessly, fending off suitors without offering the poor things even a chance to have a coffee together, let alone a foray into my underwear – and now I was left with the disadvantage of being a young woman of marriageable age with no history of romantic involvement, other than tangling myself in the bedsheets at 2 a.m. and getting lost in the quaint fantasy of being ravaged by Rhett Butler. I had never been kissed. I had never been Tamil-kissed even. So, by the time I finished college, I made up my mind that love does not come to those who stay nailed to one place reading Mills & Boon. I decided to move.

  * *

  Leaving home proved difficult. It would have been easier if I was a standard-issue engineer who was going to America for a master’s degree. That would have allowed my father to boast each day to every colleague; it would have fulfilled my mother’s reason for living, making her feel superior to her neighbours and thus providing the much sought-after meaning in life. They would have swelled with pride, perhaps dangerously so, endangering an artery here, popping out a varicose vein there. Instead, their only daughter was only going to Kerala, just a dodgy neighbouring state, doing one of those five-year integrated MA degrees that held no charm, required no intellectual prowess, and did not even further one’s job prospects. ‘Everyone from Kerala comes here to study, but our unique daughter decides to go there. What can I do?’

  My father’s intermittent grumbling was amplified by my mother who spoke non-stop about sex-rackets, ganja, alcoholism and foreign tourists, making Kerala – a demure land of lagoons and forty rivers – appear more and more like Goa. Realizing that I wasn’t easily scared, she even attempted to incite jealousy telling me of the legendary allure of Malayalee women, and expected me to drop my plan in a last minute fit of insecurity. As much as her revelation irked me, I found the perfect retort: ‘I am going there to s-t-u-d-y, Mom, not for a beauty contest.’ She pretended not to hear me.

  With their concerted campaign against Kerala having failed, they were sophisticated enough to switch to a new plan of attack. Mom wept for days on end, Dad wept because she was weeping. They took turns to come to my room, sit on a chair, and cry. My mom confessed that she did not want to face her husband alone every day and begged me not to leave. Dad claimed that without my calming presence in the house, he would never have a peaceful evening because my mom was hell-bent on sending him to an early grave with endless fights.

  They anticipated that their marriage would unravel without me; they foresaw a future where they would waste away alone and there would be no daughter at their death-bed; they blamed television, newspapers, radio stations and my best friend for putting such a funny idea into my head; and when everything else failed, they blamed me roundly squarely quadrilaterally for being ungrateful and thoughtless and selfish, and at the end of many weeks of failed emotional blackmail, they had to give in, and make peace with the fact that I was indeed moving out.

  * *

  I rapidly settled into university life. I studied language and literature by day and I found the nerve to let my hair down at night. I treated men like an equal opportunities employer. I flirted. I forged friendships.

  The men I liked here quoted Neruda. They read Márquez in the Malayalam. A train running late, a hartal on exam day, an inability to get movie tickets, the unending queues in the beverage store – all of that, they termed Kafkaesque. They spoke of Theodorarkis and Kakogiannis and asked me to watch Zorba the Greek with them. They wrote poems. They peppered their conversations with popular film dialogues, to which I lacked all frames of reference. At the first sign of monsoon clouds, they sang Rafi – ‘aaj mausam bada beimaan hai’ – hand-picked to attribute their attempts at seduction to the weather, to the state of the skies, to the smell of eager, just-drenched earth. They mimicked Rajinikanth, and when they became intimate enough, they broke into Tamil songs to please me. They were veterans of the heartbreak, they carried the war-wounds of love in their beards. They rocked their mundus, wore them just about everywhere. They drank rum and whisky and brandy, and, out of loyalty to Russia, they made their toasts with vodka. They attempted clumsy passes, asked for hugs with the persistence of two-year-olds asking for candy, apologized the next morning on behalf of the alcohol that made them overstep their boundaries, and did the exact same thing the next time. And one fine day, totally out of the blue, they swore to kill themselves because I was not reciprocating their feelings.

  I soaked up all that drama.

  * *

  There was Anish, who never met me outside of college, who was content with gazing into my eyes and scribbling my name on his notebooks, he of the respectable-love that did not breach boundaries, the love that fertilized in place of fucking insanely, the love where a woman was treated (almost) like a sister until the day of her marriage, the love of a shy and uncertain man-boy, with a moustache still growing in patches, with a love that started as a failed mission, a love that moved on.

  Balakrishnan, who saw in me the earthiness of Ilayaraja’s music, and in me he claimed to uncover the wide-eyed, strong-willed, quick-to-retort, dancing-in-the-rain Mouna Raagam Revathi, the kind of woman the men of my father’s generation fantasized about, the woman whose touch was electric, whose speech was sharp as sickles, who coupled old-world shrewdness with rustic naïveté, and the longer he kept projecting this image on me, the more distant I grew from myself, and from him.

  Chandran, thin and tall and dark and bearded, who took me to his rehearsals, who I met when I auditioned for a play, who was adapting The Last Temptation of Christ for the stage, whose life revolved around theatre, but for whom drama was insufficient, for whom being in love meant being alive, and that meant not holding to an emotion long enough for it to gather moss, but instead changing, changing, changing it all the time, through fate and force and fuck-ups just so that every moment of his life his heart was bleeding on a jagged edge, and he could feel and feel and feel.

  Dinesh, a friend of Azhar’s, who came to me to ask if the text on his start-up website had any grammatical errors, who talked and talked and talked with me, all of it centred around him, but even in the midst of the chatter, I had the opportunity to discover that he was an excellent kisser, and I would have allowed my days to whirl into his tongue, but the kilometres of his speech was not the road I wanted to take, and so I left him, not out of dislike, not out of malice, but because I was looking for respite from unceasing conversation.

  Edwin, the little rich boy, the boy who was exploring himself, who was into jazz and marijuana one week, poetry and Faiz and Pound by the weekend, the wannabe painter who wrote songs for me, the impresario who wanted me to appreciate Monet and Cézanne, who begged me to read Susan Sontag, who took me to hidden-away beaches to photograph me because he was madly in love with my imperfections, but I could not cope with his erratic pursuit of art and beauty, and I was filled with the sudden dread that the world so painstakingly built around him could be shattered any second, and so I moved away from him, a star spiralling out of axis to save a little of its own light.

  Faizal, who briefly flitted into my life, who carried clouds of depression on his small, stooped shoulders, who spoke of shadows whispering in his head, who spoke of shadows stitched to his feet, who dismissed my words of love as dewdrops on dead, decaying leaves, who lived in a drunken stupor until the ginger-skinned moon appeared in the sky, and then he would make his way to me, and hold me close, and breathe my rain-tree smell to feel safe, and his night would come to an end in my arms, until one day the demons in his head took hold of him, and he became caught up in his little world of sadness, and I was afraid to enter, and he was afraid to walk out and we left it there, in some place where words could not reach.

  Girish, a college lecturer, whose radar was quick to sense my restlessness, who was even quicker to offer a hand of friendship, who revea
led to me after a week of acquaintance that his wife never consummated their marriage, and try as hard as he could to elicit a sympathy fuck from me, it went nowhere, it only soured our friendship, and so he told the entire college that I tried to seduce him, and almost everyone seemed to buy his story, except the women who had been similarly solicited, who saw him for what he was.

  A is B is C is D is E is F is G is H is I

  And J is K is L is M is N is O is P is Q

  And R is T is V is W is some X-Y-Z.

  Not all their stories need to be written down here.

  Sunil could have been Sudheer could have been Satish could have been Surya could have been Sareesh could have been Sunny could have been Sandeep.

  The names of the men do not matter. It can be switched any which way on the page, and my story will remain the same. They were all strangers, they all became friends of some sort, and as much as they furthered my limited knowledge of what it meant to be the object of a man’s affection, I lost my heart to none of them. I fooled around, hoping that eventually, perhaps, some love would appear. Some boundaries were breached. Some boundaries were redefined. Some boundaries became borders with a vigilant army camping along their length. I lost some, I learnt some.

  * *

  For all the arbitrariness of my pursuit, the absence of maps and the lack of light from fading fast-dying stars, I one day steered my restless paper-boat heart towards a safe anchor.

  He came from the coast, a creature of the sea. His words were rough winds and stormy waters – but, in all that agitation, I found the man I had always longed for. My One True Love. I was swept away, falling for him before realizing he was a famous politician and before realizing it was doomed before we had even shared our first kiss.

  Let me tell you a dream. Far away from seascapes, deep in the forest ranges of central Kerala, I encounter a leopard. I am transfixed by his eyes. Being the catwoman that I am, I stroke him on the head, I scratch him at the scruff of his neck, I let him sniff me. He plays with me. He even lets me rub his belly. Then, suddenly, in the blink of an eye, his feline teeth find my flesh, my hand is mauled, my heart is left bleeding. That is how the dream ends. The reality intercedes later.

  This One True Love – which flourished for two, three years – left me wounded. I spent months scooped in bed howling my heart out. In learning to forget him, I had to pick up what was left of me, the little fragments of individuality, scattered across the scenery of our love, like broken bangles, chipped glass, colourful pebbles. Trinkets of the type crows love to gift, and small children love to collect.

  This was a lover who had become the landscape. Everything in Kerala reminded me of him. The never-ending sea made me feel abandoned. Lonely riverbanks made me weep inconsolably. Dawn breaking, over pink-and-cement skies, drove me into despair. Political graffiti anguished me. The city became his ruthless messenger. I had to renounce this life and return home to my parents.

  Back in the boredom of Chennai, and to escape the frowns of my parents, I grabbed every freelance job I could get, I volunteered my time to online activism, I filled up my calendar hoping that being busy would help me cope with heartbreak. At this vulnerable moment I met the man I would marry.

  There was no dull ache of desire in this manhunt. I was only looking for safety. In turn, he appeared to carry two inbuilt safeguards: unlike the politician, as a college lecturer, he was perfect husband-material in the eyes of my parents. Unlike the politician, in his secret life as a guerrilla, he believed in a revolutionary overthrow of the Indian state, boycotted democratic structures, and I could be sure of the absence of electoral ambitions that would thwart a life together.

  I rushed into it.

  The rest, as they say, is the unrest of this story.

  IV

  In using there are always two.

  The manipulator dances with a partner who cons herself.

  There are lies that glow so brightly we consent

  to give a finger and then an arm

  to let them burn.

  I was dazzled by the crowd where everyone called my name.

  Now I stand outside the funhouse exit, down the slide

  reading my guidebook of Marx in Esperanto

  and if I don’t know anymore which way means forward

  down is where my head is, next to my feet

  with a pocketful of words and plastic tokens.

  MARGE PIERCY, ‘SONG OF THE FUCKED DUCK’

  Remember the Ramayana post-reunion story.

  Suspicious King Husband tells Rescued Queen Wife to walk through fire – if she was chaste through their period of separation, she’ll emerge untouched, else, she will be consigned to ashes. All or Zilch. She comes out clean as Evian, but immediately commands Mother Earth to swallow her, outraged by her man’s suspicious behaviour. She was First Lady in Valmiki’s epic, and in keeping with the social practices of the times, this kind of test was a public spectacle.

  Not so for me. Not so at Primrose Villa.

  Not with a Communist husband. Fuck monarchy. Fuck the feudalism of petty warlords. Here, he burns himself, causing no harm whatsoever to the damsel-in-distress. Here, the test takes place before the opportunity to cheat arises, as a pre-emptive, preventive measure.

  We are in the kitchen, having coffee.

  He lights a match, brings it to his bare left elbow, extinguishes it against his skin. I smile nervously. Then another match is lit.

  ‘What kind of party trick is that?’ I ask.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Another lit match. Another self-inflicted ordeal.

  I do not get the joke.

  ‘So, I have your attention.’

  His head tilted to the right. He is staring at me intensely.

  ‘Yes, sir’ – I’m tempted to say, but I don’t.

  ‘Yes. Of course I’m listening. You don’t have to burn yourself, for god’s sake.’

  ‘Come off Facebook.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come off Facebook.’

  ‘I heard you the first time. But why the hell?’

  ‘I’m going to keep doing this until you see my point.’

  ‘Darling, please cool down. What’s your point? What have you got against Facebook?’

  ‘There is no reason why you should be on Facebook. It’s narcissism. It’s exhibitionism. It’s a waste of time. I’ve said this to you a thousand times. It’s merely you voluntarily feeding information straight to the CIA, to the RAW, to the IB, to everyone who is hounding my life. Every fucking thing is being monitored. Your life may be a peep show, but I’m a revolutionary. I cannot let you endanger me. We’ve had this argument so often that I’ve lost count. I’m not going to repeat everything I’ve said.’

  I could smell the match heads and the burnt hair.

  ‘This is plain and simple blackmail. I’m not going to do anything if you blackmail me.’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you what to do. You’re pushing me into this corner where I’m forced to tell you what’s good for you and what is not.’

  ‘If you put the matches down, we can talk about Facebook.’

  ‘If you love me, this is the quickest way you will make up your mind.’

  For a split second, I think about taking a matchstick and burning my own skin. His aim is to make me suffer for his pain; I do not want to suffer two-fold by inflicting this bizarre punishment on myself. Another matchstick is lit and put out. And another and another. I’ve stopped counting. It almost makes me feel that he is enjoying himself.

  As distressed as I am, there’s a part of me wanting to laugh. This elaborate ruse of revolution being roped in. This standard, textbook mention of the CIA and the home-grown RAW to frighten me. To laugh at my husband would mean that I humiliate him, the consequences of which would be far worse than the matchstick pyrotechnical performance. To reason with him will lead to a long, interminable fight, a war of attrition that would exhaust me into defeat.

  I lo
ok at him, deciding what I should do next. Now the lit matches are being extinguished on the inside of his left forearm, each leaving a tiny red welt on the skin. He doesn’t look up at me, he doesn’t say a word, and that in itself scares me. He has the defiant eyes of a man who is in no mood to give up. I do not know where this will end.

  In the next ten minutes, I deactivate my Facebook account.

  It is my lifeline to the world outside. Since moving to Mangalore, Facebook has transformed into my only remaining professional link. Here, I do not have the circle of artist friends I had in Kerala, I do not have the family networks that I had in Chennai. In this isolation, Facebook helps me promote my work, gives me news, keeps me in the loop of the literary scene, allows me to have an online presence which is pivotal if I do not want to be forgotten in a freelance world. My husband is not unaware of this. He knows that my being a writer involves being at the mercy of others, being visible, being remembered at the right time so that someone throws an opportunity my way. In my precarious situation, when he wants me to cut myself off from Facebook, I know that it is an act of career suicide. Right now, arguing with him will not get me anywhere. I simply count myself lucky that he asks me only to ‘deactivate’ and not actually delete my Facebook account.