When I Hit You

by Meena Kandasamy

  Then there is the divorce petition, sent by his lawyers, which talks about my ultra-feminism, which blames my parents for my modern upbringing. Forgetting everything seems a forlorn, unattainable dream. Years after you walk out, you will still be caught in the web of a bad marriage.

  * *

  Those closest to me bear the brunt. My mother copes by flamboyantly chronicling my medical ailments for her friends. Sadly, my father cannot match her imaginative or narrative powers.

  He matches her in nearly everything else – educational qualifications, being a government servant, his take-home salary, voting DMK, being an early morning person, haggling over the price of vegetables, a preference for cardamom in tea, face-reading, the ability to come up with soulful renderings of Bharathiyar and word-for-word quotations from Shakespeare and absolutely original Tamil swear-words, and a marked tendency to observe superstitions and self-medicate.

  Unlike my mother’s tendency to resort to graphic descriptions of her own battle to bring me back into human society, my father handles the problem of my hasty marriage and hastier unmarriage in an extremely methodical manner.

  When people ask him what his daughter is doing, he makes an instant estimate of how close the interrogator is to the family. Auto-rickshaw drivers, distant neighbours, distant relatives get a sanitized version of my being happily married and living in America or Singapore or London or whatever city is in vogue that month. In my father’s story tailored to Tier One (Strangers), I live the life of expat contentment, my husband teaches at a prestigious university, and our couple is a happy Double-Income-No-Kids unit, in a home full of gadgets to do our every bidding, and the only reason the son-in-law is not seen in Chennai is because of green-card obligations or he is working on a book and does not find the time to travel.

  In the story spun for those in Tier Two (Influential Strangers) – which encompasses work colleagues, neighbours, police officers, college principals, and people to whom he is prone to run for help in the case of misfortune – his daughter is back home ‘at the moment’ because there was ‘a little misunderstanding’ and ‘time heals’ and ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ and ‘you know how it is with young people these days’.

  Then there is the non-story customized for the Tier Three (Annoying Acquaintances) audience, a category that comprises shared friends of both father and daughter, usually arranged as tiles on a Facebook wall. This is the category of people that knows more about my taste in coffee and clothes than he does, that knows that I was last logged on from [insert name of café/pub], this is the category that secretly wonders whether the glass I’m holding in Profile Photo dated dd/mm/yyyy contains Coca-Cola, or is liberally mixed with JD, and this is the category that knows the names of the men who generously like all my posts. This is also the category that is the most heterogeneous, a group as assorted as the one you might encounter at the Koyambedu bus-stand, including my father’s once-upon-a-time Mathematics tutor, a respectable seventy-five-year-old man who one day angrily called up my father to complain that I had uploaded a picture in which my bra strap was visible on my shoulder. When my mother was consulted, she nonchalantly remarked that of course a girl’s bra strap was meant to be on her shoulder, where else would it be?, and more importantly why was an old man spending his time on Facebook looking at the bra strap of a girl he had last met in the flesh when she was barely two years old?

  Whenever my father assumes that the person across from him belongs to Tier Three, he ensures that the word daughter or children or offspring (or any of its synonyms) does not enter the conversation, and in the event that it does, and the inevitable questions follow, he has a stock answer: ‘You tell me. You tell me what she is up to. She has grown up and got wings. There is only so much a father can be involved in his child’s life.’

  Tier Four (Friends, Family and Well-Wishers), as a category, are people who know much more about the story of my unfortunate marriage than necessary, and these are the ones who fault him for bringing up a headstrong daughter, for educating her too much, for bringing her up like a son, for not disciplining her enough, for sending her to study away from home without any supervision, for allowing this whirlwind marriage to take place, for not consulting them when the whirlwind marriage started to blow itself out, and for being a hen-pecked husband who listens too much to his wife and daughter. Tier Four are Emasculators Ltd. They are the ones my father is most afraid to face, and in response to all their reproofs, he merely nods his head and sighs: ‘That girl N-E-V-E-R listened to me.’

  * *

  Long before I watched Cinema Paradiso, before I knew that Alfredo would angrily order Salvatore to leave the small town they call home, I had a similar directive from my father. Go away. Don’t come back.

  For many years, I couldn’t understand why he would say such a thing to his own daughter, but then one evening, while sitting in my parents’ living room, half watching the television and half rereading for the hundredth time the divorce petition, Cinema Paradiso provided the answer. Go away. Don’t come back. It was an act of love. And so I finally followed his injunction. I moved as far away as my talent could take me.

  Here, the sound of my hard heels on secluded cobblestone streets tells me that I have come far away, that I no longer need to run. The bare brown of trees stripped naked by winter. A cold that forces me to cover every inch of my skin. A stone-grey and moss-green local cemetery where I return myself to poetry. The dull sun in a cloudy sky, to be folded up and put away at the end of each day, to allow for faceless encounters in the night.

  The first few weeks in a landscape completely altered from the familiar, I do nothing but soak up its… niceness.

  I grow to like this new life, at once bereft of rage and intimacy. Here, I do not have a lover with whom I speak of a future. Here, I do not have a lover with whom I can share the lost words of my language. Here, I do not have a lover to whom I can write poems about the rain. Here, the rain itself is a nice stranger I do not want to know, not the intimate monsoon showers of home, with rolling thunders that crash-land at my window.

  Here, the man across the room, the man I take to bed every night, the man I think I love can never unlock me, never access my mind, never splice my language open for me, never get down to the skin. I want him to remain a stranger. From experience, I know that it is easier to love strangers. I am willing to give this man my all, and, in the same instant, stay far away, out of reach. I want love, but I want it at an arm’s distance, from where it cannot reach to hurt me.

  This arrangement has its drawbacks. I do not tell him that I intend to stay. He does not ask me to leave. For the moment, we are wrapped up in niceness. A niceness that loves me.

  A niceness that goes beyond him. This niceness where nobody asks me if I am married. This niceness without the dread of domestic violence. This niceness without the choke-hold of marriage. This niceness where having three planets in my seventh house does not matter at all. This niceness, far away from home, a niceness that allows me to begin the process of forgetting and healing.

  There is a poster of Marx above my lover’s bed: To be radical is to grasp things by the root. I know that, in my case, to be radical means having to cut myself off at the root.

  * *

  A world made up in the dimension of my language is beautiful, but it also hides pain. This actual body of mine, I am ashamed and embarrassed and secretive about. My scars are my secrets. My straight shoulders sometimes slump; I wish my breasts would disappear. My hair falls out in handfuls, a shame like no other for a woman, one that can barely be admitted to even the closest of friends. Every hairstyle is a style to hide. My back hurts from sitting for long hours. I am a howling, screaming mess on the days of my period. My knees wear the rough defiance of a thousand kneel-down punishments at school. My cracked heels map the idea of a woman who does not have time for herself. I shave my legs depending on whether I am going to be with a lover that week, and only if that meeting holds the possibility of intimacy.
The real body is militating against me, hurtling towards disease and age. I wear the battle wounds of heartbreak in my eyes. Whereas, the written body is completely under control. In the word-made-body, I am invincible. My breasts have the confidence of beauty queens. Men do not leave marks. Neither men as lovers, nor men as strangers.

  My written body opens up only to the extent I decide to demarcate. It does not require the permission of my parents, it does not require the approval of society. My words might reveal a generous cleavage, a breaking waist, but they do not let anyone put their hands on me. Wrapping my body into words, I proof it against the prying eye, against inspection. I have sheathed it against the hands of others. My woman’s body, when it is written down, is rape resistant.

  * *

  Here, my flesh. Here, the haphazard lines of green running around my wrists. Here, my blood. Here, my jet black hair.

  Wait. Here, my all-important cunt.

  All muscle, all memory.

  The only body I feel empowered to share is the body I fashion out of my own words. My skin acquires the right shade not in mirrors but when I write it down. Then, it is not fair or dark, it is not rough or glowing, it is not a skin that gets judged and condemned. It is skin on a woman like the bark on a tree. Brown, clearer under water, softer in the monsoon, brighter in sunshine, flaming in twilight.

  My fingers, when captured in words, are poetry and song, music and dance, they trace little butterflies in the air. Behind words I hide the rough fingers of the girl who washes her clothes by hand every week; this is how I lead you away from the hands of an agitated, clumsy woman who spills sugar as she makes tea and spills the tea as she pours it out and breaks the cup when she attempts to clean up this mess. Words allow me escape. Words give birth to another woman.

  * *

  The trouble is, whenever I sit down to write about my marriage, his outbursts play in a loop. I’ve tailored playlists to help drown out his voice, but the music is already getting in the way of the writing – my fingers keep typing, but my ears focus on the lyrics. His reproaches superimpose themselves like a rap over the songs. M.I.A. meets Tom Waits meets moron ex-husband. Hussel Hussel Hussel Grind Grind Grind A Whore Has Only One Thing On Her Mind.

  * *

  I decide to leave his words in this book, where they belong.

  Everything is writing material for you, isn’t it? This marriage, this love, this dream I’m trying to build for the both of us.

  Tomorrow, you’ll be making a book out of it. There will be interviews and readings. You’ll travel, pose for photographs, jumping across cities, jet-setting around the country, going to bed with any man you fancy that night. The writer. The free woman.

  The trouble is that you do not want a decent chance at life. You’re only after a story, and you make my life a living hell.

  These words are the equivalent of an epitaph.

  Underneath, a part of me lies buried.

  XIV

  I am the woman of myth and bullshit.

  (True. I authored some of it.)

  SANDRA CISNEROS, ‘LOOSE WOMAN’

  I am the woman sitting down to write her story. I am the woman preparing to arrest your attention. I am the woman being propped up for the world’s inspection.

  Here is my instruction manual:

  Poke me in the eye. Pinch me in the waist. Note my height. Ask me to open my mouth wide. Shine a torch inside. Ask me to open my legs wide. Ask me to relax and breathe deeply. Shine a torch inside. Examine me: with your gloved fingers, with your speculum. Make notes. Laugh about me at lunch. See if you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody like me. They all do; all the time anyway. Come back because you have no other means of knowing me.

  I am the woman who is a young writer with her pockets full of heavy stones, the one who has amassed sleeping tablets, the one with chiffon saris that will someday snap her neck. I am the glittering woman of puke and cowardice.

  I am the woman who was a battered wife. I am the same wife who ran away.

  I am the woman whose parentage is not probed. I am the woman who does not provide evidence of lineage, the one who does not have to sketch my family tree with its mangled roots, with its share of concubines and kept women, with its incorrigible branches of bastardized children.

  I am the woman who will not be silenced by the code of sub judice that forbids talk because judgment is pending. I am the woman accused of ultra-feminism in the divorce petition, the one who will not be shamed by the questions at the cross-examination. I am the one who does not sit around in family courts getting pulled up for the transgression of crossing her legs and not wearing her thaali.

  I am the woman caught in the hook of first love, the she of the eternal broken heart, the she who discovers she is a second wife, the she who is stalked, the she who was once labelled a mistress, the she who carries the stigma of muddled affairs and the unspeakable secrets of errant friends.

  I am the woman who does not have to name her lovers, categorize them alphabetically, in the hallowed tradition of a telephone directory. I am the woman not called upon to name herself. I will not face death for denying the details.

  I am the woman who will be cursed by society for being passed from man to man to man, hand to hand to hand. I am the woman at whom society cannot spit or throw stones because this me is a she who is made up only of words on a page, and the lines she speaks are those that everyone hears in their own voice.

  I am the woman men will not take home to their mother. I am the woman who does not smile about washing-up liquid, the woman who does not reach climax over liquid laundry detergent. I am the woman who, having cooked five-course meals and scrubbed toilets to a shine, publicly despairs about domestic drudgery.

  I am the woman who is not a good Hindu girl, a good Tamil girl, a good Kerala girl, a good Indian girl. I am not any of the categories I thought I was, I am not any of the categories I was moulded into being.

  I am the woman whose reputation is rusting. Who dissolves her once-upon-a-time in vodka with sliced lime, whole green chillies and sea salt. Who swallows it in the sweet heat of a neat whisky and rolls it into tight joints, smoking it up in circles of regret. I wear it in leopard print. I walk it around in red, outrageous stilettos. I take it to every seedy bar in town. I leave it behind in the beds of men whose names I do not bother to ask.

  I am the woman who did not know this woman myself, wild and ecstatic, trapped inside me. She is the stranger I am taking to town. She is the stranger I am getting to know, the rebellious stranger under my skin who refuses to stand to any judgment.

  I am the woman with wings, the woman who can fly and fuck at will. I have smuggled this woman out of the oppressive landscape of small-town India. I need to smuggle her out of her history, out of the do’s and don’ts for good Indian girls.

  I am the woman who is willing to display her scars and put them within exhibition frames. I am the madwoman of moon days. I am the breast-beating woman who howls. I am the woman who wills the skies to weep in my place.

  I am the woman who makes sex separate and outside of herself. I am the woman to whom rape has happened, the she who seeks to sleep on a separate bed, the she whose trust was broken, the she about whom it is easier to speak.

  I am the woman who has tried to shield herself from the pain of the first-person singular. I am the woman who tummy-rubs every received taunt so that it can be cajoled into sentences.

  I am the woman who stands in place of the woman who loathes to enter this story in any of its narrations – police or procedural, personal or fictional – because that woman has struggled so hard and so long to wriggle out of it – and now, when asked to speak, she would much rather send a substitute. Sharing stories might be catharsis, but to her it is the second, more sophisticated punishment. I am the woman deputed on her behalf.

  I am the woman who can be removed from the brutality of the everyday – from its dying grasshoppers and fading flowers and starving children and drowning refugees. I
am the woman sheltered within words, the one distanced into a movie running in her mind, the one asked to bear the beatings, the one who endures everything until something snaps so that fate can escape her. I am the woman conjured up to take on the life of a woman afraid of facing her own reality.

  I am the woman who asked for tenderness and got raped in return. I am the woman who has done her sentence.

  I am the woman who still believes, broken-heartedly, in love.

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2017 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Meena Kandasamy, 2017

  The moral right of Meena Kandasamy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  Excerpt from ‘Life-While-You-Wait’ from MAPS: Collected and Lost Poems by Wisława Szymborska translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. English translation copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 126 8