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

by Meena Kandasamy

I knew that I was there. I was the type who had bought a Che Guevara badge as a fifteen-year-old, and would have slept with him had I not been underage and had he not been long dead. I loved Bob Marley the same way.

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.

they blamed me roundly squarely quadrilaterally for being ungrateful and

in real life, unlike in an exam, no stranger will ask you a question that you will have trouble answering.

A lucky girl managed to escape being his wife. If she did, I can too. I smile at the retreating backs of the women.

For four months and eight days I had been off every radar.