It’s not always this way, of course. Some people are kind. They want to tell you about the entire range of human emotions you’re missing out on, which you cannot possibly know about until you’ve squeezed a thirty-five-centimetre head through your vaginal introitus. They’ll tell you that until you’ve held a being of your own living blood in your arms and looked into its eyes, you haven’t really understood the power of love. And this is somehow more offensive to me, because if love were really going to be judged as if it were a hierarchy, then surely a more powerful kind of love is that which is inexplicable, which has no familial DNA running through its cells? You’d think that a person who ethically chooses not to overpopulate an already overpopulated planet would be congratulated for her choice. That Indians, with our 1.2 billion and still going strong, would have greater appreciation for this gesture of stepping out of the genealogical race. But no.
Why is it that people who don’t have children are by and large respectful of the decisions of people who have them, but rarely vice versa? I would never (although I’ve often dreamed it) go up to a family on a day when they’re at their spectacular unbest and say, ‘Excuse me, but do you ever regret having children?’
And yet, people who proselytise about parenthood are free to pronounce, ‘Oh, you’ll change your mind eventually’, or ‘You’ll regret it’. But before I can holler ‘Glorify it as much as you want, but your little bundle of joy has arrived on this planet only by way of a (choose your adjective) sweaty/prolonged/painful/blissful/hesitating/steadfast/forgettable fuck,’ they’ve already rushed back to their harried lives.
Lying at the leafy nub of this debate is, of course, the idea of womanhood. To be a man who decides not to have children barely registers on the seismograph. To be a woman who says ‘Actually, babies aren’t for me’ is to unleash a minor tsunami. It isn’t just a personal rejection of what’s considered a woman’s unique quality – her ability to bear children – but a challenge to the entire society.
From my late twenties to my mid-thirties, every birthday that passed was signalled by my mother saying, ‘When I was your age, I had babies/toddlers/school-going children.’ She didn’t press too much, but there was always this gentle urging. What will you do when you get older? Won’t you regret it? Won’t you be lonely without a family? At some stage these exhortations ceased. There seemed to be a realisation on her part that I had chosen a radically different life from hers, and that this was okay. But more importantly, that my life-choices were in no way a backlash against her choices. That by choosing childlessness I was not undermining her entire adult life, which was, first and foremost, to be a mother.
There will always be moments when I think, What if? What if my mother was right? What if that condescending classmate had a point when he said having a child would do me good?
During an interview in Germany once, Chandralekha was asked whether she ever regretted not having children. And Chandra, in the way that only a dancer can, cupped her breasts and said that she was proud of her ‘undrunk breasts’. In Sanskrit, there is a term for it – apina vakshoruham.
Chandra did not have an easy time of it. Her rebelliousness had ostracised her several times over. In some respect, she must have thrived on it. ‘I exist in spite of you,’ is what she liked to say, of institutions, of the government, of anyone who tried to box her in. Ironically, towards the end of her life she became something of a national treasure. Officials (the kind she despised for their fickle sycophancy) dived at her feet for blessings, newspapers extolled her work as groundbreaking. And because I only knew her in the last five years of her life; because I saw her struggle with the decay of her body, which for a dancer is no easy thing; because I was there the morning we carried her body out from her house of swings, I saw how surrounded by love she had always been. That while she must have suffered and sacrificed, as we all do, this was a woman who had lived the life she constructed for herself, who had made of her friends a family. And it was what I set out to do myself. Not with quite her brand of ferocity, but with the knowledge, at least, that it was possible.
‘Mothers … If only we could be born without them.’
– All Decent Animals, Oonya Kempadoo
Let’s get back to that ungainly stegosaurus in the room: sex.
It used to be that to make a child, sex was involved. Sex for homo sapiens is a legitimate biological urge, yet we’re so hung up about sex that in cultures across the world there have been concerted efforts to separate the act of sex from the act of birthing. Ergo, baby lore such as: We found your sister under the cabbage patch! Or, the stork brought her! Or some other cock-and-bull story along the lines of birds and bees in order to make the whole enterprise respectable. Now, of course, Assisted Reproductive Technology has changed everything, and made it so a man in a dark room with a cup and a woman renting her womb in a surrogacy clinic can produce a baby without even holding hands. Parents can truthfully say ‘The petri dish brought her!’
Surrogacy in India is a multi-billion dollar industry, but it has been likened to a Wild West situation, given there is very little legislation in place to protect the surrogate mothers. These surrogates are often from indigent backgrounds. They aren’t allowed to have natural births. They cannot touch or see the child once it’s born. They must often stay in the clinic for the entire duration of the pregnancy to ensure nutrition levels are met. They are not paid if they miscarry. If the surrogate happens to die due to complications connected with childbirth, her family won’t be compensated properly. Besides all these possible pitfalls the surrogate must also bear a degree of social stigma because the act of carrying another man’s child in some communities is bizarrely equated with prostitution. For all their efforts, these women are paid US$5000. But make no mistake about it: India loves her mothers.
Nostalgia for a road not taken is inevitable with most hard-wrought choices. But when you live in India, where the pressures and expectations of motherhood perpetually press down on you from all sides, the what-ifs can be particularly poignant. After all, what can we say of the future of a childless woman among these myriad kingdoms of families? Will she really lose her sense of beauty and strength once she is past child-bearing age? How will this affect her identity? Will she really be alone? These are the questions I hope to find answers to, or at least illuminations of, in my lifetime.
It was shocking, in a way, for me to encounter Chandralekha in the city of my birth. To sit on the parapet of the beach outside her home and talk of this and that while watching the rising moon. ‘Always walk alone,’ she told me. ‘A woman is nothing without a sense of politics and sexuality,’ she told me.
But remembering her this way makes her sound so much more serious than she could be. For she was childlike as well, took delight in staying awake to watch the petals of a lotus open and close, or to catch a mongoose skittering across the garden. Her house was a house of swings and all kinds of people would pass through it – doctors, painters, mango farmers, poets. They eschewed gossip and the usual dinner-table banter, spoke instead of real things. Of politics and desire and resistance. I had travelled all the seven continents of the world and never met a woman like her. I suspect I never will again.
When I was thirty-five I met a man who gave me reason to pause. I knew I would marry him within months of meeting him, and in the most abstract fashion I began to fantasise about the kind of children we might have. There was just one thing, though: he already had a child. A sweet, seven-year-old boy I’ll call Tom. Every time I saw Tom, I used to think just one thing. You guessed it! Two people had sex to make this boy, and one of them was my soon-to-be husband.
At thirty-five you don’t expect your relationships to arrive in a quiet fashion or to be unsullied. But the presence of this child, even though he lived for the most part with his mother, tore me up. It wasn’t so much retroactive jealousy, but the foreverness of the situation pressed down on me like an entire galaxy. From here on out, till Tom came of age – summers, Christmases,
New Years, birthdays – all plans hinged on the vagaries of a woman I had nothing to do with.
And there was the question of Tom’s face – his mother’s startling wide-set eyes, her chin, her pursed lips. His father’s eyebrows and high forehead. A crucible of genes collected in his face, which served as a reminder of all the sex that had gone into making him, all the ideals and dreams and whispered words that might have accompanied that act of sex.
I was a mess. For the first few years, when Tom visited us, I frequently found myself bawling on the floor of the bathroom. Real, drawn-out howling, the kind I hadn’t engaged in since I was a teenager. It was unbearable for me to watch my husband morph from my lover to someone’s father. He was so good at fathering: intelligent, funny, tender, wise. But it was as if he could be just the one thing: lover or father. And because he suffered the guilt that most separated fathers feel (rightly so), the time that he and Tom spent together was always a kind of grasping, cloistered, intense twoness, which left little room for me.
I began to think that my emotional state was merely my body’s way of saying ‘Hey, I want one too.’ Girlfriends would visit with their kids, which always heightened the baby dilemma. We’d begin chatting, but before anyone could really hit their stride, sentences were forcibly abandoned, words and ideas kneeled in submission to the little person, close at hand, who always had something to say that was far more important. Goo-goo, ga-ga. I shared the love, read storybooks, treasured the crayon masterpieces. And as soon as they left, when the house was a quiet cathedral again, I’d breathe easy and think, ‘No, I don’t want a baby.’
What I wanted was a life of freedom, of travel and writing and friendships. But I now loved someone who had a child, so, by default, I was going to have to make space for that child in my life. It’s taken five years and, while the writhing incidents on the bathroom tiles have come to a halt, there are still twinges. Particularly when I see how their bodies tuck into each other, the limbs, the resting head on shoulder. I know I will never have that kind of physicality, that kind of unquestionable belonging. And I know that part of the bitter-sweetness of it is that I can’t forge ahead with my freedom in entirety, that I must always be reminded of my decision not to, because from time to time, I must watch father and son stride off into the sunset, while I teeter awkwardly in their wake. And I’m okay with that. Sort of.
I’ve learned to excuse myself from the drudgery duties of parenting, like trips to Disneyland and school performances, to engage instead with the marvel of how a human being grows and changes and finds his place in the world. It turns out I’m able to share a stake in this child. To see him as his own entity – separate from his genes and the history of intimacy that made him. And perhaps, one day, even to love him.
SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE
ANONYMOUS
Always heed the warning.
Love will let you down.
I never knew rape until it happened to me. It was a concept – of savagery, of violence, of violation, of disrespect of a woman’s body. I had read my share of Kate Millett and Susan Brownmiller but nothing prepared me for how to handle it. Within a marriage, fighting back comes with its consequences. The man who rapes me is not a stranger who runs away. He is not the silhouette in the car park, he is not the masked assaulter, he is not the acquaintance who has spiked my drink. He is someone who wakes up next to me. He is the husband for whom I have to make the morning coffee. He is the husband who can shrug it away and ask me to stop imagining things. He can blame his actions on unrestrained desire the next day.
There are no screams that are loud enough to make a husband stop. There are no screams that cannot be silenced by the shock of a tight slap. There is no rigidity that can guarantee a shield against penetration. He covers himself with enough lubricant to slide past all my resistance. My legs go limp. I come apart.
The rape that happens to a grown woman is different from the rape of a child. When I was little, I did not know what was going on, or its magnitude. I did not know that I was the same as the grown man forcing himself on me – I was small, I was powerless, I was sad; everybody thought I told lies all the time.
A million things happen in a child’s mind; a million things happen to a child’s body. But, to an eight-year-old, something has happened only if there are adult witnesses, only if others agree that it actually happened. A man sticking his fingers into me, a man pushing his penis between my thighs, is as real as my grandmother giving a bigger portion of the cake to my younger cousin. No one else sees the partiality, so it does not exist. No one else sees the creepy fingers, no one else notices the sticky white thing he leaves on me, so it does not exist. Everything else is make-believe. Child, don’t make up these stories, they say.
The child grows up to be a storyteller. Sadly, that eight-year-old girl also becomes a woman who can confirm the world for herself. She does not need adult witnesses. She feels its footsteps as it makes its way towards her, she recognises a rape even before it looks her in the face.
‘Will you walk out of this marriage?’
It’s a question I never answer one way or another. I answer my husband with other questions, or with a declaration of everlasting love.
There’s no honest answer. Only answers that make my life safer, the nights less painful.
The brave die every day because they do not get broken.
‘Will you walk out of this marriage?’
This time he does not even wait for an answer. He provides it.
‘Nobody is going to save you. The men who are out there, waiting for you to walk out, are waiting for their turn to ride you. The women cheering you to leave me have two intentions – they want to see you ruined, lonely, miserable. Or they want a drama absent from their own lives. If you’re banking on these men or women to fix up your life, you are making a mistake.
‘Your fellow feminists, middle-class petit-bourgeois women, have found the “freedom” they need by getting rid of their men and are free to fuck around. When they get you, it means more holes at their orgies. They’ll invite three more men. If that’s the freedom you’re looking for, leave me now.
‘Go, make yourself useful.’
I try to marry the world that I witness with the linguistic theory that I have learned.
Man made language. I have read that bit.
Man made language to (also) rape women with his words. This, I learn. This, I experience. This, I hear from my husband’s mouth. When he begins to shout, I shrink from shame.
Here, the inversion of Luce Irigaray. Not: Ta langue, dans ma bouche, m’a-t-elle obligée à parler? Was it your tongue in my mouth that forced me into speech?
No, Lucy. Not speech, but silence.
This is never a question to be answered, not something to be taken up for consideration. Within my marriage, I have the stock-sure method of knowing: it was your tongue in your mouth that forced me into silence. It was your tongue in your mouth that forced me into submission. And then, it was your tongue in my mouth that forced me.
Sex, actually rape, becomes his weapon to tame me. Your cunt will come apart, he tells me. Your cunt will turn so wasted, so useless, you will never be able to offer yourself to any man. It’ll be the loosest bag, a literal begging bowl. Koodhi kizhinja, paati surukku pai pola iruppadi.
I imagine it falling out of me like spare change. Not with jingling noises, but in a squishy, silent way, of something habituated to water. Carrying the purple of dying roses.
When he takes me, I dream of how I’m going to lose it.
Perhaps it’ll come away in slabs of blood and pink flesh. It may not go alone, bringing my uterus and woman parts out with it. On a toilet seat some day, I will notice that I’m passing my pleasure. A slow death by disintegration.
The fear makes me withdraw into myself. The terror seizes me like a spirit the minute I spread my legs.
‘Why are you so fascinated by other men?’
It’s the only question that I summon the courage to ask.
‘Don’t dream of it,’ he tells me. ‘Don’t dream of a day where you will carry your cunt into another man’s bed. When I’m through, what you have will be torn, tattered. After a child, it will not even be recognisable.’
That is the aim of his rapes, all this rough sex. Not just a disciplining, but a disabling. He believes that after him, I will have nothing left in me to love, to make love, to give pleasure.
This is a man breaking his own wife. This is a man burning down his own house.
I need to run away, I need to run away, I need to run away.
All that I need, I carry with me. My bag holds it all.
Passport. ATM card. Laptop. My phone, which he never let me use.
All of this is mine.
This is all I could think of taking. This is all I had the time to take.
Walking Towards Ourselves Page 15