Sucker Punch: Essays

by Scaachi Koul

Our wedding ceremony was supposed to last thirty minutes; it took more than an hour. The Pandit failed to announce a first kiss, and so I turned to my new husband, grabbed his face, and kissed him anyway. In the photos, the Pandit’s hand is on my shoulder, trying to pull me off. Parvati stomps her feet; she gets what she wants.

She whispered in my ear and hugged me like I was something she was letting go of forever. It’s the only moment of my life that felt too long, and yet not long enough. Like if I could stay there, everything wouldn’t go wrong later. Our audience stopped talking, stopped cheering. We created silence big enough for just the two of us to live in. I forgot my husband was even there.

I demurred. “It wasn’t in English,” I said. “It’s tough to translate from Kashmiri. It’s an inside joke.” I didn’t feel like explaining what she’d said, how it felt like a promise that I could come back home if I needed to. I didn’t want anyone else to know how I could tell that after all that—all the fighting, the pleas for my case, the strident belief that he is the one—she wasn’t that sure about this marriage either. She held me, and I felt her anxiety shoot back into my body. In that nanosecond, we traded all our worries. “Wherever you go,” she told me, quietly, so quiet I had to strain to hear, “just make sure you’re happy. Even if I can’t go with you. Make sure you’re happy.” It was like leaving a light on and the door unlocked for someone you’re not sure is ever coming back. I held her words against my chest for years, protecting them like a lantern running out of oil, like my last chance to get back home.

I was afraid of this tiny woman, this little doll who gave birth to me and has been shrinking ever since. The one I never feared was my dad. Papa was our patriarch, yes, and we had been conditioned to view him as the head of our four-person family, but to fear him was to be afraid of shadowboxing. He was all bark, even if he was bark most of the time. Even now, my mom sometimes calls me to make me listen to her yell at him. “This isn’t for you,” she said on the phone to me, taking a brief pause from screaming at my father, “but you need to listen to me tell him he’s being stupid.”

By the time she made it back to Canada, two months later, it didn’t seem like her current bout of frailty would swerve into a bounce-back. But this is a common experience—no one has found the cure for having to watch our parents get older.

She was panting and proud, and I knelt at her feet. She pulled me forward by my collar, brusquely, the way she did when I was little and had accidentally let the word “fuck” slither out of my mouth. A yank, and my face was an inch from hers. She kissed me on the forehead. “I didn’t know I could do that,” she said once she caught her breath. She took a shower, largely on her own, and I had never seen her so proud of her own body before. My spouse was right. I would never ask his permission to go home. It wasn’t his permission to give.

My mother is the backbone of our family, the only person that everyone can get along with. What a joyless position to be in. She manages the dynamics of three lugubrious, unruly churls who cope well neither with each other nor with outsiders.

The older we get, the more it feels like we’re raising our own parents. “You have to talk to Mom,” I’ll call my brother to complain about how she won’t just take a fucking edible to help with her chronic pain. “Can you deal with Papa?” he’ll implore of me over text, after he got in an argument with our dad over his medically required veganism. Our parents are the only place we see each other.

My brother was already fully a person, whereas I was a screaming mass, which I still am. My brother is stoic and emotionally complex. I am chatty and emotionally competent. Together, our brains might make one healthy person.

cried, which was what I did most of the time back then, but hid it with another puff. This all felt like a precursor to death—Mom’s, ours, who knew—but what a comfort to laugh in the face of the devil with someone made of your own sinew and salt. We retreated to our own bedrooms, and watched the Lonnie Donegan skit on our respective phones. I heard his laugh ricochet. I felt braver.

My mother started to improve, and so I decided to return to New York, to my marriage. My brother drove me to the airport for the first time. Usually my parents took me, trip after trip, but getting my mother in a car was an undertaking, and my parents would rather do things in a pair if they have to do them at all.

My mother’s knee surgery crystallized something for me, even if I was unable to identify it at the time. My dad was her useless companion but he was her companion. I ridiculed his inability to take care of her while showing any patience, but the point was that my dad was trying to take care of her. He monitored her medication to make sure she didn’t take too many or too few Oxys, just enough so that she could build her strength back up. He ensured she ate three meals a day, even when she refused, when she cried that even eating took too much energy. She slept on the guest bed brought down to the living room, and so he slept on the couch next to her the whole time. My dad is a menace to society, and often to my mother, but he’s a present menace. He was there. I didn’t feel like I had the same companionship.

Later, I’d overhear my brother further explaining my divorce to my parents, the way he did every time I fucked up at school. “She failed one math test, she isn’t going to become a vagrant,” he said in 1999. “She got suspended for three days. She’s not going to prison, Mom. That other girl just needs to learn to keep her hands to herself,” he said in 2005. “Think about how bad it had to be for her to leave. Think about what she won’t tell you,” he said in 2022.

Kelly was on vacation, and left me for a time with her dog, Leslie Stahl, a hefty and mercurial cognac-colored Shiba mix who kept me alive by pushing her snout into my neck when I cried in her mother’s bed.

hadn’t spoken to anyone in a few days, or eaten, and had only heard my own voice when it took the form of a hot sob. I felt like I was dying, then felt furious that I wasn’t. I would have to keep surviving when I clearly didn’t want to—and more pressingly, when I clearly didn’t know how to.

My brother has historically found me annoying, and I don’t blame him, but I just never had his stony attitude toward life. I’ve aspired my whole life to remain as still as he’s always been, and here he was, witnessing me at my most frenetic. My brother would handle a divorce with more grace. Or, rather, he wouldn’t need one in the first place.

It was funny because it was hell. It was funny because I couldn’t die, and he wouldn’t let me. He laughed the way he did about Lonnie Donegan, the way he laughs when something really delights and surprises him, and I felt proud to have made him laugh that way, even if it was because I was holding a match to my own life and hoping he could help me build a new one.

I had all the time in the world, so long as my mother did. Which she would. My father and I were determined, dogged in her recovery, as if she even had a choice.

I look like the person we’re always on the brink of losing, a poor facsimile of what we want: my mother, eternal.

“Aren’t you lucky,” I told my niece after my legal separation started. “I’m getting a divorce so it’ll be a lot easier for you to do it later, if you want.” She nodded, then twelve and high off her own delicious, Gen Alpha fumes. “Thanks, Boo. I’ll remember this when I’m thirty.” Devastating. I wonder where she gets it from.

My parents brought me home. I became a Koul again, with little fanfare, and almost no guilt. (There had to be some. Look, they are who they are.) All my wedding gold was gifted to me by my side of the family; my mother told me to keep wearing it. “It’s yours,” she said. “It was only ever for you.” I told her when I moved out that I still had the one piece of gold my ex-husband was given from our side of the family, a thin gold chain, from my bua to him years ago. He never wore it; yellow gold looked awful on his pink skin. “So he doesn’t have it?” she asked excitedly. When I confirmed, she pumped her fist. I still wear that necklace, too. It was only ever for me.

I wonder how long it would have taken me to leave a bad marriage had I known coming home would be easier than I thought. There was always a way back.

“But whenever you walk with me,” she said, “you always stop and turn around and look for me and wait. You wait for me when we walk.” We had taken a stroll a few weeks earlier, her little sub-five-foot-tall body taking a bit longer to get down the sidewalk. That’s okay. We weren’t in a rush. She ran her fingers along my hairline, getting grayer and grayer by the day. “I want that for you, too. I want someone to stop and look and wait for you.” I’ve had trouble feeling a fulsome rage at my ex-husband for whatever he did to me, but I was always furious that he lied to my mother. Through me, he had made so many promises to her.

My mother knows that she knows very little about my marriage. She knows it wasn’t good, but I don’t like to bring her into the details of why or how, even when she asks. Our lives have always felt tethered, together and apart, and she’s determined to feel what I feel, especially when it’s painful or tragic. “I want to be sad with you,” she told me, asking for more details, to know specifically what my husband said and how he said it and when he said it. Part of her, I suspect, wanted to figure out where I had gotten him wrong, and whether I could apologize and repair my marriage. A bigger part of her didn’t understand what malcontent looks like in a marriage. It was a feeling she’d never allowed herself.

I’m not alone unless my mother leaves me alone. But what happens to planets when they don’t have a sun to orbit around?

After my wedding, when people asked me how it was, I always answered the same way: “My mom had a great time.” Enduring is the image of her dancing in her stiff, light-green sari. She stopped dyeing her hair. She had eaten freely and had the only bite of cake I think anyone had at the reception, and so her body was strong and capable and lifted. There was joy there for her in my wedding, even if we each knew, separately, how doomed this was. When she hugged me on my wedding day, she told me to be happy. I wept because I knew I wouldn’t be. We both felt that this was not the place. There’s a photo of the moment she hugged me at the mandap, and it’s the only photo from that week I still love. I’m crying into her shoulder harder than I knew I had the capacity for. It looks like a picture of two halves refusing to split. I sobbed because I knew I would have to tell her the truth, eventually: I spent so long being so unhappy, despite the promise I made. I wouldn’t be able to outrun how miserable I was. I’d have to make her miserable with my news, too.