Sucker Punch: Essays

by Scaachi Koul

Hands pressed together, she’d mumble to herself something intended just for her and the inexplicably Caucasian elephant she was talking to.

“Do they spend all the money on coconuts and grapefruit?” I asked once, which made my dad laugh, meaning I would not get in trouble even if my mom pinched my arm like a crab.

I’ve never understood how modern Christianity became the dominant religion worldwide, when Hinduism offers more gods to choose from, more stories of triumph and deviancy, and a lot of barrel-chested half-men with thick thighs and stoned eyes. What more could you need?

But this was just how we talked. My whole family was loud and bossy and shrill. We got our messages across clearly, maybe brutally, but no one ever missed the point. Every year on my birthday, I would cry over some minor misfortune, and my father would laugh and sing to me: “It’s my paaaarty, and I’ll cry if I waaaaant to, cry if I waaaaant to.” He was mocking me, but he was also giving me permission: You can always find something to cry about, even today. You’re not ruining anyone’s time other than your own. The Kouls are always happy to give someone room to be a bitch.

My mother never apologized for yelling at me—I’m not sure, in her seventy years of life, she’s ever apologized, period—but she gave me sliced watermelon as a snack, boondi dahi with dinner, and a slice of chocolate cake for dessert. Is there any apology more universal from an ethnic mother than wordlessly feeding you until you’re sick with love? Cantaloupe and sugar prasad were her most reliable forms of communication, the one more spoonful was better than any meek apology or perfunctory hug she could’ve given. If my mother felt bad about whatever she had said, whatever wooden spoon she wielded and then thwacked across my arm, she’d rub my back while I cut into my cake. “You should put your hair back more,” she’d say. “I like seeing your face.” I could never predict our fights, but I was always happy to forget them on her schedule.

Now, grown, living far away from the suburban cul-de-sac that was once my whole world, I’m almost pleased when my mother calls me while I’m in a bad mood. Finally, someone to take it out on, someone who loves me too much to make me face a consequence for my temper tantrum. I pray that this woman calls me asking for help on how to set up the same printer they’ve had for fifteen years, only to discover that they unplugged it at some point and forgot to plug it back in. I sleep the deepest sleep after twenty minutes on FaceTime with her and my father, the two of them trying to aim the iPad camera at the printer, only to angle it so that I can see everything except, incredibly, the printer. (“The screen isn’t saying anything because you need to plug the fucking printer in.”) Daughters seem to choose our mothers for our most loathsome derision; hating her is easy in the same way it’s easy to hate ourselves.

I’m not good at a lot of things—I spent most of high school thinking the word “chaos” was pronounced “cha-choze”—but fighting? I’m incredible at it, and my appetite for it is enormous. When people meet my parents, fighting as my birthright makes more sense to them.

To me, nothing was more comforting than seeing my father’s face slowly turn purple, my mother gesticulating with an armful of gold bangles clashing together. I could always find them in a crowd. They were united in the pursuit of raising their respective blood pressures to levels previously unseen in the corporeal form.

We swell, our emotions get huge and bloated, and the house swells with us: my brother is mad at me for being condescending, I’m mad at my dad for being unhelpful, he’s mad at my mother for being cold, and she’s mad at my brother for being inconsiderate. Our words take up more space than they should, and we drown each other in volume. It’s fun! Or, it’s not any less fun than the hobbies people picked up during the quarantine. Screaming at your family is a more transferable skill than baking garden focaccias.

But then I grew up, and it seemed less obvious that she was indeed pathetic or foolish. She was being kind, and I saw that as its own weakness. I spent my whole life waiting to fight with someone I love, to be big enough to win. When I got it, it lost any appeal it ever had.

I had told our story a thousand times. I wrote essays about him and me and us, and later, a book cataloguing the impossible challenge of getting my aged, tricky, mercurial Indian father to accept my aged, tricky, mercurial white boyfriend.

I bought tickets to Tanzania for our honeymoon on the back of the story about our fight, little gold hoops for my lobes, flowers for my friends, a trip to Italy for my parents for their fortieth anniversary, all from the money made about our fight. On my book tour, he often sat in the first row of libraries and theaters and community centers and smiled, good-naturedly, when I talked about his beefy forearms and stupid face.

My mother reassured me that the first year of marriage was the toughest. But what about the second? The third? Every time I outlined to her a fight we had—sometimes his fault, sometimes mine—she laughed with a mirth I hadn’t ever really heard from her. “Couples fight,” she said. “Men are stupid. They don’t know what they’re doing and it makes them panic, like dogs.” She’d gesture at my father, asleep in his armchair with his mouth open, as if to say, This is who you’re trying to reason with?

But I didn’t worry about my parents being argumentative people because they were well-matched. Papa never said anything to Mom that she didn’t have a retort for. He never got in her face. He was never violent or degrading. Their arguments were a series of Kashmiri insults hurled at each other over things that didn’t matter: how many plants were too many plants in the kitchen, why someone didn’t have their phone turned on while they were at the mall, whether fifty-four degrees Farenheit is an appropriate base temperature for the home. (If my dad is reading this: It’s not!!! Take off one of your six sweaters and turn the heat on!) Their bigger, more consequential fights—if they had any—were kept away from me entirely. So maybe this was normal. Maybe feeling destabilized was a part of marriage. Because after all, I got what I wanted, and I got it by fighting.

Parvati stands in devotion, but I stomped my feet so hard that I cracked the Earth with my heel. I deserved the title, a fact my father would repeat to me in a wide variety of tones as I moved through my relationship. “You got what you wanted!” Papa said in glee after the wedding. “But, you got what you wanted?” Papa said when I told him I didn’t think the marriage was working. “You got what you wanted,” Papa said in quiet panic when I called crying because I knew I had to move out. On my wedding day, my relatives brought me the same blessings we used to bring Parvati, laid out on a thali: sugar cubes, almonds, a perfectly round orange. I always get what I want. I’m starting to think that might be the problem.

Later, when we were so unhappy that I couldn’t believe my misery was formed by my own hand—I married this person? On PURPOSE?—I thought about Parvati and her outrageous devotion.

I didn’t know how to be without an argument. If he and I weren’t united against a force, then what were we? Did that make us adversaries? Is my brain that simplistic, that primitive, that if I don’t see prey nearby, I’ll eat one of my own?

That’s the fallacy about hating someone, disagreeing with them, viewing them as your enemy; it’s still a form of intimacy.

When I confronted him about it, one of the last times I looked him in his eyes, I saw nothing more than a vast emptiness. He hung his head and wept silently, his dead face shimmering with tears. He did not say he was sorry. He was already drunk. I’d never see him sober again.

Half of me wanted to give him cover—Oh, he doesn’t know what he’s saying—but how many times in my life could I make excuses for him? At some point, eventually, you have to be aware of how heavy your fists are when you swing them. I’d skulk off, determined to stop contacting him, and fail every time.

Instead of learning about some other place I hated, this place was the devil I knew and I would never be surprised. No one likes getting punched in the stomach, but a sucker punch hurts the body and the ego. I’m tired of being shocked by pain.

all the people to tell, I told Jeff. I didn’t think of it as a conscious choice, but there was a glee in watching him write and delete replies, the ellipses of his response popping up and disappearing. He was struggling with our shared context, too. What could he say to that? How could he side-step this one, the closest we’d come to discussing our relationship and how it ended? I put him in an impossible place, and I watched him scramble up the high, unscalable walls of this little prison. I wanted him to starve in there.

Unusual for me, I wanted to be at peace again, even if it meant patching things up with Jeff. I had started to believe he deserved it, this redemption without doing any of the work. I wanted the man who took so much from me to take one more thing—my dignity—and mail it back to me with a kiss.

“Are you stupid?” he asked me, and it did occur to me that, well, yes, I think I might be.

Jeff and I ran out of things to discuss—you can only have small talk with the person who fundamentally reshaped your relationship with men and your own body for so long. We lost touch, as they say, a troubling turn of phrase for someone who had seemingly been touching me from afar for more than fifteen years. Without a fight, we had nothing in common anymore.

I felt reassured that he was never alone, even in death, and then furious that I cared about whether he was alone in death in the first place.

In his death, I can choose to believe that he tried harder. I’m left with wishes that will go nowhere: I wish he hadn’t raped me, but he did. I wish I didn’t have to rehash it again for my own survival, but I do. I wish he hadn’t died, but I have no say in the matter. I didn’t attend any of the services. I didn’t send flowers. Instead, I thought about sitting next to him in class, sliding the sleeve off his coffee, and drawing a watch on it for him. He wore it all day. I loved him so much.

So much of me is still determined to believe a man’s fable about how he has rehabilitated himself. I’ll do it at my own cost. I’ll edit my own story down so that the reader laughs instead of winces. I’ll find empathy for the villain, and turn him into an antihero. I used to feel safer in stories where men hurt me only when I deserved it.

Maybe that’s why boys were so unkind to me; prepubescent, I gave off the energy of a divorced woman in her late forties. (My destiny.)

But I was worried about being seen too closely by girls like these, and making a joke of the person who loved me the most in the world was good deflection.

Couldn’t I instead have one of the more interesting entries of the DSM-5? A compulsion to eat dishwasher pods like the women of My Strange Addiction? Maybe a brand-new psychological dysfunction that they could name after me: Koul Disorder, the unexplained impulse to flip off any camera taking a picture of you at any time, exacerbated by baby showers.

My shoulders sometimes feel inappropriate in meetings and at work; my body is inherently too sexual because there’s plenty of it.

I used to admire this rainbow she fashioned with a plastic frame and multicolored ribbons, little plastic beads hanging from the ends. “Don’t touch that,” she’d tell me. “It’s not a toy.” Well, I’m twelve and this is a craft made out of ribbons and beads, so what the fuck is it? My mother still has it hidden in a junk drawer; I still want it and I don’t know why.

I was fifteen, too old to be looking for cool, arid places to hide from my own mother like a nervous lizard, but I liked hiding in there when she was too sharp to hug.

Or maybe from my ex-husband, who told me innocently enough that I had the widest rib cage of any woman he had ever slept with, a sentence that sent me into a tailspin of googling “average ribcage woman” for weeks, or when he told me that my bulimia was “a teenager’s affliction” after he caught me vomiting in the bathroom of his apartment after dinner.

She never asked what my marriage was like, just about the meals that my husband and I shared. “What do you eat together at dinner?” she asked me. I glowed in response, because this I could answer. “Big bowls of spaghetti and meatballs. Boeuf bourguignon in the winter. Mussels in the summer. Bún thįt nuong made from scratch. Wild rice bowls with spinach and sausage. Asparagus risotto. Paella, he even bought a special pan for it. Shrimp tacos with cabbage slaw. Beef Wellington on my birthday.” My ex-husband loved to cook, and he fed me well from the moment we met. I gained weight steadily when we were together, and sometimes I felt admiration for the addition. This is love, I thought, looking at the clothes that no longer fit. Someone loved me so much they wanted to fill me to the brim. “Slow-barbecue ribs. Black pepper beef. Green curry with brown rice. Zucchini noodles with chicken cutlets. Lamb shanks. Turkey burgers.” Jackie shook her head disapprovingly when I told her how much my husband loved me.

On this particular night, Barb wanted to play a card game called We’re Not Really Strangers, which is less of a “game” and more of what I would call “an exercise in testing exactly how much witchcraft I’ll allow in my life.”

But for Barb, I did it anyway. I’ve known Barb for sixteen years, and can’t think of a safer place for my anxieties and insecurities. She is a vault for my failures.

Barb shrugged, her surgery on my feelings commonplace to her. “That’s the hope, right?” she said. “That your friends can see you in the places you go to hide.”

How could she hate this? To me, she was shaped like sanctuary. Could I give myself some grace as a way to give it to Barb? Don’t I want that for her?

It seems like, overnight, my mother stopped caring. She got rid of old clothes that didn’t really fit and bought bright clothes in the right sizes. She stopped counting calories and measuring portions. She stopped dyeing her hair and let the soft white grow out from her scalp. She ate an entire brownie that she found in the freezer that turned out to be filled with potent weed, and then proceeded to eat two, maybe three bowls of steaming pasta. She got drunk on FaceTime with me and started talking like a jazz cat from an off-brand kids movie. “Heyyyyy bayyyybyyyyy,” she slurred after half a glass of pissy white wine. “What’s goin’ oooooon?” She didn’t give up; she gave in to what she was supposed to be all along. I like her so much now.

I missed my eating disorder more than I missed my ex-husband. He brought me brief comfort, but bulimia brought me a way to hide. He saw me, all the time, for who I was, until he didn’t. By that point, he was gone. My eating disorder, conversely, never let me see myself. It was a shield. My ex was always feeding me. I want to remember him fondly and so I think of spaghetti squash with sun-dried tomatoes and pesto, cheddar-jalapeño biscuits, the mint chocolates his ex-girlfriend’s mother used to send him every Christmas, even after we got married. Then again, I ate whatever he served me: I consumed his version of events always, his side of an argument, his perspective of all matters big and small. I followed his routine and his timelines. There was never any force; I willingly gobbled up whatever he served. I ate in front of him, greedily and fast and sloppy, and felt loved for it. Finally someone who wants to feed me. I didn’t take any time to consider how much bullshit I had to eat in order to finally feel full.

I track my life in phases of how much my mother calls me, and during this time, she called three, sometimes four times daily. That’s how much trouble I was in; her attention was constant. I never had anything to say and always tried to get off the phone as fast as I could.

Day after day, my mother would call, and request something she never really had before. “I need you to eat,” she said. “Eat whatever you can. Make sure you eat a few times a day. Eat anything you want. As long as you eat.” It was the first time in my life that I took her advice without even thinking about it. I ate and ate and ate. I never had an appetite, and could only pretend food was still enjoyable, but I was relentless in taking her guidance. I ate rice bowls and noodles and dumplings and dosa and chips and crudités and croissants and cookies. If I had a thought about food, it entered me within moments. I never purged; I let my body swell and ache so I could relearn how to stop when I needed to stop. I let hunger fill me to the brink and then spoke to it with spring rolls crushed in two bites. My mother started calling me even more, focused on the same question: “Did you eat?” Yes, I’d tell her. I ate plenty. I could almost hear her blood pressure go back down to a normal range. I loved those calls. The food was sometimes healthy, more often not, but it was something. I’d text her pictures of empty takeout containers and she’d always text back, immediately, “Good.” I used to protest when she’d call and ask what I had for lunch—“Mom, it’s 5:25”—but now I rushed to answer the phone so I could hear her give me permission. “Did you eat?” she’d say. “You have to eat. Eat everything. Eat whatever you want. Eat now.”

I have been losing the fight with my own body for a deceptively simple reason: I treat it as a fight in the first place. But I don’t need to hide from myself, or hide myself from other people. Besides, I cannot hide because no one will let me. Even if I try to slink away to an invisible place, someone will come and get me. It’s nice in the light if you can stand in it long enough to feel the warmth. Looking at my body with my own gaze is a light unto itself. I try to stay there as much as I possibly can. My mother told me to eat, and so I did.

He hugged me for a while to calm me down and reassured me that I was simply insane. It wasn’t a big deal; I was a crazy person, is all.

“She’s just jealous that things didn’t work out between us,” my boyfriend—eventually, our ex—told me. He said it like he was the prize, as if I had won something. It bothered me, but then I remembered: I wrote it that way, too.

My work kept me in my marriage longer than I want to admit. I didn’t know how to write about how it was failing; my first book was lousy with details about how well he had treated me, and how good we were together. I believed it; I was one of the last two people on earth who did.

Of course, I couldn’t even begin to consider the process of posting about my divorce online until I told people in my tangible life first. Telling my father was a specific nightmare that I’m glad I’ll never have to relive, his ruddy face looking at me perplexed over FaceTime, asking if he should fly to New York to “get me,” whatever that meant. My friends were told through a few well-placed texts to notorious gossips; that would do most of the work for me. Initially I tried to find some fun in the way I told people, like when my friend Sarah chirped me on Valentine’s Day during a podcast recording.

And—this is an important factor that a lot of writers and performers don’t admit to enough—I liked the attention. I would likely not make a good actor because I want credit for being interesting enough as myself. I’d never be a good editor because I like how warm a spotlight feels. Praise for my abilities is all very fine and good, but I want people to tell me it’s nice to spend a few hundred pages with me. I allowed myself to be my work when I should have protected myself better. It’s like I intentionally built my house on a tilt, and now I’m complaining that all my drinks keep sliding off my table, crashing into the walls.