When I Hit You

by Meena Kandasamy

how he discovered amazing talent in a young man, how he saved his colleague from making a blunder in her research hypothesis,

Notice the masculine gender for recognizing talent and feminine gender for recognizing blunder.

becomes a Herculean task, or how the thought of checking on the slow-cooking chicken Chettinad curry when she is busy reading a book becomes an impossible chore. I also have to find out the technique to show its exact opposite, how the rooms begin to close in on this woman when she is being violated, how the walls chase her into corners, how the house appears to shrink the minute her husband is home, how there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nowhere to evade his presence.

The see saw between space and void. Claustrophobia and nothingness! It is quite terrific.

what kept me occupied as a teenager was the Quest for One True Love, the kind of love that happened only in Tamil movies where the man is a hero of the people, the underdog who takes down the bad guys, the stammering-shy-orphan who cannot contain his anger in the face of injustice, the undercover-cop-with-a-heart, the misunderstood student-activist, the stylish go-getter who never gives a fuck about what happens in the world until someone threatens his girl.

The way that movies make heroes out of assholes. How they are being portrayed as this all powerful men who can do anything! It is really disgusting.

Your husband is doing this for your own good, they both concur.

The ownership that culturally conscious indians can have over a womens body, mind, activities is staggering. The mere concept of "kannika dhaanam" is horrible. The father is giving his daughter to the husband. She is a property being transferred from one male to another. Making my blood boil!

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.

When I hit you, Comrade Lenin weeps.

I think my state is the textbook case of a trap: when you are inside a trap, thinking about other things sets you free. Simultaneously, everything that you think about reminds you of your own state of entrapment.

Beautiful

In a marriage, there’s no such room to fool around. Everything has form and function. Everything belongs in its place. The peg on the clothesline, the gem clips on the table, the coat-hanger in the closet, the woman in the kitchen, the submissive between the sheets.

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.

The original and most popular bachelor politician was of course Gandhi, the goat-milk-drinking-groundnut-eating Gandhi, the father-of-the-nation Gandhi. Gandhi was a married man who managed the miracle of becoming a bachelor politician. He made his celibacy public. This gave him a sainthood, whereas anywhere else in the world he would have been berated or mocked for denying pleasure to his wife and for not taking his conjugal responsibilities seriously.

He was a perfect husband: he never picked up anything from the floor, or turned out a light, or closed a door.

I climb into the incredible sadness of silence. Wrap its slowness around my shoulders, conceal its shame within the folds of my sari. Make it a vow, as if my life hinged upon it, as if I was not a wife in Mangalore but a nun elsewhere, cloistered and clinging to her silence to make sense of the world.

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.

In his ironclad logic: I am a whore, so I can be raped; I let myself be raped, so I am a whore.

At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.

Yes! The brain is a treacherous bastard !

They just do not know that when a child forms inside the womb of a sad, broken woman, its little heart will be made up of her tears.

Some men leave me because they have just met another woman who does not wield her words like Molotovs,

Tomorrow, you’ll be making a book out of it. There will be interviews and readings. You’ll travel, pose for photographs, jumping across cities, jet-setting around the country, going to bed with any man you fancy that night. The writer. The free woman.

These are the words that you imbibe into yourself. You start believing in them. They crawl all over you every time you do anything that reminds you of him. You think you are a whore. You deserve the punishment that he meted out to you. You are worthless. Tiny lice crawling inside your brain. It is these insects that are difficult to remove. They persist inside your brain and the minute you think they are not eating you out, they come back with a vengence! These are the thoughts that make the abuse stay with her forever!

I am the woman who still believes, broken-heartedly, in love.