Sucker Punch: Essays

by Scaachi Koul

The only person who handled news of my divorce particularly well was my friend Rudy, who bypasses most relationships in order to spend more time being gay, getting tattoos, and hoisting barbells over his head. “Ooh, a divorcée?” he said outside a whiskey bar in Manhattan, sucking on the end of a Camel Light. “How louche.” “I wouldn’t say this feels very glamorous at present,” I told him. “Maybe not now. But think of the future!” he said, tossing his cigarette into the street. “Finally, there’s something interesting about you.”

Our marriage was plainly laid out in screenshots and emails and texts and Instagrams. Almost every fight we’ve ever had exists on a server somewhere. Every grandiose pain I’ve felt about my marriage lives in a folder on my phone’s photo app, a carousel of each spider crack in our foundation. If I wanted to feel sad, I had data for it.

“legally and morally obligated to end the day by telling you all that the loser husband made me dinner,” I wrote the next year, alongside a photo of this fish and lentil dish he made. I always loved it. Sometimes it makes me miss the shape of his neck, so I don’t eat it much anymore.

Did he resent the profile I was giving him? Was he embarrassed by me and my (several, loud, polarizing) internet public antics? Did it hurt his feelings when I called him a loser in public? I was kidding, like I’m always fucking kidding, but it probably sucked to be the target of my jokes. He probably told me it sucked and I probably didn’t listen. The internet is a record of my failures in so many ways, but none more blatant than how the person I loved most in the world and I failed each other. I am tired of the negotiation I make, every day, whether to be my true self online or not. I am tired of wondering whether the record could turn on me eventually or not. What am I so worried about? I’m dying. We all are.

Should it be a struggle? Does everything have to be a fight? I laid out our argument in writing for a decade, and now, I wasn’t so sure any of it was worth it. He had been saying the quiet part out loud since the beginning of our relationship. Being with me would be a struggle. To do it, you had to love it. I would and will bring anyone into the public with me. Who could blame him for not wanting such discomfort, forever.

All I’ve done for my entire life, personally and professionally, is make a record. All I’ve done is leave evidence. All I’ve done is tell everyone, anyone, everything.

One morning, on Instagram, she sent me a thicket of sixty-nine (nice) messages between the two of them, outlining their five-year-long affair.

I didn’t want to ruin his day, or his life, but by the end of our marriage, all I had was that record. The very thing I wanted to obliterate was the only belonging I took from our marriage. Every physical object I took from our apartment, in fact, was in pursuit of writing: The desk where I wrote my internet articles for years. The green chair where I sat slumped over, looking at tweets. The guest bed where I’d sleep on nights we couldn’t get along, the internet my company for another night alone.

I still struggle with the personal sheddings I leave all over the internet. I’ve deleted my tweets and my old blog. I don’t go out the way I used to. I live alone now, and there’s no one to run from in my own home anymore. Writing about yourself for the internet means pulling off little pieces of your body and letting them walk around without you. You have to let them go, and when you meet them again, you might not like them anymore.

“I know!” I’d say to the ghost of my ex-husband, who now only lives with me through stories. I still work hard to try to remember the best parts of him, to pepper in the good parts while I consider the worst ones. “It’s my own fault. I don’t have a right to you like this anymore, and she doesn’t have this right to me. I told her too much.” My ex-husband would agree. “It’s your own fault. You let them think they were in this life with us. Now I’m gone, and all you have are the secrets you could never keep to yourself.”

I’m sorry I keep writing like this, separating everything into a before and an after, and I’m not sure when I’ll stop feeling like that. It’s as if a barrier formed in my life in my early thirties; everything before was naive and argumentative and ridiculous and everything after was painful and empty and honest. I’m waiting for another crack of lightning to strike and change things again; maybe next time I’ll get something good. Like a gun!

“You’re funny,” these men would say to me, as if I didn’t know, as if that wasn’t my one and only protection in the world.

“ARE YOU HAVING FUN?” Janet asked me after finding me tucked in a booth alone. She rested her hand on my thigh, her martini half full and mine half empty. “WE CAN GO IF YOU’RE NOT.”

Durga Maa is what they call her; the most terrifying warriors are, above all, mothers.

Men were a breed perhaps worthy of fear, but certainly worthy of suspicion. This never squared away with the understanding of men I had formed at home: Men were like my father. They were helpless, sometimes unkind, but ultimately malleable. They didn’t know where the can opener was. They needed us more than we needed them.

“I think I might spend a long time alone,” I told my book editor over margaritas and Vogue Menthols on the beach. “No one will want to go out with me after they read anything I’ve ever written.” She laughed and lit a second cigarette from her first, looking out at the steadily setting sun. “Honey, I have some news for you: men don’t read.”

Sex was the preoccupation for my friends once I became single, but I was still running forensics on my dead marriage.

As is customary when you get divorced, I went out with a lot of hot idiots. Just a parade of the most useless men in any of the city’s several boroughs, all with the kind of shoulders that make you want to scale him like you’re King Kong and he’s the Empire State Building.

I was too young to know the difference between playing like you had power and actually having it.

My ex-husband and I used to laugh about the prosaic literary tastes of straight, white men. In some other timeline, we’re reading Blake Butler and debating the merits of his sentence structure. In this one, however, I point men of a certain age toward my bookshelf, like a sexy grim reaper, guiding them toward the light between my legs. “I didn’t know Jon Stewart wrote a short story collection,” these men say, tenderly tipping the cover open to see the table of contents. I fold down the corner of my bedsheets.

If I wanted the divorce, I’d have to get it myself. And so I took a sunny fall Friday off from work to walk the four-hour round trip to the clerk’s office, exactly $210 in hand, my documentation signed and stacked and notarized. I got the paperwork wrong twice before I got it right.

But more irksome was the steady creep of loneliness, the way my body would sway if I smelled someone delicious on a subway car, bringing up the memory I was trying to suppress: that once, I woke up next to someone, every morning. I wanted to get close to someone without them getting too close to me. Being alone is lovely but, periodically, you need someone to like you enough that they want to taste the inside of your mouth.

“I’m seeing a young man in Brooklyn,” I told Adrian one afternoon. Adrian and I have never finished a conversation; one just bleeds into the next one and the one after that and the one after that. We were picking up wherever we’d left off, as usual.

“He’s just thirty-seven?” Adrian asked with the trepidation of someone being invited to a party where the theme is beating up people named Adrian. “Do you mean, like, in dog years?”

All The Trainer knew about me, for months, was that I was a writer. “I’m eager to read what you write about me,” he told me once. “Though it would probably mean we no longer know one another. So, not that eager.” Could he read? I never asked and was a little too spooked about the answer to try and find out.

When my mother got sick, and I had to leave town for a month, I didn’t have to talk him into why it was a good idea for me to go. “It’s your mom,” he said. “What else is there to do but go home?” He texted me every few days, asking about aunty. I wish I had better language to explain the ease with which everything came, purely because our backgrounds had commonalities. Is there a word, in Kashmiri or Hindi or anything else, that describes the immediate comfort of spending time among a community similar to yours? I spent night after night with The Trainer, sometimes feeling like I was being unfaithful to the white husband I no longer had, who I’d once loved and protected and defended for so long. It felt disloyal to admit the truth: his whiteness was something we had to overcome, though I suspect he always thought it was my race that created the bulk of our burdens.

It’s painful to get what you want. It reminds you of when you didn’t get anything at all.

He’d run his fingers up and down my shins, an act so tender that it made me want to double over and retch. The gentler he was with me, the meaner I was, but he reacted the way a giant might when a scared townsperson throws a rock at his ankle, laughing and swooping me up with a veiny forearm. I had only been divorced for a few months when we met, but it had been several years since someone had been tender with me.

The Trainer shook his long hair out from under his cap, filled my space with his big body, and, even better, refused to notice when I was being a fucking bitch.

I told him about my namesakes, all of them, about the way my ex-husband said my name, always a little wrong, always beyond repair. I told him how long it had been since I had dated someone my own age, and finally, someone who wasn’t white. He kissed me on the forehead, again too tender for what we were careening toward. “Scaaaaah-chi,” he said, learning the new contours of this name, smiling with his eyes still closed. “Scaaaaaah-chi.” I pressed my fingers against his lips to feel my own name; I liked the way he said it.

For a while, I admired this: I was so used to people showing me their most competitive sides through high executive functioning.

How many times could I prostrate myself at the feet of someone whose indifference I had confused for affection? The answer for a long time, it turned out, was just a little bit more, just a few more times, just one more night with him and then I’d be cured for sure.

My ex-husband’s unkindness was a rock, something burdensome that I could get used to—you can get strong enough to carry anything around. But The Trainer’s insensitivity was electric, like volts traveling from the soles of my feet to my crown. I didn’t know how to get better at being electrocuted.

There was something about the mundanity of a relationship that I missed: reading in the park, peeling a potato while he cuts an onion, squabbling about if it’s pronounced charade (American English) or charade (Canadian English). I just needed more light.

How boring, I thought, to have fallen into the same trap of a barely there man. I had built this house just for me; he ruined it by reminding me that I still wanted to make room for someone else, no matter how little room was left. I resented that I still had the muscle memory to make space for someone who made none for me. I thought it was okay because he was my age. Somehow, we were equals, even though he kept a polite distance from me always, and I was so swept up in him that I wanted to drink his blood through a curly straw.

I’m trying to remember that it’s a privilege to be alone.

I’ll remember that it’s been weeks or months since someone touched me, but it’s also been years since someone told me what to do. I’m lucky to get to trust myself. I wonder what it’ll be like to invite someone in—to move the green chair so it’s next to the wall to make room for their little table, to replace some of my books with theirs, to have to house a copy of Lolita, years after I left my original with my very own Humbert Humbert. I am lonely because I have grown up. The light in my apartment filters in through my curtains, spilling pink and green and blue sunbeams in my space. I’m alone in here, but I feel like a kid again, gazing at ice blocks dyed to make the cold beautiful, for however long it lasts.

My father isn’t perceptive. He would never be able to guess. But my mother was in another room, had not yet seen my face, and had yet to hear me say a word. I could hear her put the top of the pressure cooker on, sealing it so it would start screaming in twenty minutes. Still, she knew: “Are they separating?” she asked. Papa looked back at me, puzzled, and all I could do was crumple into my hands. “Oh, no,” he said, softly, and I had visions of hundreds of my strands of hair, cut from my virgin head, rotting away in my parents’ freezer. I never turned them into extensions. My mother saved them, like dried roses, for no good reason at all. That night, I dreamed of the hairs forming a tight braid around my throat, squeezing the breath out of me. I woke up, disappointed to be alive.

“This isn’t very auspicious,” he said to me, hangdog about his appearance. “Auspicious” is the word Indians use a thousand times at weddings, to denote how blessed a union is. The food’s arrival was auspicious. Our star charts showed a good match: also auspicious. The fact that he was cheating on me but I had no idea? I’m sure someone would find a way to make it work in our favor.

I put the ring on and felt unsettled, even if I was excited at the same time. I wasn’t surprised by the proposal—I mean, I designed the ring, I’m not insane enough to leave such a big decision to a straight man who wore pageboy hats and wanted to get me, an ethnic, a white gold band—but even as I felt one burden lift, I knew a new one would settle in after it.

These days, Papa and I don’t discuss the lost year, though we do talk about nearly everything else. It’s too common in our family for a couple of relatives to stop speaking for a while, a little cold war, until someone thaws or until someone dies or until someone forgets.

She said this while waving her hands broadly but dismissively across our laps as we sat facing each other on the couch, our legs crossed and our knees touching, like we normally do.

“This has always been your problem,” my mother said, sadly but with a frisson of pleasure. “Always saying sorry. Never asking for permission.”

It was an event witnessed by nearly everyone I have ever known in my entire life, and now, in my divorce, by several people I’ll never speak to again.

In the mornings, my husband still wakes me up by tickling the inside of my arm with his beard. At night, he still complains that I’m keeping the lights on reading when he wants to go to bed. It’s a nice alternate reality that I visit from time to time, like my taking a drive up the coast on a breezy Saturday (I can’t drive) or pretending like climate change isn’t going to burn my corneas out by the time I’m fifty.

My bua FaceTimed my chacha into our ceremony, holding him aloft so everyone could see this brown guy in a white tank top reclining in bed and heckling me on my wedding day.

Mangalsutra means “auspicious thread,” an indicator to the world that I’m married, but also protection for myself as a married woman. It was a cue to others that billions of women before me had displayed in another era: someone loves me enough to cover me in gold.

The wedding itself is a severance; the weddings take days, in part, because everyone wants you to be sure. You can’t go home again, so you ought to be sure. Men don’t have the same rules; they continue to live with and see their families.

The hope isn’t so much that you don’t suffer—Kashmiris appreciate, nay, love suffering—but just that you never have to do it alone. It’s a nice gesture. I believed, once, that our families could protect us from forthcoming harm just by walking us to the altar. I believed we were building a new framework where we would be partnered in our tragedies and in our successes. It was true for my mother, so I wanted it to be true for me, too.

My family enrobed me in gold, theirs and mine, a protection from future ill will. My aunties kissed the top of my head. My uncles got quiet and muttered something about how I was once so small, I could fit in their pockets. Everyone was getting ready to let me go.