When I Hit You Read online

  To save face, and to explain the sudden departure, I put up my last status message, telling the world that I’m busy with a writing project, that I need time for myself, that this is going to be a long hiatus.

  * *

  When I was offering myself out as a freelancer in Chennai, having escaped Kerala and heartbreak – and in order to escape the boredom of being back in my parents’ place – I did some ghost-translation for an old man in the neighbourhood, sub-contracting for the UNESCO Courier. I was asked to render into Tamil a rather long essay about the human endeavour to communicate with aliens.

  Of all the things we could have said to the people of other planets, we chose to fire into space a capsule containing the model for the double helix structure, the composition of DNA and the formula of its nucleotides. Not a message that declared: it is sunny here it also rains a lot we love colours and dope we sing and we dance we cook up a storm with anything we can find we are fucked up in too many ways but we are a funny bunch so may we request the pleasure of your company.

  For a message that would take twenty-five thousand years to send, and another twenty-five thousand years to receive a reply, we had no sense of humility or hospitality. We were clearly showing off.

  My communication with the world outside falls into this pattern. When I am forced to leave Facebook, my final message is not: Trouble in Second Week of Marriage: Husband-Moron Insistent I Stay Isolated. Mr Control Freak Blackmailed Me Into Deactivating Account. Writer At Risk! SOS!

  Instead, my swansong is serious and formal; I write about the intertwining double helix of projects and looming deadlines. I compose the picture of being a busy woman, and maintain the act to its precise proportions. I write out the formulaic pretence of living the writer’s life. No one gets a clue of how precariously alone I feel.

  * *

  My abrupt disappearance from Facebook is the first of several stages. The same week, he writes down his email password and gives it to me.

  ‘You can have this.’

  ‘I do not need it.’

  ‘I trust you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you trust me?’

  ‘I do. So?’

  ‘Do you trust me enough to share your passwords?’

  ‘I have never shared my passwords with anyone.’

  ‘So, you are hiding something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘By believing me.’

  ‘How would I believe you if you don’t trust me?’

  ‘Because I have nothing to hide.’

  This argument is endless, it keeps moving in circles, a snake eating its own tail. At the moment, the only way of proving myself means writing down all my passwords. My hot tears burn my cheeks, but I resolutely buy myself an uneasy peace. I write down my passwords.

  The camel’s nose has just entered the tent.

  * *

  Unlike the Arab and his camel, we are married to each other. A month into the marriage, I find that he has answered some of my emails.

  ‘I can handle my own messages, I never asked you to do this.’

  He does not defend himself. He does not argue. He whistles a tune, continues to fiddle with his computer.

  ‘Come here, my little one, come here,’ he says. The taunt in his voice is like the slime in a deep, old well – glinting, slippery, deathly.

  He opens his own inbox and shows me that he has been replying to his emails by signing both our names at the end of every message. I find that my name has been co-signed in letters to students, in group emails to his activist friends, in making book recommendations to his colleagues, in querying for a postcolonial studies research conference, for all sundry little shit. I feel nauseous. I feel robbed of my identity. I’m no longer myself if another person can so easily claim to be me, pretend to be me, and assume my life while we live under the same roof.

  I gather myself enough to ask: ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘Since we got married.’ His voice is flat now. Matter-of-fact. Precise and reasonable like a well-paved six-lane highway.

  And then, unfazed, he tries to elaborate: ‘I want the world to know that we are a couple. I want them to accept us as a unit.’

  * *

  My mother on the phone:

  Listen, my dear. I know it is upsetting. Just breathe deeply. Do not give him any ground for suspicion. Let us see how far he goes. Suspicion is in the nature of men; it is in the nature of love. He revolves around one question: What if she loves somebody else?

  It is a weak mind, it is a weak man who comes up with these fears. Do not let him feel weak. If he wants your world to revolve around him, make that happen. He will grow tired of your attention, and he will learn to give you space. The more you try to stake your claim to privacy, the more he will assume that you are hiding things from him and forging a secret life for yourself. That will drive him mad. Stay open, and that dog will leave you in peace when he cannot catch scent of all the shit that he thinks exists.

  * *

  It begins to fit a pattern.

  The first to go was my phone.

  When I had just moved with him to Mangalore after the marriage, it wouldn’t cease ringing for hours – friends, well-wishers, distant family – calling me up to congratulate the happy couple, asking for details, chiding me on why it was all so hush-hush and hasty. Roaming charges, Tamil curiosity and all their warm cheer made me run out of credit by the end of the evening. We kept topping it up for a day and the next, and then my comrade-husband advised me on the economics of it all, the exorbitant costs I would be paying if I retained the number of another state, and suggested that it was better if I got a local number. The task of procuring the new number was taken on as his own personal responsibility – we could have walked over to any little shop, given a photocopy of his ID card to prove our address and a passport-sized photo and got a SIM card for fifty rupees, but it was not so easy where he was concerned. He was paranoid about the state, about security, about being monitored. He deemed it best if the SIM card was procured in the name of one of his students’ extended friendship circle, someone whose connections to him would not be apparent, someone who would not be on the police radar.

  That promised card materialized after ten days of religious waiting, and when it finally reached me, my husband instructed me not to share the number indiscriminately, warning me that the moment a friend of mine in the press or media or publishing industry got hold of the number, it was the equivalent of uploading it online for all to see.

  ‘There’s a reward on my head. Two lakhs, last heard. They are this close, my dear, this fucking close to finding me. What shields me? They do not know that the so-called underground, dangerous, armed guerrilla they are looking for is a happily married college lecturer now. Don’t play with fire. You will be throwing us in jail. Torture. A staged “encounter”. The police will take me from home for an interrogation, then come back to speak with you. They will be polite as hell, they will even drink the tea you make for them, and two days later, you will read in the papers that a most-wanted, armed thirty-year-old man in combat fatigues was shot dead by the paramilitary in some far-away forest. The same polite policemen will turn up at our house again and ask you to come and identify my body. You will become a widow overnight. Do you want any of that? Am I making it clear?’

  I nod in agreement. This is something I had never anticipated. I want to tell him that I will never, ever betray him, but I do not know if that is something he wants to hear. Apart from my parents, I do not share my phone number with anyone else. Even to my parents, I do not breathe a word about his paranoia – about his fear of being captured for waging war against the state, or the risky side of the man I have married, and how all this in effect restrains me. Tomorrow, if trouble were to knock on our door, I do not want anyone else to pay a price.

  * *

  The loss of telephonic communication doesn’t wound me too much. But what I find impossible to fat
hom is how I now find myself in the position of having my online freedom curtailed. I never thought that it would be so important to me until it was.

  His voice drowns out all my arguments with one sentence: You are addicted. You are addicted. You are addicted. You are addicted.

  In an act of mercy, he allows me three hours a week: rationed, it comes to a very brief half an hour a day. The internet access itself is possible only in his presence, for he carries the Huawei USB dongle with him at all times – saying he needs the internet to prepare for his classes and to do his research. I relay this problem to my parents, hoping that they can see through the absolute insanity of this prohibition. Mom, this is so fucked up. Dad, this is so fucked up. Mom and Dad, this will kill me as a writer. Mom and Dad, I will go mad. They do not get it.

  Three hours is a long time, my mother replies, three hours a week will do. I only take ten minutes every day to check my email, she says.

  Some days my students check email for me, she adds.

  My father does not even have an email address. That does not prevent him from having an opinion. He believes the entire world of the internet is a big sinkhole waiting to swallow his daughter forever.

  We brought you up without the TV, and you have turned out just fine, he says. Will you die if you do not have the internet? he asks me.

  I answer in the affirmative.

  The internet is your drug, he says.

  Your husband is doing this for your own good, they both concur.

  ‘Your own good’ was the mantra of my mother when I was growing up – it justified being force-fed laxatives once every three months, not celebrating my birthdays at school, curfews against travelling alone, refusal of permission to go to picnics. ‘Your own good’ was the reason my English teacher offered when she pulled me by the ear and led me out of the classroom, shouting rowdy girl rowdy girl rowdy girl this is for your own good and struck me with a wooden ruler. ‘Your own good’ was what justified my teenage neighbour putting his fingers inside my eight-year-old vagina to check for forest insects and bed bugs and evil imps. When I hear ‘your own good’ I am reduced to being a child again. I do not argue any more. I go silent.

  * *

  Walk out. Walk out.

  The recurrent voice that stays stuck in your throat. It is how you know you need to run. It is how you know that now is not the right time. How you also know there will never be a right time. How you know it is not the how of it that matters, but the when. How you know the world will laugh at you for a month-long marriage. Even that is not as cruel as the sight of the sad faces of your parents. Disgraced. You have given them nothing but disappointment. The defeat they will carry in their eyes for the rest of their days. Never again the old pride. Never again the easy trust. Never again will the way they say your name be the same. No more will they carry their dreams on your shoulders.

  Not just them and their heavy, gathered sorrows. You will have to live with one person all your life: you. The you wanting to leave today might be the you who thinks you should have stayed tomorrow. The fear that when you face yourself ten years from now, you will blame your haste, blame your hot blood, blame your sharp tongue, blame yourself for giving up so easily. The question within you, coming from your own sense of fairness: what if he was given the chance to rectify his mistakes, to change himself, to begin anew? The next question, coming up after the commercial break: were you willing to forgive him? And then of course, the inevitable, the unavoidable, absolutely vital: have you fought enough for what you believe in?

  Fight or Flight.

  The old formula again. I haven’t given up fighting, not yet.

  The flight only comes when the fight has failed.

  V

  Sometimes, of course, art creates the

  suffering in the first place.

  ELFRIEDE JELINEK, THE PIANO TEACHER

  What prevents a woman from walking out of an abusive relationship?

  Old-school feminists will speak about economic independence. A woman is free if she has the money to support herself. With a job, she will find her feet. If she has a job, it will miraculously solve all her problems. A job will give her community. One day she will walk into the office, and they will ask her about the bruise above her eyebrow and she will say she walked into a wall, but they will know it is her husband hitting her, and they will wrap her up in a protective embrace. In the framework of a job, a woman will find that one female friend who will see her through thick and thin. The job will create a support group for her, people who will give her access to the police, to the lawyers, to the judges.

  In the office, there will at least be one man – one good, honest, decent man – who finds her attractive, who slips her love notes at weekly meetings, who loves her for what she is, who makes her feel beautiful, who makes her laugh. In the absence of such a man, she will find a lesbian lover. Sometimes, the lesbian love happens irrespective of the presence or absence of men, the woman turning her back on an entire gender to live happily – and safely – ever after.

  Abstractions are easy, but my story, like every woman’s story, is something else.

  * *

  No one knows the peculiar realities of my situation.

  How do you land a job when:

  • you end up somewhere in the middle of the teaching semester?

  • you have no contacts in a strange city?

  • your husband has forced you off social media?

  • you have no phone of your own?

  • your husband monitors and replies to all messages addressed to you?

  • you do not speak the local language?

  • you have the wifely responsibility of producing children first?

  That’s a long list already. These are not the regrets of an unemployed person. These are the complaints of an imprisoned wife.

  * *

  Let’s say that I’m even allowed to take a job. Will the daily escape from the house granted by a 9-to-5 solve my problem? Or, will that freedom act as a compensation for the deal with the devil that I seem to have made within my marriage? Will I breathe freely for a few hours and be happy to come home to this state of hate that awaits me? Will I get used to it, the new normal? Or, will this outside world step in and intervene? I do not have answers. In my short life as a wife so far in this town, I have participated in the same little verbal dance that happens every time I step out of the house and run into the neighbours, or on the rare day when I visit my husband in his college to hand him his lunch and I come across his students and friends.

  How are you?

  Have you eaten?

  Do you like Mangalore?

  Do you like the weather?

  Do you like the rain?

  Do you like the Mangalore food?

  How was last weekend?

  What’s your plan this weekend?

  Conversations here follow the same pattern. An endless back-and-forth relay of absolute pointlessness. No question demands an honest answer. A question is asked as an exercise in formal behaviour.

  Questions that are greetings. Questions that are placeholders. Questions that fill awkward gaps. Questions to suggest an interest that does not exist. Questions that pretend to listen.

  Never, ever a question that seeks to know.

  It’s a register, the kind of talk that’s reserved for the new-wife-in-town, the talk that’s meant for a stranger you’ve just met; in this cooperative talk, there is no point at which I can tell the truth.

  * *

  This was one of those things they taught us back in college. I marvelled at this feature of social interaction – surprised that it had a proper name, the ‘Politeness Phenomenon’ – and considered it a great achievement of our civilization. I believed we had reached the zenith of sophistication as we did this nervous foxtrot with strangers, never hurting, never making them reveal hurt. It had all been perfectly rehearsed and choreographed.

  Two sociolinguists, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levin-son, about whom I
have no reliable gossip except that they are married to each other, put forth this theory. Their conjecture: people use politeness as a way of mutually permitted deception in order to help each other save face. Translation: in real life, unlike in an exam, no stranger will ask you a question that you will have trouble answering.

  We were made to study this because it was a language universal, something that happened in every language across the world. At that time, it was reassuring.

  Whatever its benefits for the rest of humankind, I have now come to look at it as a design flaw in the construct of language. There’s nothing in the structure of language to flash a code-red in the middle of polite verbal back-and-forth, nothing that can interrupt the staged niceness by being a secret cry for help.

  * *

  Trying to recollect the first time I was hit by my husband, there’s only hot glass tears and the enduring fear of how often it has come to pass. The reconstruction of the events does not help. It always begins with a silly accusation, my denial, an argument, and along the road, the verbal clash cascades into a torrent of blows. The accusations stand out because of how trivial they are – Why does this man call you ‘dearest’? Why have you cleared your trash can in your email inbox? Why are there only nine telephone calls on the call log of your phone, whose number have you deleted? Why haven’t you washed the sink? Why are you trying to kill me by trying to over-salt my food? Why can’t you write as ‘anonymous’? Why did you not immediately reject the conference invitation when you bloody know that I’m not going to let you travel alone? – sometimes, his bones of contention are so thin that they make me wonder if any accusation is only a ruse and excuse to hit me.

  I do not have anyone I can talk to about what is going on behind these closed doors. At the moment, I am not even sure if I want to talk to anyone about what I am going through.

  On a dull afternoon, I can catalogue the weapons of abuse that have gathered around the house. The cord of my Mac-Book which left thin, red welts on my arms. The back of the broomstick that pounded me across the length of my back. The writing pad whose edges found my knuckles. His brown leather belt. Broken ceramic plates after a brief journey as flying saucers. The drain hose of the washing machine.