When I Hit You

by Meena Kandasamy

  Is this happening to you? The disbelief.

  Did you let this happen to you? The shock.

  Why did you put up with all of this? The shame.

  You knew better, didn’t you? The shame, again.

  Why did you not reach out to one of us? The lack of trust.

  If only we had known…

  It does not cross their mind that a woman who is being beaten is intimidated into feeling, believing, knowing that to ask for help from others will only put her at greater risk. In their questions and their responses I come to know that even those of them who have mastered the theory have not lived through the experience: they lack the insight that a woman being abused can mostly trust only one person for help. Herself.

  * *

  Not having a man in my life now becomes a series of little activities and rituals. I replace men with an array of placeholders.

  A blank page. Poetry, in translation, rife with awkward, charming metaphors. Reading the funny below-the-line comments that follow a sober article. Girl crushes. The supreme sense of accomplishment derived from preparing a meal just for myself. The mushrooms browning in butter, and for a little time, a sharp smell that reminds me of sex.

  A cat, any cat, because at the moment I lack self-confidence and I am badly in need of some basic lessons in independence and attitude. Raiding the clothes cupboards of my friends. Long skirts. Bead necklaces. Mismatched, dangling earrings and the courage to wear them in public. Compliments from strangers on the road.

  Watching peacock feathers grow a little between the pages of my diary, choreographing the waltz of iron filings with a magnet held beneath the paper, pressing flowers into heavy books, trying to tie-dye a dupatta.

  Elfriede Jelinek and Clarice Lispector. Women writing women in the way in which I might someday write myself.

  Long volatile emails with numbered lists and half-formed poems. Colourful curses, damning every man to hell and halfway back. The perverse pleasure of rejecting all advances, even from the men I am attracted to because I am in no mood to create that kind of space at this point in my life. Wearing the same rust-red tunic for three days to hold all my energy from leaving me. Two-hour-long showers and soap bubbles.

  Sleep.

  Reading Calvin and Hobbes endlessly. Wishing I had a little son exactly like Calvin. The undeniable urge to adopt all of the beautiful children I see. Loving my mother, in spite of everything, because she managed to keep me whole. Loving my father, in spite of everything, because he cared for me when I came home broken.

  Compulsive anorexia, or the desire to achieve the waistlines of chola bronzes.

  Imagining myself as the widow of each of the men I’ve dated (and especially the one I married), and grieving in accordance with how much I loved them while it lasted. Falling to my knees to weep for their deaths. Beating my breast. Wearing black. Wearing white. Wearing nothing but wine-red lipstick, because some men need to be remembered that way.

  Mirrors. Scream-crying, shy-smiling in their presence. The monologues, the dialogues, the disorienting impermanence of playing out life for the benefit of a one-woman audience. The soul-talk where I congratulate myself on every moment that I do not have to bother about the incorrigible nature of love, its heavy baggage and bitter arguments, the needless questions of men, the worthless jealousy of other women.

  The conversation that I never have, but always rehearse within my head: I am a tough bitch, I can take it, I am happy you asked me if you could help. I did not deserve this sadness. I do not know if I deserve all this love, either.

  The resignation of my mind’s million anxieties when I begin to run. The defiant straightness of my shoulders that catches me by surprise. My wild hair, with a life of its own, where my lovers have buried their kisses and their prayers.

  Last of all, the world of the books I enter, the world that I create in writing, the word-tunnels that I burrow, where I bury myself.

  * *

  I write a first-person account of the marriage for a magazine. Hundreds of women write in to say that in the thousand and odd words of my piece, they feel their stories, their voices, their tears. A woman from Australia recounts how her friend, a victim of domestic violence, was killed on 10 January 2012. It was the same day that my husband pinned me to the wall and threatened to kill me. The day I left. The coincidence is eerie.

  In the days that follow, I wake up to social media unpicking every single thread of my life. The post-mortem analysis of my marriage reveals more about people and their prejudices than anything about me or my husband. Quick to condemn, they say my abuser is Sri Lankan Tamil, a Dalit, a Christian. He is none of the above. It is a short-cut to absolve larger society of blame and to make those that are marginalized into the mischief-makers.

  The worst attacks blame me. What kind of feminist was she? Why did she endure it for four months? Is this a publicity stunt? And then the poser: if she was indeed abused why does she weep to the national media, why does she not go to the police? If she was indeed abused, why doesn’t she report the abuser? Trial by media is no trial, her husband must be proved guilty in a court of law. If she is a feminist, why does she let her rapist and abuser walk away scot-free?

  I might have moved from Mangalore, from the marriage, but I realize that I cannot get away from abuse. To save face, and in the hope of justice, I turn over the corpse of my marriage to the police. I meet lawyers, I pay consultation fees with a writer’s unsteady, meagre income.

  * *

  I realize that penance does not finish with the act of nailing myself to a cross. To suffer for the sins of this world, there is much more to be endured. To those who know only the public persona, I will not be vindicated until I have knocked on every door of justice, until I have sent the culprit to prison, until I have endlessly relived my tragedy through the filing of petitions and complaints and depositions and a sensational series of cases that begin to proliferate around me, stretching from one city to the next. To those who know me personally, it becomes my responsibility to wipe their tears, to ameliorate their sorrows surrounding the unfortunate events of my marriage, to make them feel that somehow it was all better than how it has been portrayed.

  Almost a year after I walked away from the marriage, I visit a Tamil friend’s house. I’m playing with my friend’s son, his wife’s tidying up around us, he’s getting ready to go to work. This is the third and last day of my visit.

  ‘I read what you’ve written about your marriage.’

  He’s referring to the article I wrote for the magazine.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s sad.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What you went through is horrible. I’m not disputing it.’

  ‘Okay. So?’

  ‘Just that this man whom you depicted – it was like he was a monster. The sum total of all the evil things in the world.’

  ‘No, I never said that.’

  ‘But that’s how it came across.’

  ‘That’s not what I intended. It was his violence. That’s all.’

  Here’s a friend asking me if there was nothing redeemable about my ex-husband. I do not know how to justify myself. What do I tell people like him, who want a balanced picture, who want to know that this was a real person with a rainbow side, just so that they are reminded of their own humanity?

  I realize that this is the curse of victimhood, to feel compelled to lend an appropriate colour of goodness to their abuser. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. The landlord’s benevolence, the overseer’s kindness, the criminal’s humour, the wife-beater’s punctuality.

  He made the best rasam I’ve ever tasted. He sang out of tune always, but with no hint of shyness. That sometimes, when he was not angry, or proud, I saw him with a lost look in his eyes. He dimpled when he smiled. He yearned for his mother’s approval – but for some reason he never got it. His father, a major in the Indian Army, had beaten him often as a child. He had made a note of it every time it happened in a sma
ll pocketbook. It was easy to believe that a little love would make him whole again. I had convinced myself to believe that when everything told me I was wrong.

  He was given to white lies. But I knew he loved me. That was not one of his lies. He could walk for hours on end with no sign of tiredness. He did not know what to do when we went to Ullal beach – the two of us, alone in the open, under an unforgiving afternoon sun, he looked hopeless, almost out of place. There was nothing romantic about him, and that was endearing.

  When we were in the presence of people he did not know, people who did not matter to his career or his politics – and this included my parents – he spoke without a pause to me, as if from a fear that if he stopped to breathe, I would use that pause in his throat to wander away, as if his speech was a snare, as if it was all he had to stop me from leaving him behind.

  * *

  My husband was the only man I left. Before I was married, it was the men who left me. Afterward, in my life as a divorcee, they started leaving me again.

  I know now how to read its onset. Overnight, their eyes go into exile. When they wake up, their eyes wear the open disinterest of strangers. Yet the men remain a while longer, until they cannot bear the familiar itch of their feet and then they are gone.

  * *

  Some men leave me with memories, a secret language, unfinished poems, frayed old T-shirts, half-told anecdotes of their childhood, newspaper clippings in a script I cannot read, books defaced with dog-ears and underlinings, swear-words, a taste for grunge singers, abandoned promises of holiday plans.

  Some men keep it minimal: jangling regrets in their pockets with their car keys, hurrying to the door and leaving me with a final, clumsy love bite. I wear it on my skin for a week at the most, until it fades away along with the dreams we shared.

  Some men leave me with a thousand kisses, but these kisses are contagious, and once I have caught them, it is a curse – they keep me awake, feverish, I cannot sleep night after night after night.

  Some men leave me with unresolved fights and I ache in anger, never being able to apologize, or feel vindicated, and I have to live the rest of my life like a student with a failed grade, with a bulleted list of points that I cannot make, or concede.

  Some men leave me because it is a matter of routine for them – refusing to give or take blame, just putting the sad turn of events down to time, or place, or luck, or stress, or stars, or jobs, or their respective, respectable families.

  Some men leave me even as they are with me, knowing that I will never be able to love them the way their mothers loved them, and that they will never be able to love me the way they love themselves. Some men leave me because of this absence of deference, and because they are not used to living in a space that is not a dedicated shrine, where they are not considered divine.

  Some men leave me because I am unpredictable – sunshine one moment and storm clouds the next; the scent of summer rain with the sleep-depriving aftershock of thunder. They cannot keep pace with the fighting that follows the kissing that follows the argument that follows the laughing in unending circles.

  Some men leave me because they have the misplaced confidence that they can always pick me up later in life, pluck me from wherever I have put down roots and replant me in the shade of what they have to offer.

  Some men leave me in the middle of a long kiss, tongue and lips working mechanically, while their minds race with business goals, PowerPoint presentations, office politics, political office, the crisis of capitalism, the sister’s marriage, the repayments on the car loan, terrorism, the bills to pay, the new waitress who has smiled often enough to be taken seriously, the last ex-girlfriend who has started sending ambiguous signals over the past week, the next day’s plans, misplaced objects and the fervent anticipation of a beep-beep on their phone.

  Some men leave me just as soon as they have come. Others, only after we have experimented our way together through the Kamasutra, and my body has contorted itself into every shape that their porn-directed desire demands, and now sex with me holds no novelty, so they move on, to women who are more portable, more flexible, more young, and crucially, more naive.

  Some men leave me before anything even begins between us, because they are terrified that I use small words like cage and consent in an exaggerated political fashion, and being a writer I spell trouble, and if they had half a chance they would magic me into stone or turn me into a pillar of salt, but being kind and gentle, they remove themselves from my presence.

  Some men leave me silently because I make the mistake of telling them that other men have been kinder, but in their minds, this is already rejection-through-comparison because they assume that kinder translates to better, and better translates to (what else?) better-in-bed, and better-in-bed translates into the larger size of other men’s penises, and that competition actually translates into a belittling, almost a castration, and no man wants to enter that no-man’s land.

  Some men leave me because they have just met another woman who does not wield her words like Molotovs, who creates better monochrome memories, who holds permissible quantities of bitterness, who knows her place and who sings their praise.

  Some men leave me because they have no other options left, they leave me because my eyes no longer light up with love and it breaks them to see that they have broken me.

  * *

  In the meantime, the quest for justice does not lead anywhere.

  Picture the red-brick ramshackle inside of an Indian police station. Petty criminals sitting along the floors of corridors with their hands folded over their knees. Wooden benches reserved for the more respectable visitors. Bleached ceiling fans with years of gathered cobwebs, making a grudging noise every turn they make. An old constable stretching like a cat in the sun before his afternoon nap, a fixture as old as the rest of the furniture. Telephones and wireless sets and heaps of paperwork on every table. A computer in the corner, reserved for use by the youngest and only tech-savvy officer. Within this scene of everyday chaos, a partitioned area for women. An obese female police inspector looks through pictures of my marriage and asks me what is my husband’s height (six feet and two inches) and mine (five feet and an inch). She suggests there is little compatibility. ‘Why did you marry him?’ she asks with a smirk. ‘Did you expect a big cock?’ She looks at me with a level, mocking gaze. I don’t respond. Shame comes in many flavours. This one is meant to be swallowed silently.

  She berates my mother for not giving a dowry to my husband. Men who marry a girl for a dowry treat her nicely. Men who marry her for other reasons, well, this is how it ends.

  Then the inevitable question: love or arranged marriage? I don’t know quite how to answer. Love and arranged marriage, I suppose. I repeat the summary of my story. We met on Facebook. I was part of a campaign against the death penalty. We had mutual friends. We consulted each other to draft statements. It turned into friendship. I opened up to him. He appeared principled, sincere and enormously respectful. The arguments always polite, political. I saw no intention to flirt, to breach the boundaries of our comradeship. It was a space in which I felt safe. I trusted him enough to tell him what I thought. We made plans for the future. I was single, heartbroken. I did not want any fooling around. He offered to marry me. At that time, it was all I wanted to hear from a man. Not really love. Not really arranged. Where do we cast the in-betweens?

  She married in haste. She unmarried in haste. She rushed into it, she rushed out of it. I understand those who judge.

  * *

  I write letters to St Alfonso College in Mangalore. There’s an internal review and a quick, short response. ‘We will ask him to resign.’

  Demanding a man’s resignation, instead of terminating his services, is the short-cut academic institutions like to take. Sacking an abusive faculty member involves process, procedure, a committee, its findings, the decision, his appeal. A resignation is easier from the institution’s point of view – the problem sorts itself out. The problem mere
ly packs its bags and goes to another town and sets up shop. A different university, a different city, a different set of references. As long as this man is not their headache, everyone at the old place is unconcerned about this new arrangement. This is how he shape-shifts and moves around. College to college, city to city, country to country.

  He moves to Chennai, becomes an English lecturer at the Tambaram Christian College. I ask the college board why they shelter him. Well, what happened with you is personal, they say. Personal.

  Then, he moves to South Africa. He champions a wide range of causes. A paper on the importance of mother-tongue education for the Zulu and Indian people. The necessity for safe, violence-free homes in Durban and community support for affected women. The recording of oral histories of indentured labourers in order to put together a narrative of their bondage and suffering. The popular Palestinian cause. Riding on the wave of anti-imperialist sentiment, he even endorses ISIS as a counter to American war-mongering. Activism becomes the mask behind which he hides. He plays the race card when this or that supervisor complains about whichever stance he might be taking. There is no end to his chameleonism. His fields of expertise are inclusive sexuality and masculinity. This is not hypocrisy, this is sophisticated multidisciplinary mutation. The messianic status conferred on him for picking up the causes of the dispossessed allows him to entrench himself into communities. At this stage, talking about his misogyny, his violence, becomes an act of blasphemy against a crusader.

  For two and a half years, my case at the Metropolitan Magistrate Court fails to be called. I run from pillar to post. I want him to come to India and face charges – if he takes citizenship elsewhere, then I can hardly run to Interpol.

  Important Communist writers act as intermediaries and say that I must remain silent about him. A journalist comes to my home asking me to accept financial compensation. The Additional Public Prosecutor, who is tasked with defending me, asks me if I’m jealous of his new girlfriend. That’s the man who is going to argue my case on behalf of the state.