* *
Sex, actually rape, becomes his weapon to tame me. Your cunt will be ruined, 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 as wide as a begging bowl. Koodhi kizhinja, paati surukku pai pola iruppadi.
I imagine my vagina falling out of me like spare change. Not with jingling noises, but in a wet, pulpy, silent way, carrying the purple of dying roses.
When he takes me, I dream of how I’m going to lose this part of me.
Perhaps it’ll come away in slabs of blood and pink flesh. It may not go alone, bringing my uterus and ovaries out with it. On a toilet seat someday, 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 my legs are spread.
* *
As much as it resists rape, my body has also learnt how to surrender. It learns to shut its eyes, it learns to look away. It knows to kneel on all fours and await its own humiliation. It learns to play dead. It learns to wait. It learns to extend its own threshold of pain and shame and brutality. And yet, there is no such thing as preemptive sex. There is no way in which I can make an offering of voluntary sex to prevent myself from getting raped afterwards. It does not work like that. If there was, then I would have avoided many nights of rape.
* *
The shame of rape is the shame of the unspeakable. Women have found it easier to jump into fire, consume poison, blow themselves up as suicide bombers, than tell another soul about what happened. A rape is a fight you did not win. You could not win.
A rape is defeat.
* *
A rape is also punishment. Sometimes, the punishment for saying no. Sometimes, the punishment for a long-ago love story.
In Tamil culture, menstruation pollutes the body for a period of three days. After childbirth, the body remains polluted for eleven days; and for the death of a blood relative, we are considered soiled for sixteen days. For sex with another man before marriage, a husband considers his wife polluted for a lifetime. A body that is considered polluted can be punished as a man pleases. That is the philosophy of caste, that is the philosophy of my rape.
* *
How? is eight times more popular than its nearest interrogative rival, Who?
Where? When? Why? What? They come far, far behind on that list. Google will tell you this, when we, the people, ask about the questions that we, the people, ask.
My husband is like other people, his endless question-on-a-loop begins with How? But, my husband is also a unique individual, so he brings in his own addition.
He asks me, not How?, but How many?
As in: How many men have fucked you?
In his defence it could be argued that he simply likes to pay attention to detail.
* *
The coarseness of my husband’s insults makes me cringe. I’m ashamed that language allows a man to insult a woman in an infinite number of ways. Every image conjured up is repellent. Every part of my body is a word spat out in disgust. My cunt, sequestered and quarantined, is nothing but a spittoon for his insults.
Once, this language was something else for me. It was a secret place of pleasure. It was my face in the water, the sudden comfort of far-away laughter, the smell of wood-smoke clinging to my hair, the eager arrival of my breasts – it was all mine to explore. Like a lover’s body, there were things about my language that I thought only I knew.
I remember mining my language for words from the deepest, most forgotten seams, words that people no longer wrap around their tongues, words that stay mouldering in lexicons and old works of literature that nobody bothers to read anymore. I found the word for a flirtatious girl who chatters too much, the word for the first meeting of the eyes of two people who will eventually fall in love, the word for an intoxicating drink that induces dance. Keep in mind that this is a language where the word for obstinacy is also the word for intercourse.
Slut is not only a woman who wants sex, as in English. In this part of India, it is the dirty woman, but also the disrespectful one, the fight-loving woman, the quarrel-monger.
In Tamil, I discovered words to describe the delirious fever from aggressive sex and the deep sleep that immediately descends on satisfied lovers. One word, for the practice of having sex with a woman selected by a drawing of lots on a festive day, confirmed my worst suspicions about my culture.
Sex, as a sensory experience, lurks around other corners: there is a readymade word for the pervading smell that follows an act of coitus, another for the paleness that settles on a woman’s sad skin when her lover is long gone. My curiosity kept me engaged, kept me going back.
In the completely refined and absolutely unused formal version of my language, the word for blow job can also be loosely translated as a face-ride. In the same sanitized dictionary of this agglutinative tongue, the clitoris is, among other names, a compound word – yonilingam – the vagina penis. I joked about this juxtaposition with my politician-lover. He corrected me, wrote back to gently chide me that I should know better, this word is never on anyone’s lips, and introduced a word from the soft porn of his student days: mathanapeetam. The highest seat of lovemaking, the headquarters if you like.
Every once in a while I allowed my politician-lover to enter my translator’s territory. I gave him the unadulterated pleasure of etymology. Mulaikann. Eye of the breast. Areola. Mulaikaambu. Stalk of the breast. Nipple. And then again: mulai. Breast. Also meaning, as a verb, sprout. He would whisper the names to the parts of my body, using the rough words of the street, employing the same deliberate slowness as when he used the words of poets. I learnt from him a word for the wetness that wells up between a woman’s legs. I had never encountered that word before. This is one of those words that only travel within a language from lover to lover. Years later, I realized that though these words move in this slow, nomadic way, everyone, eventually, learns them.
* *
I try to reconcile the world that I witness with the linguistic theory that I have learnt.
Here, the inversion of Luce Irigaray. Not: Ta langue, dans ma bouche, m’a-t-elle obligée à parler? Not: Was it your tongue in my mouth that forced me into speech?
No, Lucy. Not speech, but silence.
Within my marriage, I have the conclusive results of scientific method: 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.
* *
As rapes become a regular occurrence, I reach the point of no return. I play rag-doll and normalize it; I learn to normalize the violence in his words. His insults degrade me, as if through the act of calling me whore and slut and every conceivable swear-word, my body becomes a necessary receptacle to this rape. Good women don’t have bad things happen to them – in order to be raped, I need first to be made into this caricature of a bad woman. This male psychosexual logic looks at penetration as punishment. This is the rape that disciplines, the rape that penalizes me for the life I have presumably led. This is the rape that tames, the rape that puts me on the path of being a good wife. This is the rape whose aim is to inspire regret in me. This is the rape whose aim is to make me understand that my husband can do with my body as he pleases. This is rape as ownership. This rape contains a husband’s rage against all the men who may have touched me, against all the men who may touch me, against all the men who may have desired me. This nightly rape comes with a one-point agenda: she must derive no pleasure from sex. And yet, whenever he takes me against my will, he taunts me for enjoying it. In his ironclad logic: I am a whore, so I can be raped; I let myself be raped, so I am a whore.
* *
Popular opinion suggests that the greatest Indian film ever made – a ‘curry western’ in Western academic classification – was Sholay. Unable to come to terms with the idea that I might end up being disappointed with the best
of Bollywood, I never watched it. But, like everyone who only reads about movies in newspapers, and never goes to cinemas or turns on the television, I know its most important line of dialogue.
Kitne aadmi thay?
How many men were there?
I do not know what comes before that line. I do not know what comes after. I do not know the context, except perhaps that the villain wants to know, and he is angry, and he is quite demanding. I hear this question again and again. In rough Tamil. Often, in bed, as he penetrates me.
When I hear my husband ask me howmanymen, I do not answer. I have not watched Sholay. I do not know what is the answer. I lie there dreaming of rocky hilltops and songs and dances and murders and gunshots.
* *
In a life I led long before I was married, I’m the poet who wrote: After the fifth man, every woman becomes a temple.
* *
‘Why are you so fascinated by other men?’ I ask in a low voice as we tour the marketplace together, picking out okra for dinner and giving tight smiles to the other shoppers. There are hundreds of people around us. It is the only reason I have the courage to ask him.
‘It’s you who are fascinated,’ he hisses back. ‘You dream of the day when you will carry your cunt into another man’s bed. Well, don’t. When I’m through, what you have will be torn and tattered. After a child, it will not even be recognizable.’
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.
XI
At the end of the day, we can endure
much more than we think we can.
FRIDA KAHLO
‘Will you walk out of this marriage?’
It’s a question I never answer one way or another. I answer him 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 back down.
* *
What happens to those not brave enough, I wonder? And what happens to those who are too brave for their own good?
Every day, newspapers smelling of fresh kill bring us morbidity from Central India. Defiant tribal women raped, mutilated and dressed up in combat gear for the photographs. Portrayed as Maoists because body counts help paramilitary forces. Their stark-naked corpses returned to their parents wrapped in clear plastic. Prisons filled to thrice the maximum capacity with young, idealistic men. The horrors of third-degree torture visited upon those who preach a different politics – tortures without traces. A long splinter from a coconut broom, doused in petrol, forced up the penis, followed by holding a lighter aflame at its orifice. An internal burn that no medical examination would red-flag. The unbearable, endless enumeration of these atrocities each passing day.
I wish I was just a writer taking in the tragedy.
I’m not. I’m wife. I watch my husband become unhinged and destabilized by the daily flow of reports. Afraid that the hunt will one day come to our doorstep, he begins to take a perverse pleasure in narrating and boasting of his guerrilla days.
‘I’ve smuggled AK47s. We ripped apart a Tata Safari and had the weapons fitted into the metal frame of the seats. I brought it along from Chhattisgarh to Chennai, right under the nose of the great Indian police.
‘I once ran a typing institute in the south. Decoy operation, I had to provide a cover for a senior leader who was undergoing treatment.
‘Had to kill a soldier once. He had fucked a girl against her will and was now torturing her little sister who he snatched from the road to school. The instruction was to throw him over the bridge. You want to know what I did? I disembowelled him. Not one man in his platoon would have the guts to be inappropriate to women after they saw his corpse. Even the party was angry that I went beyond my brief.
‘They had me sent to Bhutan to hide, afraid the forces would come after me. I became Thinley Dorji. I was to keep a low profile. Low profile doesn’t exist in my dictionary. In three months, I had perfected a plot to assassinate the king. They called me back to avoid trouble.’
The isolation of our marriage feeds his words. He speaks of his exploits unceasingly and in the most graphic language possible. I cannot rule out if all this is an experiment to control me. Having got used to the nightly bedroom violence, I have become less afraid and so the more menacing his storytelling grows. I can no longer sift fact from fiction.
* *
‘Will you walk out of this marriage?’
The old, familiar question after many days. He is sitting at the kitchen table, crossing and uncrossing his legs nervously. I refuse to answer him, instead I challenge him with a blank stare. He laughs aloud to dismiss his own anxiety.
He does not wait for my 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 in 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 man and are free to fuck around.
‘Now go, make yourself useful. I’m hungry.’
* *
What makes a woman stay in a marriage that she should have left the day before it even happened? The need to prove a point – to those who publicly bet that a woman writer like her cannot stay married for more than four weeks, to those who bet that she was incapable of commitment, to her mother who told her to wait till she was older to settle down. To add to the list there is fear; the pressure of family; and, also, hope.
Hope prevents me from taking my own life. Hope is the kind voice in my head that prevents me from fleeing. Hope is the traitor that chains me to this marriage.
The hope that things will change for the better tomorrow. The hope that he will eventually give up violence. Hope – as the cliché goes – is the last thing to disappear. I sometimes wish it had abandoned me first, with no farewell note or goodbye hug, and forced me to act.
* *
How could I rely on anyone to intervene?
I consider going to the police, but when I contemplate it in the solitude of lonely afternoons, I understand that it is impossible. If he caught scent of my plans, I know how he would react. He would surrender as a former Maoist fighter, claim the offered amnesty and rehabilitation money, and, in exchange for a new job and police protection, betray his comrades. He would probably want his revenge on me as well, so he would denounce me as a political courier, implicating me as a terrorist. Given a choice between punishing a wife-beating rapist, and having an opportunity to milk an ex-guerrilla for intelligence, I know where the interests of the state machinery would be.
For the sake of self-preservation, I know that the police route – the first port of call for any abused woman – is closed to me.
Family and friends are my only option. But he plays the role of dutiful son-in-law to my parents. He weeps over the phone to my father. He begs my mother to tell me to be more obedient. He tells his relatives that I do not feed him properly. He hints to the only neighbours around that I’m anti-social, that I’m one of the intellectual types who prefers her own company. The bigger the circle of spectators, the more nuanced his portrait of me becomes and the less inclined people are to believe that there is no substance to his lies. To women, he evokes sympathy by saying that I constantly compare him to other men. To men, he peddles the story that I’m jealous, that I do not tolerate his female students.
I’m the battered woman, but he is the one who is playing the role of the victim.
My escape cannot come
through these people. He is too effective at giving his version of events; too quick to ask grovellingly for their advice; too good at flattering them with his attentions. He pushes my friends and family into the territory of the neutral; he asks them to play fair. No one wants to give a guilty verdict to the man who is prepared to elevate them to the role of judge and jury.
* *
Every arbitration seems to end in his favour, yet it still does not placate him. He knows I am not bound to anyone else’s words or appeals. When arguments between us cannot be resolved by outside intervention, he resorts to threats. He instills a raw bleeding fear in me in the belief that I will be too afraid to act.
‘I will skin your scalp. It will be slow, but I will do a very thorough job of it. It will be very painful, but precision always has its element of pain. All this beauty that you boast about will be gone. Your hair will be gone. I will be kind. I will remove every mirror from your presence. This punishment is not only for you. You will not die. Not immediately anyway. I will call your father to come and collect you. You will stay alive long enough for him to reach here and see you in this state. And he will know then what happens when he brings up a whore. This is a price he has to pay. I will be long gone by then. You cannot find me. Your father cannot find me. You may go to the police, but wait, you will need to go to a hospital first. Or to the burial ground. And if the police come, even if they begin to hunt for me, they will never find me. I will go underground. I will be a different man with a new name and speaking another language. Even you will not be able to recognize me. The police cannot do anything. I know how to slip out of their hands. I’ve done it many times before.’
When I Hit You Page 11