‘When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait Of the Writer as a Young Wife,’ Meena Kandasamy

“Primrose Villa, with its little walled garden, its two side entrances, has the quaint air of kept secrets. It is the sort of setting that demands drama. The white and magenta bougainvillea creepers in their lush September bloom. Papaya plants, along the east wall, with their spiralling, umbrella leaves and frail trunks. A coconut tree in its advanced years, its leaves designed to frame the solitary moon at night and play an air-piano in the rain.”

Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful family saga, doesn’t it? Well, as in many an experience, first impression can be deceivingly false. But then, you already know what is coming. A book and an author who has been discussed to death. Her memoir of a marriage that was all of four months long came out two years ago, surrounded by controversies.

A writer, and a ‘feminist’ at that, putting up with an abusive husband, not walking out immediately? How could she, why didn’t she, the accusations are aplenty. But we all know, not a thing in life is as simple as that.

She writes about her search for that ‘one perfect love,’ how she almost found it in a Kerala politician, and married a professor almost twenty years her senior on the rebound. What she thought and dreamed of, from a pre marital distance was strikingly different from the reality of being a ‘married woman.’

The trauma that she went through in four months is so unbelievable that it can only be facts. For reality is always stranger than fiction. The descriptions are graphic. As to the question of why an educated, thinking girl did not walk out, that is what her story answers. And mind you, she had to face this trial by fire even if she did leave him after four months.

“In place of a firing squad, I stare down the barrels of endless interrogation.
Why did she not run away?
Why did she not use the opportunities that she had for escape?
Why did she stay if, indeed, the conditions were as bad as she claims?
How much of this wasn’t really consensual?
Let me tell you a story. Not mine, this time around.
It is the story of a girl we call after the place of her birth, lacking the integrity to even utter her name. The Suryanelli Girl.
Forty-two men rape this girl, over a period of forty days.
She is sixteen years old.
The police do not investigate her case. The high court questions her character. The highest court in the land asks the inevitable. Why did she not run away? Why did she not use the opportunities that she had for escape? Why did she stay if, indeed, the conditions were as bad as she claims? How much of this wasn’t really consensual?
Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape.
The shaming is in being asked to stand to judgment.”

There are questions aplenty. Would she have walked out if the abuse was not so intensely physical? Would she have continued in hope if it was more subtle and not so visceral? And I guess we all know the answers to that.

You may or may not agree with her choices, her way of life before and after. Maybe she could have handled things differently. There is one thing that remains unquestionable. The beauty of her language, the power of her thoughts and how it seems to flow so effortlessly into words that read like a poem that speaks directly to your heart, catch you by the the throat and shake you to the core.

The life of a ‘feminist,’ a woman who thinks, who dares to have her own opinions, who has the courage to question, is not so easy, you see. As for love, no one seems to believe that even she can yearn for it.