When I Hit You Page 5
I did not know that this was the exemplary life awaiting a newly married woman.
* *
Before we were married, we had discussed our plans. Rosy hazy red. Nothing was well defined; I liked it that way. Undecided, unprepared, spontaneous. All that I knew was that we would move to Mangalore, where he had a job lecturing in English Literature. I would take up a teaching assignment, hopefully at his college. Until that happened, I would try to write. Later, we would consider whether or not we liked the place and whether or not we would think of moving. We would be aimless. We would be unchained. We would stay afloat, anchored only to each other. We were making a leap into the wild. Hand in hand, ready to fall or float. To make it more exciting, we had blindfolds on. Or at least, I had a blindfold on.
That seems like a long, long time ago.
* *
‘Why don’t you come and teach my class one day? I can arrange it. You can occupy yourself.’
This comes as a gesture of reciprocal affection, a statement of appreciation for my efforts.
We have settled in properly: the fridge holds milk and eggs and idli batter; the ceiling fan’s intermittent flapping noise no longer wakes us up at night; the cockroach situation in the kitchen is under control. The daily grind has been worn into place.
His offer comes after a campaign of very gentle nagging, to ask him if there are any opportunities for me.
Can I teach here? Can you ask around for me? Do you need a copy of my CV? Will I find something temporary? Don’t you think it would be nice if I got out of the house once in a while?
‘St Alfonso’s does not allow married couples to work in the same institution, there is an employee policy against that,’ he casually informs me one night when I am pressing him on progress. ‘The sister college is a possibility, but the problem is that you have to wait until the next semester to try to get a job there.’ This suggestion, that I can give a guest lecture to his students, is the big concession. Even his departmental head is happy with this arrangement.
A week later, just for an hour, I handle his class.
In the middle of my lecture on Postcolonial Literature, I spot a student passing a handwritten note. I ignore it, I carry on, but as the note travels, I’m forced to act. I approach their desks and take the piece of paper. Please let all of us donate 50p each, and buy coconut oil and a comb for sir’s wife. The loose hair looks like a beggar’s.
My cheeks burn, but I crumple the note into my palm and finish the class with as much dignity as I can muster. This is not my idea of a dream job, to stand before a room of fifty men and women who are judging my looks as I try to teach.
That afternoon, I tell this to my husband, the note still balled up in my pocket. He launches into a lecture on how often he has asked me to learn from the people; dress and behave in a way that they will respect. My first day out backfires on me.
* *
Two days later, I have thought enough about the incident to formulate a fitting comeback to the student. Two days later, unfortunately, is a time-frame in which I’ve been reduced to irrelevance. The class that I was handling – on postcolonialism – was not entirely disconnected to the way in which I was being read. Hair is a vexed topic in the many subcultures that make up India: in the Kamasutra, a woman standing in the courtyard of her home, combing her untied hair, has been seen as the symbol of a wanton woman; the wild, untameable hair of possessed women has been seen as the sign of the devil itself; the matted hair of women saints and the shorn head of widows, a symbol of their having given up all claims to exercising sexuality. Not a pretty picture by any means. Where and how does the monster of colonialism enter this picture and pose for a photograph?
The superficial backstory is not very hard to spot: shorter, untied, loose hair was seen as an influence of European women – a corruption of the local ideal; a symbolism of unbridled, shameless desires; an effort at modernity at the expense of tradition; a betrayal of the national through an allegiance to the white man through a replication of the white woman’s styling. There’s another apocryphal story that often lies buried. Regiments of the British Army had their retinue of native sex workers who stayed close to the cantonments. Unlike Nautch girls and devadasis, each of these sex workers was registered by the colonial government. In exchange for lodgings and a substantial soldier clientele, they had to agree to regular examination for venereal diseases. This was in the heyday when syphilis maimed more men than brutal Indian summers, so these women were forbidden from sleeping with the natives, out of misplaced fears.
The story goes that the dark, long tresses of these women would be chopped periodically – allowing the enforcers and sanitary inspectors to easily spot them at the marketplace if they were ever soliciting native men, and to drag them back to the Regiment. As much as it enabled control for the cause of the empire, in the eyes of the lay people, a woman with short, loose hair in the bazaar also became synonymous with the white man’s prostitute. She was the one who was sleeping with the enemy, sexually servicing the oppressor, and she deserved the greatest disdain.
In the six decades since the British left, some perceptions do not seem to have changed. In our postcolonialism classes, we speak of the empire writing back. But within these classrooms, we are still products of the same empire – carrying our bags of shame and sin.
* *
When I try to unload my interpretation of the classroom debacle to my husband, he is dismissive.
He begins thumping the table and laughing out loud. ‘Finally you found an excuse. And what’s that excuse? Colonialism? You write in English – and you find it convenient enough to blame my students’ opinion of you on colonialism. Don’t bullshit me. You know what? The whore in those times was the link, the bridge between the colonizer and the colonized. Today, the link – the writer who writes in English, this bridge – she is the whore.’
* *
Being a writer invites constant ridicule from my husband. At the end of a long day, he comes home to ask me what I did all day long. I was writing, I say. More often, I stick to the more modest version: I was trying to write. In the brief pauses between household chores, I would hunt for inspiration on empty pages, on the blank screen of my laptop. That’s not work in his dictionary. That is someone doing nothing.
There is a semblance of respect that comes my way when I’m asked to write for a magazine, however. Even if the magazine itself is called into question by my husband, he recognizes that this validation might mean that he should take me more seriously. Usually, however, he decides against it.
Such as when Outlook wants an essay for their annual issue on sex surveys, and the editor emails me asking me to call so that I can be briefed. My husband and I are busy packing to catch a train that will take us to his village for a weekend with his family, but I manage to slip out and make the call.
When I share the details with my husband he says I have been asked to write on sexuality because I have the wide-ranging experience of having fucked men who are twenty years old, thirty years old, forty years old, fifty years old, sixty years old, seventy years old.
He is laughing but only to try to disguise his anger.
This is an accusation that I cannot share with anyone. The shaming that I face as I try to write this article is something my readers will never know about.
‘Why did you agree,’ he asks? ‘You are a slave of this corporate media. You are selling your body. This is elite prostitution, where men do not get to touch you, but they masturbate to the image of the woman you represent. This is not freedom. This is sexual anarchy. This is not revolutionary. This is pandering to vulgar imperialist culture.’
And within the next hour, there are suggestions that I have slept with the entire editorial team at Outlook. The most intimate that I have been with any of them is that solitary phone call.
* *
‘How do you propose to even write your sex article?’ At the last minute, he takes my laptop out of my travel bag and leaves it on the
table.
‘This is going to stay here,’ he says. ‘Only the two of us are going on this trip. We are going to my village, to meet relatives, to attend a marriage, to stay with my mother. I do not want you to sit there and keep typing your essay when there are more important things to do. Should I remind Writer Madam that she is also a wife?’
There are no computers in the village. There is no internet either, and in any case, I cannot go to a net café in the nearest town without him by my side, or without his approval.
I snatch every free second I can get over the next two days. I type while I catch water to fill the pots in the house, when I enter the bathroom to wash my hair, when I’m asked to clean the moringa leaves for a soup, when I watch the goat stew simmer over a firewood stove and the smoke sets me coughing, when I babysit my niece and nephew. I learn to compose whole sentences and paragraphs at a stretch in my mind. It is an article that I entirely key in on my phone, a clunky Nokia E63. The new Mangalore SIM card that my husband has got for me does not have a data plan, and there is no way I can transmit my article. At some point, I want to call the editor at Outlook and read out what I have written for someone on his team to take down. The fear of being discovered midway through the call makes me hesitate. I search desperately for the right opportunity. Maybe when my husband goes off with one of his cousins on some errand, to pick up a surly guest, or to troubleshoot some last minute misunderstanding that has cropped up with the caterers – one of a thousand things that could go wrong at a wedding and would need a man’s authority to interfere. All that I need is half an hour of freedom and I keep looking for the minute such a chance opens up.
My fear of him gives way to my fear of missing the deadline. In desperation, I come up with the riskiest of strategies. I remember that my husband and the USB dongle that allows us to connect to the internet are never parted. What makes the dongle an internet-ready device is the data-powered SIM card inside it. When he has gone off to have his evening bath, I rummage through the pockets of his clothes and find the dongle. I quickly remove the SIM card, hide it in the side seams of my kurta, and leave everything looking as untouched as before. When my turn to use the bathroom comes, I hurry inside, my phone well hidden within a towel, replace the SIM card, and send the article across a very slow Opera browser, with no formatting, no italics. When I bathe that night, looking at the black starlit sky out of the window, I’m the happiest woman I’ve ever known. I’m radiant when I step out. I hurriedly put the SIM card back in the dongle so that there’s no trace of the crime. My husband calls me to bed, and I coo back to him. This is not a time to hold a grudge.
When I get back to Mangalore, I check my email. There’s a message from my editor at Outlook. Three words: Got it. Brilliant.
* *
Within our marriage, my husband holds the role of People’s Commissar for Labour. (At the moment he’s wearing a red T-shirt and jeans. In the art-film version I’m directing in my head, I plan to dress him in the appropriate Stalinist attire.) On Sundays, we wake up late and stay in bed. In my fantasies of marriage, it is a suspended morning of making love and stepping out to eat an endless, lazy brunch. In reality, my husband goes over the events of the past week to conclude, after an elaborate analysis, that I’ve done practically nothing at all, and suggests a host of jobs that I should try. He usually sets himself as the stellar example.
‘When I first joined the party, they sent me off to work in a garment factory. Six months in a sweatshop in Tirupur. That’s where I lost the humbug of a petit bourgeois lifestyle. You need a job that will make you declass thoroughly.’
The following week, it’s a job at a printing press in Mangalore. Next, it’s working as a sales-girl in a showroom in the City Centre mall. The choices offered to me vary every day: candle-making factory, cashewnut packing godown.
‘You’ll learn the language of the people. You’ll learn to live the life of working-class women. You’ll then write out of experience. That will teach you how fake your feminism is. You’ll not capitalize on your cunt, you will be labouring with your hands.’
I think the job of a wife comes somewhere in the middle: labouring with my cunt, labouring with my hands. As it stands, I am not sure if I am ready to take on an additional job.
* *
He is not sincere about any of these suggestions, of course. He is the type of anxious husband who stands outside the door of a toilet in a train carriage afraid that I might seize that opportunity to give him the slip, disappear into another faraway compartment, get down at a random station and vanish without a trace. He is not going to let me go to a workplace unsupervised and risk losing me. These ‘declassing jobs’ are just thrown in the air to catch me out. Tomorrow, he will bring up my reluctance to pack cashews as evidence of my middle-class life, as proof that I do not want to live by manual labour. Communist ideas are a cover for his own sadism.
I have stopped asking him to help me find a job. I half-promise myself that I’ll still apply for a teaching position when the new semester begins, but I’m not sure I believe myself anymore. Having a job becomes one of many vague things that I want to do in my life but see little way of attaining.
Being a writer is now a matter of self-respect. It is the job title that I give myself. I realize that my husband does not hate anything in this universe as much as the idea of a writer (a petit bourgeois woman writer, at that), so I forge a sense of reverence towards the job of being a writer.
But it’s not just about antagonizing him. There is a distasteful air of the outlaw that accompanies the idea of a writer in my husband’s mind. A self-centredness about writing that doesn’t fit with his image of a revolutionary. It has the one-word job description: defiance. I’ve never felt such a dangerous attraction towards anything else in my life.
* *
Back when everything around me came crashing down, when my One True Love broke my heart, I quit a full-time teaching job so that I could write, write, write. There was nothing else I wanted to do. Now, I’m reduced to a position where I’ve nothing else to do.
Writer. Just that, just to myself, just in front of the mirror.
I play wife, but the minute my husband walks out, I’m screaming yes yes yes yes yes yes in my head, and I obsess about what I need to be writing. Domestic chores do not allow me to work with deadlines. What propels me forward is my restless urge to tell a story.
It’s a novel about militant resistance to feudalism and caste. The characters in my book – still half-formed, as yet unnamed – stand up against the brute force of the state machinery, against the menacing threats of landlords. They march across me. They swear by the red flag of Communism, pay with their lives.
The theme is resistance and defiance.
Can I write this novel? Will the fear in my state of mind eat into my writing? Will I be betrayed by these words I choose? How many words can you write before they turn traitors?
I find myself incapable of writing even a single word.
The women in the book I’m supposed to be writing are so strong.
I’m nothing like them. My life shames me before my prose gets a similar chance.
* *
I find poetry easier. I try to bury my anger in words. As I sit and type at my laptop, tears running down my face, I realize he is watching me intently. There is something about my act of writing a poem that disturbs him deeply. He spies the irregular lines, the paragraph breaks, the jagged lines that could only belong to a poem. The fractured page crushes him. He comes close to me, and pleads: ‘No. Don’t do this. Don’t do this – for the sake of us, for the sake of our future. We can move away from our differences. If you put this within a poem, it will stay there, imprisoned forever. It will be a poison that will never let us move further, it will never let us forgive, or forget.’
I cannot agree with what he has to say. To me, it sounds strange, alien almost, to imagine that my poem will be the source of future trouble, that a poem will prevent us from healing. The poem is the
healing, I tell him. It’s by writing this that I can get over it.
He is vehemently against putting my pain into poetry. ‘No, no, that is not how it works.’ He is shouting at me. ‘You are missing the whole point about materialism. You think that materialism is merely believing only in the things that exist. To you, materialism is one of the ways in which you defend your atheism. That is a very shallow view. I take it seriously. I believe that as long as a material basis exists to remind us of the fights and misunderstandings that we have had, we can never truly transcend these troubles. We will be held back, against our will. Do not make the temporary into something permanent. Do not make a passing emotion into an objective reality.’
That is how it happens. A permanent injunction against my poetry.
* *
This entire discourse about materialism disappears when he is the one writing poems. When I try to remind him, he turns the arguments on their pretty heads.
‘Yes, I know this is material basis. Yes, I know that this will exist long after you and I have moved past this stage of fighting. I want this material to remain, to remind me of how cruel I have been, to never let me forget that I have wronged you, to make me feel truly guilty not only because I have hurt you, but also because I have forsaken my ideals, I have not behaved like a Communist.’
And how do you justify that your poems can be written, but that I cannot write poems on my marriage?
Once again, a play of words to justify the duplicity. ‘Your poems blame me. My poems blame me. There is a difference between the hatred that fuels your poems, and the self-criticism that forms the backbone of mine. Your poems label me and put me in a box, my poems struggle to move past my weaknesses.’
And that is that. In this marriage in which I’m beaten, he is the poet. And one of his opening lines of verse reads: