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

by Meena Kandasamy

I am all set to play the part of the good housewife. Nothing loud, nothing eye-catching, nothing beautiful. I should look like a woman whom no one wants to look at or, more accurately, whom no one even sees.

This plainness comforts him greatly because it renders me unattractive to the world around

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.

Every line I have written to you is a thought-crime, a crime that does not leave a trail of evidence, a crime that is not even a crime.

The shame of rape is the shame of the unspeakable. Women have found it easier to jump into fire, consume poison, blow themselves up as suicide bombers, than tell another soul about what happened. A rape is a fight you did not win. You could not win. A rape is defeat.

A rape is also punishment. Sometimes, the punishment for saying no. Sometimes, the punishment for a long-ago love story.

Tradition never goes out of fashion. Remaining in public memory, it wears new clothes. In India, a bride is burnt every ninety minutes.

Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape. The shaming is in being asked to stand to judgment.

It does not cross their mind that a woman who is being beaten is intimidated into feeling, believing, knowing that to ask for help from others will only put her at greater risk. In their questions and their responses I come to know that even those of them who have mastered the theory have not lived through the experience: they lack the insight that a woman being abused can mostly trust only one person for help. Herself.

Some men leave me because I am unpredictable – sunshine one moment and storm clouds the next; the scent of summer rain with the sleep-depriving aftershock of thunder. They cannot keep pace with the fighting that follows the kissing that follows the argument that follows the laughing in unending circles.

Some men leave me because they have just met another woman who does not wield her words like Molotovs, who creates better monochrome memories, who holds permissible quantities of bitterness, who knows her place and who sings their praise.