When I Hit You

by Meena Kandasamy

  * *

  Another day, another story. Now, the scene shifts outside the four walls of our house. The claustrophobia that I feel must not infect the entire narrative. Sometimes, to step outside is to achieve breathing space.

  It’s nearly eleven o’clock. We’re leaving Chef Xinlai in Attavar, satisfyingly full of dumplings and egg drop soup, Singapore fried rice and chow mein. We’re holding hands. He looks happy, a little protective, even. I secretly wish we had more evenings out like this one. Good food that gives me a break from cooking. Getting away from our house to explore the town. The calm drowsiness we feel as we walk this long stretch back home in pitch darkness broken only by the lights of an occasional speeding motorbike or the glow from the kulfi shops that stay open at night.

  He remarks about how I’m more attuned to walking since I married him. It sounds like a compliment. He says it’s a sign of my giving up the perks of middle-class life. I grew up in a forest, I tell him. We went for walks every day.

  ‘Your parents have a car.’

  ‘They bought it on a loan last year. My mom had to work twenty-five years in the same job to be able to afford one.’

  ‘You don’t know what it is to walk as a poor person.’

  ‘And you do?’

  He’s silent for a moment. And then he snarls at me in the dark.

  ‘Nothing about you has changed, has it? I was a fucking fighter. Ordering chow mein is the closest your cunt has got to Maoism.’

  * *

  I’m a blinking red dot lying flat at the bottom left of a large, flat-screen monitor. The screen is blank except for a red star at the top right. Every time my husband gives me an orientation course about the revolution or a lesson in declassing, this red dot inches diagonally up the screen. This is my cunt moving closer to Maoism. The red dot fades to purple when it is undergoing a crash course in political economy. The red dot turns black during a session on self-criticism. The red dot turns white when it is in the process of learning. Whenever there is a slight move towards the star, the red dot flashes. This is accompanied by the sound of the same computer-generated applause that comes at the end of a game of Solitaire.

  I’m curious to find out what the red dot will do on a red letter day. My birthday.

  At the stroke of midnight, my mother calls to wish me many happy returns. My father won’t wish me happy returns, however, as he is unhappy himself: he thinks I’m not doing enough to make the marriage work, so he won’t come to the phone. I hear my mother pleading with him, but it is met by silence. She asks to speak to my husband, they exchange a few polite words, and then she hangs up.

  He stands there looking at me, before wrapping me up in an awkward hug. ‘Happy birthday,’ he whispers. This is my first birthday with him. I’m turning twenty-seven.

  He fetches a fruitcake from the fridge and I find myself oddly touched.

  I cut us both a slice and we eat in silence. When he swallows the last of his cake, he takes my hand in his.

  ‘I’ve made a compromise.’

  ‘By marrying me?’

  ‘No. By celebrating your birthday.’

  ‘But I didn’t ask you to.’

  ‘Yes. But you are used to it. It’s a middle-class girl thing. To make a big fuss about the day they were born.’

  ‘But you didn’t marry middle-class girls. You married me.’

  He abruptly drops my hand. ‘It’s these tiny compromises that erode me. It’s why I’m a married man today, instead of being a militant. I’m a salaried dog, instead of being underground. That’s the petit-bourgeois vacillation that Mao talks about.’

  I am taken aback by the sudden, intense turn of conversation. I try to lighten the mood.

  ‘I’ll try harder. Tell me, what does a true Communist do on his birthday, then?’

  ‘I observe my birthday on the day of martyrdom of Bhagat Singh. 23 March. That day, a true revolutionary was born, the day a great man was hanged by the British. That day has to be celebrated.’

  ‘Then next year, we’ll do it, comrade. We’ll shout lal salaam as well.’

  The humour doesn’t go down well. He is offended. He takes the remains of the cake, drops it into the bin and goes to bed.

  My birthday is just like any regular day. I stay at home. I make breakfast, lunch, dinner. I do the dishes. I sweep the floors. I fold clothes. I make coffee in the morning, tea in the evening. At night, I make the bed. We have sex before falling asleep. The only human interaction I have all day is with my husband.

  The red dot remains stationary.

  * *

  three four

  sweep the floor

  three four

  do the chore

  three four

  come here whore

  The rhymes run in my head.

  The rhymes help me keep count of the day’s progress: morning, noon and night.

  * *

  The smallest thing could spark a major fight: the level of salt in the pumpkin sambar, the excess oil in the groundnut chutney, the green chilli in the chicken curry, the headline in the newspaper, the suspicion that I went to the shop without wearing a dupatta, the agenda for the day, the shopping list I have forgotten to prepare, the laundry piling up, the failure to bring back the clothes left to dry in the porch the night before, which are now rain-soaked and mud-splattered and have to be washed again, the sticky kitchen floor, the slow speed at which I clear the dishes, his shirt and trousers that I have not ironed. He can be kind, I know he can, I’ve seen how tender he is with the homeless boys in town, but with me I know that he will always choose to be cruel.

  The red dot remembers the video games from its earlier life. Diablo. Mortal Kombat 3. It wants to fight back, draw its weapons and return fire, but somehow it always ends up shying away from fully fledged carnage.

  The red dot wants to stay safe. It is content to accept what it is given and do as it is told.

  * *

  Note to myself

  one two

  get a clue

  three four

  say no more

  five six

  take the risk

  seven eight

  try to fight

  nine ten

  a free woman

  * *

  My husband decides to set me free. Free of my past. Free of the burden of memory. Free of the burden of lost dreams. In setting me free, he says, he is setting himself free.

  He deletes the 25,600-odd emails from my Gmail inbox. All at one go. Then, to prevent me from writing to the Gmail help team and having my emails restored, he changes the password to something I do not know and cannot guess. He erases everything on my hard disk.

  Everything about my life as a writer is gone. There are no contacts. There is no email conversation that I can return to at a later date. There is no past. There are no drafts of poems I sent to friends. There are no love letters. There is no history of the emails my mother sent me, typing with one finger, telling me to stay warm in Shimla when I was there for a research seminar, telling me to call home often, telling me to be happy. There is no past. I am rendered a blank slate. My husband’s liberation comes from what he calls ‘annihilating all material basis of your engagement with the past’.

  The red dot now grows exponentially. This is the cultural revolution for a computer age. The red dot is now a red flag.

  * *

  Everyone at school had a hobby: they collected stamps, coins, baggage tags, train tickets, keychains, empty bottles, fridge magnets, or transfer tattoos that came with bubblegum packets. For a brief period, my hobby involved cutting out Heathcliff comic strips from Young World and pasting them into a fat notebook. The three minutes of precision cutting and sloppy pasting were followed by half an hour of liberally applying Fevicol on my palm, letting it dry and then peeling off glue that now looked like layers of skin. My father never noticed. My mother called it childish, but she was happy I kept myself busy with a cartoon of a misbehaving cat.

  Now, as a bor
ed housewife, who cannot even carry on the pretence of being a writer, I return to the restlessness of my childhood summers.

  I make up my own hobbies. They are all the lives I could be leading in a parallel universe.

  Post-doctoral fellow:

  A socio-linguistic study of a dysfunctional marriage

  Friday film critic:

  Short synopses of movies inspired by violent husbands

  Kindergarten teacher:

  Teaching how to count with the help of rhymes

  Games developer:

  Choose-the-ending virtual reality games to simulate marriage

  Anthropologist meets Agony Aunt meets

  The-Everything-Expert:

  Tracing the culture-specific evolutionary origins of everyday aggressions

  Hobby-maker:

  Suggesting hobbies for lonely, married women to keep themselves busy

  These games make me feel creative and resourceful. This could be the seed of a start-up. Or a salaried position: Artist-in-Forced-Residence.

  The red dot on the screen remains stationary.

  * *

  The biggest insult that can come a woman’s way from a left-winger husband are the dreaded words: ‘You are not fit for me to call you a comrade.’ This is when the red dot pales into insignificance, when it becomes so minuscule that it requires a microscope to be seen.

  It is an abject declaration of failure, but when my husband says these words, I hear them as a revelation. ‘Comrade’ and ‘human’ are interchangeable in his lexicon, so perhaps if I were fit to be called a comrade then he would begin treating me as a human? I spend several weeks setting about becoming the most credible, the most self-effacing, self-righteous, self-reflexive comrade that has ever worn a beret.

  I learn to criticize myself for who I am. I criticize myself for my reluctance about housework. I criticize myself for my choice of clothing. I try to point out the feudal remnants in my behaviour. I take blame for the petit-bourgeois mentality that I harbour. I concede that my feminism, with its obsession about sexuality, is a middle-class project that forgets the lived realities of millions of working-class women. In the same breath I also say that I continue to think that working-class women also have sexual desires and need equal rights, and that they need feminism too. When this is met with disdain and disapproval, I talk about why such a vacillation is a hallmark of the petit-bourgeois mind, and I promise to work on it by declassing myself. I explain why I have not yet read Mao on the eight kinds of writing. I do my best to criticize myself viciously until I become a ‘true comrade’.

  It feels like confession. It feels like what I imagine Sunday morning confession feels like to church-goers. It feels as if Communism was a religion, even if it swears that it is against religion.

  The red dot decides to equip itself with more knowledge. Reading is the way towards a revolutionary consciousness. The red dot tries to educate itself. It connects to the internet in the half an hour it is allowed access. It looks up information. It hopes to grow from strength to strength, until it is an enormous fiery red ball, like the sun itself. Sometimes, the information confounds the red dot.

  Criticism is a part of the Marxist dialectical method; as such, Communists must not fear it, but engage in it openly. (The members of Italian flagellant confraternities were deeply involved in promoting peace. They travelled from town to town, publicly flagellating themselves.)

  Criticism may take place along comradely lines, while at the same time a basic unity is felt and preserved. This is the dialectical method. (Their activity was invested with a variety of goals: as penance for and purgation from personal sin, as a sharing in the sufferings of Christ, a demonstration of love for and solidarity with Christ, and as expiation for the sins of humanity.)

  The red dot blinks furiously. The blinking causes the system to hang.

  * *

  The red dot plays anthropologist in the marriage. Its method: participant-observation. It is a bit of both: participant and observer.

  The hallmark of an anthropologist is the willingness to try. (That’s from Valentine. No, not the saint, a different Valentine.)

  So it tries, and tries hard to familiarize itself with the field.

  The act of making the strange familiar always makes the familiar a little bit strange. (That’s from Wagner. No, not the composer.)

  And the more familiar the strange becomes, the more and more strange the familiar appears. That’s how the once-upon-a-time fiery feminist becomes a battered wife. By observing, but not doing anything. By experiencing, but not understanding. By recording but not judging.

  By getting used. By no longer being the outsider. By becoming the native informant. By becoming the specimen in a lab, by becoming the case study.

  The red dot needs to be saved from itself.

  * *

  Today, still smarting from its emptied inbox, the red dot prowls the internet looking for information about the destruction of material basis as a method for revolutionary transformation. It comes across an artist.

  Michael Landy made an inventory of everything he owned: every item of furniture, every book, every piece of food, every cat toy… The list took three years to complete and it contained 7,227 items. Then, with the help of a large machine and an overall-clad team of operatives, he set about destroying it all. After two weeks nothing but powder remained.

  His work is called Break Down.

  The red dot now becomes a big red bleeding heart.

  * *

  Although it is diminutive, the red dot jumps into major-league action soon enough. It has the secret pent-up energy of bored housewives.

  The red dot remembers that ever since it started gaining the upper hand in arguments by quoting the same men as its adversary and arch-rival – Marx and Mao and other scarecrows – its intelligence has been insulted by claims that it is not dialectically right, that it lacks the capability to conduct a decent argument, that it does not accept criticism, that it is incapable of nuance, that its logic is inconsistent.

  It schools itself in a treatise on how to debate. It learns the tightrope walk of dialectics. It learns to hold its own against rhetorical somersaulting. On those evenings, the red dot is a sharp round stone in a slingshot.

  But the red dot also knows that what my husband needs is only a provocation. Something that sets him on fire, credible enough to incense him, harmful enough to make him rage through the evening, malleable enough for it all to become about my past rather than our present. So, packed with the awareness that Communism with this comrade is only control and punishment, the red dot must sometimes forgo its own ideals and back down. It stage-manages a fight of its own making; it creates its own confusion; it admits fault; it defuses him by giving him a chance to lecture; it props up a dummy altercation to prevent itself from becoming the whore while the husband becomes the abuser.

  On those evenings, in self-defence mode, the red dot becomes a smoke bomb.

  IX

  Watch out for love

  (unless it is true,

  and every part of you says yes including the toes),

  it will wrap you up like a mummy,

  and your scream won’t be heard

  and none of your running will end.

  ANNE SEXTON,

  ‘ADMONITIONS TO A SPECIAL PERSON’

  Always heed the warning.

  Love will let you down.

  * *

  I stammer.

  I stutter.

  I sandbag my husband in the silences between my utterances.

  With a man who has rehearsed his accusations, and your responses, and his response to your response, and so on, to the nth conceivable degree, with a man who will never hesitate to raise his hand to you if all else fails, with this man, to shout or argue is to lose.

  To be unsure, however, is to take him by surprise; to take him by surprise is to have a fighting chance.

  * *

  This battle of the adversaries is structured like a chess game.
Here, there are only two players. I’m the king, constantly under threat. I’m the king, who can move only one step at any given time. He’s the drama queen. There is no move that he cannot make. The board is empty except for us. He corners me wherever I move. There is no hiding. In the end, he always corners me.

  ‘Your violence is the violence of the Indian state,’ he tells me. ‘Your violence is structural. My violence is the counter-violence of the insurgents who are fighting for the rights of the people, the counter-violence of the women who blow themselves up to declare their nation’s struggle for self-determination, the counter-violence of a little Kashmiri boy throwing a stone at a soldier. His act of violence is an act to oppose the violence of the Indian state. Edward Said threw stones at the Israelis. I am not ashamed of my violence. I am proud of it. I am not a liberal, or a democrat. My violence is a reaction to your violence. Your violence is your effort to emasculate me, to live the life of middle-class luxury, to go on talking about your feminism.’

  I’m now the repressive apparatus of the state.

  He is the guerrilla warrior.

  This is his stubborn song.

  This is an unequal war.

  * *

  If I stand up to him, if I shout back at him, he calls me mad. When I dismiss such a glib label, he says that it is the nature of mad people to claim to be sane.

  I see, it is no longer fashionable to be mad. Depression is the word, isn’t it? Three inches of cleavage, two books of poetry, plenty of sex and depression – that’s all it takes to make a woman a famous writer. Beginning from Sylvia Plath to Kamala Das, that is the only trajectory you have all followed.

  What I’m undergoing seems to me something far more colossal than a darkness in my head. ‘Depression’ is the label that he applies to my state of mind, my sense of life.

  Depression is the disease that only middle-class women nurture and put on display to the world.

  Depression, a symbol of the meaninglessness of bourgeois existence.

  Depression is a career choice for you. Without that, you are nothing.

  Depression: how much more individualistic can you be?

  Depression, the privileged woman’s sole ticket to victimhood.

  Depression – like the cunning politician who killed his mother on the eve of election day – a raft on which to ride a wave of sympathy.