When I Hit You

by Meena Kandasamy

  It is incredible, his monologue. In his words, I find the feverish mirror image of his enemy: the state machinery chopping off breasts of female fighters, splashing captured militants with acid, yanking away their limbs to let them bleed to death, dancing with its military boots on the faces of slain guerrillas to render them beyond recognition. I search his eyes for just a glimpse that he recognizes how absurd he sounds, how inhuman he has himself become, but the hollow look he returns is of something that has become extinct.

  * *

  I have watched him play all the roles. The doting husband in the presence of his colleagues, the harassed victim of a suspicious wife to his male friends, the unjustly emasculated man to my female friends, the pleading son-in-law to my parents. The role of would-be-murderer, however, is new. I try to forget the haunting image of the white of my skull. Instead, I retreat to the comfort of the cinematic imagination. The scene forms itself. I’m lying dead in a room, looking at my corpse from outside a window. It has no hair, of course, but also no eyes. It has no mouth. It has achieved the blankness that I never managed to achieve in life. The rain lashes around and through my ghost. I picture my husband in the white clothing of a sad widower. He is sitting cross-legged on the floor. I see him with his head shorn of all hair, wearing his symbolism of heartbreak as evidence of his love. I hear him weep the most moving lament. I see him beat his head and chest. He looks broken. Between my fresh corpse and his exaggerated sorrow, my ghost-heart breaks for him. The image of my death makes him appear as the one who has lost something, not the other way around. I walk away from the window with very hesitant steps, leaving my corpse there with him. I’m on the highway. The scene dissolves with a rain-drenched shot of a city that is a stranger to me.

  When I cut back to reality, there’s a part of me that scoffs at the possibility of him going so far as to kill me. Then again, four months ago, I would have scoffed at the idea of being beaten by a man, or being raped by my husband. I put myself back on screen. This time I’m sitting in Morgan Freeman’s white God chair, swivelling around and smoking a cigarette. I hear myself speak in the voice of God. You are more useful alive than dead. You are more useful alive than dead. You are more useful alive than dead.

  I do not want to do anything that would endanger my life. I do not want to do anything that would allow my killer to pretend to be the bereaved husband enveloped in an aura of tragedy. So, I stay quiet and do as I’m told.

  * *

  In the beginning, only widows were burnt to death: tied to their dead man’s pyre and set alight. That was because they wanted to get rid of the surplus women in society, they wanted to preserve the caste order. And then, when we got rid of one evil, another started to take its place. In the greedy quest for more and more dowry, or because women did not give birth to sons, or because they refused to sleep with their husbands every night, our culture started burning brides.

  Tradition never goes out of fashion. Remaining in public memory, it wears new clothes. In India, a bride is burnt every ninety minutes. The time it takes to fix a quick dinner. The time it takes to do the dishes. The time it takes to wash a load of clothing. The time it takes to commute to work. This is the official statistic – the deaths the police do not even bother trying to hide in semantics. The real truth lies in the wailing that never ceases at the burns wards of hospitals.

  Stuck here alone, I count the passage of hours by the number of brides who have been burnt to death. At least a hundred women reduced to their charred remains every week. Their murders written away as suicides or mishaps, a test of fire where no wife returns alive.

  Fire has been established as the easiest way to kill an unnecessary wife. Knives, poisoning, hanging – the needle of suspicion in other methods of murder would point to the husband. Fire can be faked, however, made to look like a real accident. The fear of being burnt to death seizes me. Fear takes me to strange places. It paralyses me. Even in the middle of a downpour, I leave the windows open before I switch on the gas stove. I light matchsticks in the empty air before I open the valve of the gas cylinder. I step into my kitchen like someone steps into a land filled with Claymore mines.

  Marriage has made sure that this is the space where I spend most of my living day. I do not want my kitchen to become my funeral pyre.

  * *

  My fears multiply like rats in monsoon season. Getting restless at night, their constant, scurrying feet prevent me from falling asleep. As I lie next to my husband, I’m aware of their presence all the time. Something gnaws at my fingers and nips at my toes. Something that eludes being captured or sighted. I try to trace them, lay little traps for them where I can, find out how many of them exist. Most of them have come from my husband, because he has himself made these threats, never mincing his words. Others come from what I have read in the papers, seen on television serials, heard in general gossip-at-large, the word on the street. The ability to pin them down and list them out sets me at peace. As if the information would empower me, as if knowing more would banish all the fears.

  What haunts me most now was a story that at first had me laughing. During a semester when I learnt about French philosophers, the six of us who had chosen the elective prevented our degeneration into abstraction by digging up all the dirt we could find on everyone in our reading list. We were outraged that Simone de Beauvoir had passed on her young lovers to Sartre; sad that the world had lost Foucault to AIDS; engrossed with the entire Spivak–Kristeva female rivalry. That no one in the city, outside of the half a dozen of us, cared about these stories only encouraged us. That is where I first heard the story that holds me hostage today. First, it started as a joke – Althusser learnt to masturbate only in his twenties; intellectually overdeveloped, sexually underdeveloped. But then Althusser wasn’t a laughing matter anymore, because one day I discovered that he had strangled his wife to death.

  Later, in his memoirs, he would write about this. In slow, meandering prose he would describe how he was massaging her neck, how he pressed his thumbs into the hollow at the top of her breastbone, how he moved them both, one to the left, one to the right up towards her ears where the flesh was hard, how the muscles in his forearms began to feel very tired, how *he* was terror-struck that *her* eyes stared interminably. He would later argue that this was how his wife would have wanted it. He would rationalize it with his theory as suicide-by-proxy. A kind of non-consensual consent. A no meaning a yes. She wanted it. His followers would advance the argument that her body did not show any evidence of struggle. Because he was an intellectual, he had the guile to legitimize the murder. Because he was an influential professor, he could make others stand in his support. Because he had an anti-establishment reputation, even the state absolved him.

  Althusser’s wife: her name was Hélène. I remember that clearly. She was killed, she could not tell her story. He had lived long enough afterward not only to tell his story, but also to cast himself as the victim. I am afraid of becoming her.

  This fear is the permanent attic-rat-in-residence. This is the fear that does not go away.

  * *

  There is the fear of death and dying and being killed. Then, there is the other fear. The life sentence in lieu of the death warrant. The fear that I grow afraid of naming, that is wrapped tight around me like skin on a garlic pod, that restricts my breathing, that I sidestep instead of confronting: the fear of giving birth.

  This marriage, oppressive and impossible as it is, does not have the power to hold me hostage forever. But, if I were to be burdened with a child, I do not know how I could walk away. I anticipate my parents forcing me to stay with him for the sake of society, I anticipate society asking me to stay with him for the sake of the child, I anticipate my own child asking me to stay with him for the sake of family reputation. I cannot have that happening.

  In Tamil, there is a beautiful word for the womb. Karuvarai. The room of the foetus. Karuvarai. It is what the inner sanctum of a temple is called, where a god or a goddess resides. It is a p
lace of peace. To keep it empty is what I have decided to do. My husband has other ideas.

  XII

  She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

  ZORA NEALE HURSTON,

  THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

  Four months into marriage, polite enquiries about providing ‘good news’ have already turned into a pressing demand to produce a child. My husband is the only male heir for his grandparents on both sides, and this fact blossoms into questions on the future of this family tree. For reasons beyond posterity, my husband has also become convinced that what is lacking in our marriage is a child. He sees it as a measure that will fix our relationship and bind us together.

  A visit to the gynaecologist is the first step. But I do not want the child of a man who beats me. I do not want to carry a child and bring it into a world because I was raped within a marriage, on a bed where my ‘no’ held no meaning. I’m distraught. I fight to stay back at home. He throws things around the house. He leaves a ladle on the gas stove, threatens to burn himself if I do not go with him. I will him to do it; I want him to hurt. I refuse to leave the house. Calmly, he removes the red-hot ladle from the stove and pushes it into the flesh of his left calf, right above the ankle. I miss the hiss of scorching skin because I begin to scream. I disarm him. I pull him away. He is insistent that we leave immediately, that we do not miss the appointment. He doesn’t even stop to attend to the dark shape of the burn. I follow him mutely into an auto-rickshaw.

  It’s a dark night, there are dim lights on the street, the rain is a shroud on the city. The auto-driver is a silhouette against the road. My husband, tall and imposing, is another silhouette. His form fills the entire space of the auto, but he somehow feels absent; his face impassive in the shadows. The city passes through me as we drive. In that darkness, his phone rings. He answers it and greets a man from his village. They talk, they talk about me, and then he holds the phone out to me. ‘My vagrant cousin, he wants to say hello.’

  ‘Hello? Hello?’ Then, a low voice, abrupt and direct, whispers into the shell of my ear: ‘Your husband acts like Mister Righteous. He is a fraud. The biggest fraud in our village. He was married before he married you.’ I am stunned. The words loop through my head: ‘He was married before he married you.’ I don’t know how to respond, but the next second, the cousin slides back into everyday prattle. ‘What did you make for lunch today? You must come to the village sometime. I have only seen you in the photographs, this is the first time I’m talking to you, this makes me very happy. You take care of my cousin brother.’ In a daze, I continue this conversation until we reach the clinic, and then I say goodbye and hand the phone back to my husband. A group of women walk past as I climb from the auto-rickshaw. They cackle with laughter. A lucky girl managed to escape being his wife. If she did, I can too. I smile at the retreating backs of the women.

  * *

  The doctor wants to know how long we have been married. She wants to know the date of my last period. Not regular, it is as moody as I am. She prescribes birth-control pills. My husband freaks out. ‘We are trying to have a baby. We want a baby. Do you understand?’

  The doctor remains calm. ‘This is to regularize her periods. She cannot conceive unless her calendar is in place.’

  He remains defiant and asks her to find a way where I don’t have to take these tablets. ‘Hormones never did anyone any good.’ So, the doctor amicably opts out, and sings the virtues of multi-vitamins and folic acid. Having a baby is only a matter of discussion between the doctor and the husband. The woman does not ask me if I want a baby, if I am ready for a baby, if I am happy with my husband, if I have any problems that I might want to discuss. She asks him to take me to a medical centre for a scan so that she can decide the further course of treatment.

  Violence is not something that advertises itself. It is not written on my face – he is too careful for that, of course, aiming his fists at my body. As long as a woman cannot speak, as long as those to whom she speaks do not listen, the violence is unending.

  * *

  My mother on the phone:

  A child is not a bad idea. He will become more gentle when he is a father. I’m a mother. Babies have that effect, they can tame brutes.

  When you have a child, try to move back to Chennai. There will be an element of control. We can intervene. He cannot carry on in this fashion here. Right now he is on an ego-trip. He will eventually climb down. When he looks at the face of a child, he cannot beat the mother as he pleases. When the child grows up, it will tell him to get lost if he raises his hand against you. Anyway, if he’s beating you, it only shows he has run out of arguments. Just be patient, dear. Buy yourself time, bring him here. Please do not lose hope. Do not act in haste. Take care.

  * *

  The man’s fluids form the bones. The woman’s fluids form the flesh. This is the belief of elders in my ancestral village. This is how they think life begins. I do not think they have got it wrong at all. They just do not know that when a child forms inside the womb of a sad, broken woman, its little heart will be made up of her tears.

  * *

  Mangalore’s oppressive heat at noon. A heat that will not subside until the sky tears itself into a thousand pieces and begins to rain down.

  I reach the medical centre. I have had the recommended two glasses of water. When I meet my husband in the waiting room, he presents me with a tender coconut, full of milk. It is not a gift but a precaution. My name is called for the pelvic exam and the doctor positions me under the machine, but after several moments of button pushing and sighing, he sends me back saying the quantity of the water in me is still insufficient for the machine to light up my insides.

  My husband is furious. He calls up my father and weeps to him. ‘Your daughter has new-fangled ideas. She thinks she is Miss World. She wants to maintain her figure. She does not drink water. She does not want to have my children.’

  He fetches a two-litre bottle of water from the reception and orders me to drink it. I put the neck to my lips and tip the bottle. ‘Faster,’ he orders, lifting the bottle to a sharper angle. ‘Faster.’ Halfway through I wrench the bottle away, gasping for air. I tell him I cannot take it anymore, that I’m going to drown. He slaps me in front of everyone. The people in the waiting room either watch or avert their eyes. To them, this is just an overexcited man eager to be a father. They do not know what I live through. Or maybe they all know, and everyone takes it for granted. Or everyone believes, like I sometimes do, that the next day would be better.

  I put the bottle to my mouth again and drink. Almost immediately, I feel nauseous and before long I’m vomiting water down my chest. He is disgusted. ‘Imagine this is a literary festival. Imagine this nurse is Arundhati Roy. Imagine these people are some of your fucking writers. Will you throw up then? Hold it in. Behave yourself. You have no responsibility. You have no intention of being either a wife or a mother. Thousands of women have scans every day, but the only one making a scene is you. You want to keep your size zero frame. You are a zero yourself. You do not want my children. You will be out of business as a whore if you become a mother. Why do you torture me?’

  * *

  He is right. I do not want his baby. I cannot bring a baby into a world in which I have no love. I do not want to bring into the world a son who will watch his mother being beaten up, I do not want to bring into the world a daughter who will be beaten up.

  When my scan is over, the doctor compliments me on having such a loving husband; on being married to such a devoted, doting man, the lecturer who takes a long lunch break so that he can be by the side of his wife when she is undergoing an ultrasound of her pelvis.

  At no time does he give me an opportunity to talk to him. At no time does he ask me how I am. Even if he had, how could I open up to strangers who buy the fiction performed for their benefit?

  We appear helpless in front of doctors and they heal us. They protect us. Perhaps there
was a part of me that had believed that doctors would protect me, would stop this enforced fertility treatment, would come to my rescue. It is only now, finally, that I realize that if I want to be rescued, I’ll have to do it myself.

  * *

  My skills in the kitchen are summoned forth in my secret plan of foiling Project Baby. The breakfast chutneys for the dosa that I make no longer contain only groundnuts, green chillies and onion, but I toss in a spoon of white sesame seeds. I follow the whispers of teenaged years, when girls with delayed periods, girls who had sex without condoms, girls who were married early kept motherhood at bay with kitchen ingredients. In my fish curry, the tang comes not from tomato or tamarind – I introduce the pulp of raw, green mangoes into the spicy gravy. My grandmother’s recipe, I maintain to my husband, rejoicing in the forbidden knowledge that the heat-inducing mango will forestall the possibility of conception. Every dish is destiny. Even fruits I choose for a post-dinner snack are not innocent. I serve diced papayas sprinkled with black salt and paprika, slices of pineapple with brown sugar. These are the fruits that are kept out of reach of pregnant women for fear of miscarriage. This is how I turn my kitchen into a combat zone, making sure that my cooking secures my and my womb’s liberty.

  * *

  One night, having endured my husband’s attentions in bed, I stumble to the bathroom to pee. No sooner have I sat on the toilet seat than he forces his way through the door and kicks me to the floor. He sees it as a systematic conspiracy to ensure that I never get pregnant, argues that I’m making every attempt to avoid having children, flushing out his seminal deposits as soon as he has fucked me. After that, every night of sex comes with an instruction to lie still on my back.

  The one time I protest that I do actually need to go to the toilet is followed, the next evening, with the directive to go and get rid of all my fucking piss and all my fucking shit before we go to bed.