When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

by Meena Kandasamy

when she begins to talk about the time that I ran away from my marriage because I was being routinely beaten and it had become unbearable and untenable for me to keep playing the role of the good Indian wife, she does not talk about the monster who was my husband, she does not talk about the violence, she does not even talk about the actual chain of events that led to my running away. That is not the kind of story you will be getting out of my mother, because my mother is a teacher, and a teacher knows that there is no reason to state the obvious.

The number one lesson I have learnt as a writer: Don’t let people remove you from your own story. Be ruthless, even if it is your own mother.

There are not many things a woman can become when she is a housewife in a strange town that does not speak any of her mother-tongues. Not when her life revolves around her husband. Not when she has been trapped for two months in the space of three rooms and a veranda.

It makes a perfect film set. And in some ways, that is how I think of it: it is easier to imagine this life in which I’m trapped as a film; it is easier when I imagine myself as a character. It makes everything around me appear less frightening; my experiences at a remove. Less painful, less permanent. Here, long before I ever faced a camera, I became an actress.

whom no one even sees. I should be a blank. With everything that reflects my personality cleared out. Like a house after a robbery. Like a mannequin stripped of its little black dress and dragged away from the store window, covered in a bedsheet and locked off in the godown.

And cut! I am the wife playing the role of an actress playing out the role of a dutiful wife watching my husband pretend to be the hero of the everyday. I play the role with flair. The longer I stretch the act of the happily married couple, the more I dodge his anger. It’s not a test of talent alone. My life depends upon it.

I loved Russia and her bitter cold that killed the Nazis, her Soviet snows that saved the world. And then we watched it all melt away.

‘There’s a part where Lenin talks about how men, even so-called Marxists, take advantage of the idea of emancipation of love which is nothing but the emancipation of the flesh, to have one love affair after another. And Lenin condemns such promiscuity in sexual matters as nothing but bourgeois. And that made me feel guilty – feel guilty as to whether all my talk of emancipation and freedom with my women comrades had only been with the motive of making them fall in love with me. Was my talk of their sexual freedom only an excuse that would allow me to sleep with them?

Soon after my marriage I realized that my husband did not hate the Bill Gates and the Warren Buffetts and the Ambani Brothers of this world and the Indian state as much as he hated petit bourgeois writers (read, me).

I must remember that the responsibility of the female body belongs to me, and that I must not move or walk in such a fashion that makes others feel it is an object of allurement and enjoyment (although I should respectfully tolerate the gropes, the whistles, the hissed invitations); I must learn that a Communist woman is treated equally and respectfully by comrades in public but can be slapped and called a whore behind closed doors. This is dialectics.

There was Anish, who never met me outside of college, who was content with gazing into my eyes and scribbling my name on his notebooks, he of the respectable-love that did not breach boundaries, the love that fertilized in place of fucking insanely, the love where a woman was treated (almost) like a sister until the day of her marriage, the love of a shy and uncertain man-boy, with a moustache still growing in patches, with a love that started as a failed mission, a love that moved on.

Chandran, thin and tall and dark and bearded, who took me to his rehearsals, who I met when I auditioned for a play, who was adapting The Last Temptation of Christ for the stage, whose life revolved around theatre, but for whom drama was insufficient, for whom being in love meant being alive, and that meant not holding to an emotion long enough for it to gather moss, but instead changing, changing, changing it all the time, through fate and force and fuck-ups just so that every moment of his life his heart was bleeding on a jagged edge, and he could feel and feel and feel.

I had the opportunity to discover that he was an excellent kisser, and I would have allowed my days to whirl into his tongue, but the kilometres of his speech was not the road I wanted to take, and so I left him, not out of dislike, not out of malice, but because I was looking for respite from unceasing conversation.

was filled with the sudden dread that the world so painstakingly built around him could be shattered any second, and so I moved away from him, a star spiralling out of axis to save a little of its own light.

I fooled around, hoping that eventually, perhaps, some love would appear. Some boundaries were breached. Some boundaries were redefined. Some boundaries became borders with a vigilant army camping along their length. I lost some, I learnt some.

There are lies that glow so brightly we consent to give a finger and then an arm to let them burn. I was dazzled by the crowd where everyone called my name. Now I stand outside the funhouse exit, down the slide reading my guidebook of Marx in Esperanto and if I don’t know anymore which way means forward down is where my head is, next to my feet with a pocketful of words and plastic tokens. MARGE PIERCY, ‘SONG OF THE FUCKED DUCK’

Walk out. Walk out. The recurrent voice that stays stuck in your throat. It is how you know you need to run. It is how you know that now is not the right time. How you also know there will never be a right time. How you know it is not the how of it that matters, but the when.

How do you land a job when: • you end up somewhere in the middle of the teaching semester? • you have no contacts in a strange city? • your husband has forced you off social media? • you have no phone of your own? • your husband monitors and replies to all messages addressed to you? • you do not speak the local language? • you have the wifely responsibility of producing children first?

Conversations here follow the same pattern. An endless back-and-forth relay of absolute pointlessness. No question demands an honest answer. A question is asked as an exercise in formal behaviour.

people use politeness as a way of mutually permitted deception in order to help each other save face. Translation: in real life, unlike in an exam, no stranger will ask you a question that you will have trouble answering.

shorter, untied, loose hair was seen as an influence of European women – a corruption of the local ideal; a symbolism of unbridled, shameless desires; an effort at modernity at the expense of tradition; a betrayal of the national through an allegiance to the white man through a replication of the white woman’s styling.

‘You are a slave of this corporate media. You are selling your body. This is elite prostitution, where men do not get to touch you, but they masturbate to the image of the woman you represent. This is not freedom. This is sexual anarchy. This is not revolutionary. This is pandering to vulgar imperialist culture.’

I find myself incapable of writing even a single word. The women in the book I’m supposed to be writing are so strong. I’m nothing like them. My life shames me before my prose gets a similar chance. *

The common, widely held opinion is that writers dig the ruins, scour the past, always put themselves there. Yes. But at strange times they put themselves elsewhere. My husband is railing at me, slapping me, throwing my laptop across the small kitchen, forcing me to delete a manuscript, a non-fiction book-in-progress, because somewhere in its pages there is a mention of the word lover.

I fell in love with the man I married because when he spoke about the revolution it seemed more intense than any poetry, more moving than any beauty. I’m no longer convinced. For every genuine revolutionary in the ranks, there is a careerist, a wife-beater, an opportunist, a manipulator, an infiltrator, a go-getter, an ass-licker, an alcoholic and a dopehead.

When something is too obvious, I think the best course of action is to pretend not to notice it at all.

I think what you know in a language shows who you are in relation to that language. Not an instance of language shaping your worldview, but its obtuse inverse, where your worldview shapes what parts of the language you pick up.

But also: who you are determines what language you inhabit, the prison-house of your existence permits you only to access and wield some parts of a language.

So much of sex is what it is because you are allowed to be yourself. This individuality – which can be anything in a lover: fierceness, clumsiness, coyness – is what makes sex different every time, this is what changes the nature of pleasure from one act to the next, from one lover to another. To play the role of the still, passive and submissive woman day after day leaves a woman in a relationship with the ceiling, not with her man.

I am at home, lying down on my marital bed and this is how I sin. Memory transcribing the words of a love from long ago.

don’t choose one of a battered wife – that’s an image that will brand itself on your mind, and the longer you think of it, the more impossible it will become for you to relate to me, to love me naturally. You will then love me like a scar loves a wound and I deserve something more.

I do not experiment. I do not replicate what I did with my lovers, or what I plan to do with you. Every day, I serve food to him as if it were a declaration of chastity.

Fighting about who loved whom more. Fighting about our fighting. Giving each other names. Fucking, without giving a fuck. There was a lot of kissing. There was the blood and bones, the smell of sex and aftershave, the beauty that kept us going. There was, what could only be called, love. *

These stories sow the seeds of doubt. I begin to live in them. I look for evidence to believe them. When it becomes difficult to dismiss them as groundless gossip, I confront him. It is unpleasant and painful. Like cutting into my own flesh with a blade. Like taking someone captive. It breaks the languid charm of our relationship – that space without fights, that absence of raised voices, that snuggle-area we have fashioned for ourselves, where hurt does not enter, or exist.

Advice to young women who are into hero-worship: the world is full of women in love with the men who you are in love with. Learn to live with that.

‘I do not ask you to marry me because I love you and you love me. I do not ask for you to marry me because this is the thing that people in love do. I do not ask you to marry me because I believe in marriage or because I believe in this society. I do not ask you to marry me because we can live together night and day or because I would die if I do not get to wash your underwear with my own delicate hands. I do not ask you to marry me because I want to be your dazzling trophy wife, or because I can be the gold-digger who married up, up, up above her status. ‘I want you to marry me because I want to confront the reasons why you refuse to marry me. When you fail to take even a step towards marriage, I want to know why this idea does not exist on your horizon. I want to know why I am rejected even if you never say these words yourself. I want to know what it is about me that makes me unworthy of being your wife.

So is the man I am with: Bachelor. Politician. This label makes him stand out. This label conveys the pledge that his life is dedicated to serving the people. This label conveys that he takes his semen seriously. How can I stake a claim without making him lose this label? How can I press for marriage if he keeps declaring that it would prove costly to his political life?

I decide against a love that decides against acknowledging me. I want a man for whom I will have the right to mourn in public, by whose dead body I can sit for the last few hours before it is consigned to ashes, on whom I can throw myself and weep my heart to a stop. This is not feminism. I am just a woman in love.