13 Lessons From A Morally-Wounded Woman: Chapter 9

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Chapter 9
“The sexuality of a person is the fingerprint to their identity and the blueprint to their soul.”


I wave at My Only Friend as she enters through the glass doors and disappears into the airport. She’s going to visit The Boyfriend in his hometown, this time because there is finally a chance that they might be able to finalise his divorce. Last week, he filed for divorce from The Wife alleging abandonment which is one of the situations in which the court allows you the privilege of moving on with your life, the case was expected to go on for years but fortunately the lawyer he is working with now has made a case that may end in The Wife receiving very little money if she sees it through to completion. The financial compensation for being a wife is such a complex equation. On the one hand, it is hardly untrue that women sacrifice their careers for marriage and children routinely, and it is even expected that they will do so. Once, many years ago, I interviewed for a position at a real estate company on a whim and almost the first question that I was asked was about my intentions to marry and procreate. I asked whether his offer to me would depend on my answer to the question and he explained that usually women become less interested in work after they marry and have children.

“I am completely infertile, though,” I told him, expecting that would make him uncomfortable enough to deter from going further along that line of questioning.

“That doesn’t matter,” he said, “You’ll definitely get treatment for that.”

It was rather idiotic of me to assume anything could deter a man from telling a woman how her life would play out.

“So, you’re sure that I am more likely to have treatment for a child I do not want with a husband I do not have than stay at a job if I fell in love?” I asked him.

“Who said anything about love?” He asked.

Who, indeed. It was, clearly, rather naive of me to link marriage with love. It isn’t love that makes one sign papers that guarantee the right to half of your husband’s money. Love only makes you want to stay with a person for as long as you can, marriage gives you the idea that you are worth a sum of money to that person and you can cash that in upon retirement from the relationship or take monthly payouts for performing the job of wife through your life. And I’m the whore, apparently. I’m the one who is supposed to be calculative and weigh men in terms of money, I’m the soulless capitalist while the hordes of women fighting in family courts to determine their value by way of a judge, they’re martyrs at the altar of marriage. I’m the whore. Still, I am aware it is more complex than that. Employment is hard enough in our country without telling women that they could probably earn as much money as men, when that isn’t even close to the truth. Most women aren’t quite educated for a lifetime of work either, a woman’s education is often geared towards ensuring that she can always find work as a teacher.

“You should become a teacher,” My Actual Abusive Boyfriend’s mother used to tell me, “That way you will have time for the household as well as the work. You will make enough money to do shopping and go to the salon. What else do you need?”

Little did she know that I was supporting her son with whore money while he pretended to continue to be working at the sales job he was fired from months ago. A woman’s money is supposed to be for purposes that aren’t as serious as a man’s money. A man has a salary that he uses to pay rent, to put food on the table, to send the kids to school but a woman has pocket-money that she uses to buy clothes and get waxed and go to lunches with other women. We tell girls at school that they can be anything they want to be but we tell them at home that they can be anything they want to be once they are married and in the charge of another man. It’s like telling a child they can have ice cream after dinner knowing that they will be too full for it then.

“They’ll stop telling you what to do when you are like fifty,” my mother used to tell me, “They are scared of youth and the things it might do because it can run faster than them.”

She was right and wrong. I don’t think they stop telling you what to do at fifty, they just expect that you will have learnt their ways by then, and hope you will conform out of fear for your daughters. I believe society fears nothing more than childless, single women at fifty because they represent the failures in its agenda. The most effective way to ensure the perpetuation of the patriarchal agenda is to teach it through the mothers. After all, when a woman is teaching you that you must never make more money than your man it can’t possibly be the patriarchy speaking through her breasts. Even if we wanted to make more money than men someone has to be willing to pay you those amounts. A man’s salary is determined with considerations far more serious than a woman’s salary, a woman is just lucky to have a job that pays enough for her to have her nails done and her backside waxed. In that regard, I do understand why we rear women that see marriage as their primary financial investment, I am hardly one to judge making all your money from a man. However, in application it is nuanced, in the same society rear women who are trained to work towards financial independence.

That is unique thing about feminism in India, we don’t have a first wave or a second or a third that can be placed neatly on a timeline. We have multiple waves of feminism going on at the same time. While I am more likely to fight for the right to equal pay, the daughter of the guard at the shelter is more likely to be fighting for the right to marry, or not, whomsoever she chooses to, while I consider my low-cut dresses empowering, feminists in plaid shirts might think I am just being the object men have always wanted us to be. My Only Friend would fight for the right to live with a man without marrying him while The Seamstress is still fighting for the right to not be kicked out of her house for being raped. We can all agree that shit is rough for women but we are never talking about the same shit. What is feminism to me is not what it is to The Teacher, it’s not what it is to The Recluse and I don’t even know what it is to Number 3. I do know that the most effective way to shut down a movement is to encourage its partition into sub-sects that don’t agree with one another. That way we get so busy fighting with each other we lose sight of the actual enemy.

The Wife has not lost sight of the enemy, but I don’t believe she was ever part of any woman-based solidarity. She is not one of those women who was forced to give up her career for man or child and while I cannot as she didn’t feel any social pressure to do it, I do believe The Boyfriend would never expect such a thing from a woman. I know that because he is not just supportive of My Only Friend’s job and career, he takes it for granted that she must do that because that is the way of the world. It’s not a matter up for discussion between them and I cannot imagine that kind of man ever telling a woman she could not work. What is more is that despite being routinely fucked over by laws biased towards women, he recognises it is so for good reason, and just because he is a victim to those laws that doesn’t mean he will stop supporting equal rights. He will not even stop supporting the law that got him arrested. To me that takes an extremely evolved person, we all think we are evolved until we are victim to those things ourselves.

Then we justify our stance as men’s rights activists by citing personal incidents. It takes a big person not to do that. It takes a big person to have the ability to bear the trauma of their situation and not lose sight of the real fight. The Wife operates out of a singular sense of entitlement that wouldn’t even be hers if the legal system moved fast enough for justice to really prevail. She is an educated woman who has held many jobs before and if private investigations are to be believed she still does, even though she comes to court dressed like a nun with her child in rags. I don’t know why religious fervour is a sign of morality when it has killed more people over time than many diseases. Outside the court though she demands that The Boyfriend give her money to speak with his child. What kind of God agrees with that? What kind of religion teaches that? If I donned saffron and walked down the street, would I become any less of a whore or does that legitimise my position as one?

I wish I had definitive answers to these things. I don’t. I am just happy that as a result of filing for divorce, The Wife has agreed to a court-supervised and ordered mediation process. The Boyfriend’s new lawyer is experienced at cases like this and he has assured him that taking the first step usually leads to a deal being struck within a matter of weeks. Within a matter of weeks, he could begin the legally-recognised process of getting over his marriage. Apparently, it takes six months to recover once the court is involved, not twice the length of the relationship. I am thrilled for my friend even though she insists that it won’t work out. I believe she says that because disappointment is much harder to bear when you have hope and they have had so much disappointment on this front that I don’t blame her. It does, however, amuse me that it seems like my unmarried friend seems to be going through this divorce too.

I text her good luck as I walk out of the airport and hail one of those over-priced airport taxis to take me to the home. It has been three weeks since my night with Number 3, and three weeks since I have been hopelessly in love with her. She has since spent three more nights at my place. I’ve been staying late at work every day so we can spend some time together in the office after everyone has left. The Child is happy that his sister, as she calls herself, is making a friend she genuinely likes. Everyone in the house believes that we are becoming fast friends and this has worked out even better than I could have imagined.

That makes me feel relieved but I am simultaneously outraged when I realise that no one would have assumed our relationship to be as innocent if one of us were a man. Taking a punch for The Teacher and banning The Womanfriend from the premises has really redeemed me in the eyes of The Seamstress, for the wrong reasons, and I have caught her beaming at me several times in the past weeks. It unsettles me to have her approve of me, it’s like the approval of a rapist, and I still haven’t learnt what to do with that.


…….



The Teacher, however, has decided to leave us. She spoke to me the day after the incident. She came to the office and asked to speak to my friend and I. She looked even more pale and emotionless than usual when she told us that she would be leaving us and moving in with The Womanfriend. I wonder if I can protect her if I move her from her room to the shelter. That’s what it is for, isn’t it? I started to speak but my friend cut me off and took over the conversation, which was probably for the best.

“Have you thought this through?” She asked, “If you are scared, we can protect you, you are like family to us and this is exactly what we do for a living.”

I am glad she took over because that’s not what I was going to say at all. It was along the same lines but her words were much more measured than mine would have been. Mine were more likely to be akin to a watermelon crashing into the head of a fruit-lover, well intentioned and idiotically delivered.

“I know what you guys think of her,” she said to us, “And I cannot deny that she has an anger-problem but I love her, she’s an amazing person.”

Somehow, I cannot corroborate the word amazing and the person who called me a bitch after I helped her off the ground but if anyone can understand why violence is attractive, it is me. Maybe that’s why I do what I do now. It’s not because I think I help people because on some level I genuinely believe the condition of womanhood is without cure.

“If you change your mind we’ll be here for you,” I said to her even as my friend glared at me.

She believes if we had pushed harder and longer, we could have helped her see reason and changed her mind. My friend has exactly the attitude of a person who has never been punched in the face by someone who claims to love them and I am glad for that. However, sometimes that means she doesn’t understand things that are extremely obvious to me. Like the temptation to believe the world is your enemy instead of the person kicking you in the gut.


…….


I remember when I first realised that I had to leave My Actual Abusive Boyfriend, we had only been together for six months after we had met through a guy I had been sleeping with off and on for a couple of months. I was going to college then. I worked afternoons doing inventory for a manufacturing concern and I worked nights fulfilling my weird dreams. I always kept some kind of a day job in my sixteen years of selling my body because I don’t like to be idle during the day. I changed jobs often, because when you have the unquestionable security of being a woman willing to use her body to make money, you don’t worry so much about finding your way in the world. You don’t put up with employers who ask you if you are going to have a baby soon, you can choose whatever job you like on a whim without having to the math of whether it is a good job. I’ve worked in factories, in offices, in restaurants, in bookstores, in cafes, at a car wash, at a real estate company and for one weird year at an investment company where I tried to raise money for a rubber plantation. All my jobs were fine but they never felt real enough to matter. They didn’t need to matter, they were like outfits. I put them on and discarded them with the ease of a spoiled rich girl spending daddy’s money.

That day I was coming back from work when he called me and asked me to pick up a burger for him on the way. I was happy to do because I have always liked doing things for people and doing things for him brought me more joy than I could have imagined. It’s not that he was a nice guy, it’s that they first time we slept together and I tried to suck his dick, he pushed me off.

“I’m not interested in your mouth,” he said, “I’m interested in your blood.”

To this day, it is perhaps the most surprising and attractive thing a man has ever said to me. Especially since he followed it up by biting me so hard that drops of my blood were painted across his lips like the most beautiful shade of lipstick I have ever seen. For the first six months of our relationship, we were in love. It was the type of love where my allegiance to it was constantly being tested. Owing to the fact that I had slept with his friends before, he believed that I was a huge slut, which is not untrue, but it’s something I refuse to view negatively. The way he said it, it wasn’t a compliment or even a statement of fact. It was an invitation to explain myself and my ways. I had no explanation nor was I interested in formulating one.

…….


I remember the first time someone called me a slut, which was also the first time I had really questioned the word. I would have seen it around, written somewhere, but I never thought to investigate what it meant. I was doing the school play, not Pygmalion but a rather amusing play about two older homicidal ladies who trapped old men for their money and buried them in their basement after they died from a slow-poisoning, it was called Arsenic and Old Lace.

I was fifteen-years-old and still friendless, but I was also confident and outgoing. I was still seeing Spearmint but also cheating on him with multiple other men. Of all the men I have done wrong in my life, he is the only one I regret hurting. He genuinely loved me, he even refused to have sex with me because he said claimed that we should get to know each other well before we took that step. I feel that people should fuck before they get to know each other because if we don’t even enjoy fucking one another, why bother to make the effort to learn about our deep-seated fears and favourite colours?

He did not feel that way, I should have left him instead of cheating on him but I was trying something. I figured, at first, that if I couldn’t get him to fuck me, maybe I could get him to hit me. I started to include allusions to belts and ropes when we talked dirty with each other which I don’t understand. If you can say dirty things to each other, if you can touch boobs and stroke dicks, how much of a difference does penetration make, actually? Why do we need to get to know each other better to go six-inches deeper into a person?

He thought the belts and ropes were weird and never took the bait, so I tried fighting with him and making him angry until he lost his temper and hit me. This is what I believed of men; I believed that if you make any man angry enough, he would turn to violence to set you right. When Spearmint wouldn’t be angered at my behaviour I was not put off but determined so I cheated. I cheated not for the sex I would have with another guy but because I wanted to tell him that I had. When I told him there was a terrific row that ended somehow in him apologising to me for not being able to fulfil me sexually. He said he understood that I had some weird leanings, possibly because of the abuse of my mother, that had led to me looking for things he couldn’t give me in the arms of another man. I was baffled but still undeterred, I did it again and again until he came to just accept my cheating as something that I was unable to stop doing. He said it was like smoking, an addiction that he would help me work through.

It was during this phase of our relationship that someone called me a slut. It was a bunch of older, cool girls that were also in the play, I met them after the first table-read and they were very nice to me. We talked about the play, about our lives and other such things. They told me at the end of the day that I was a very nice and sweet girl and that they looked forward to spending more time with me. I will always deny that I ever wanted friends but I think the truth is that I did. I wanted someone to talk to and rely on as much as the next person but having never been given that option, I found it safer to pretend that I didn’t need these human things. Still, I was happy that day. The next day when I saw them at rehearsal again, I went up to talk to them.

“You can’t be our friend,” the one who grew up to be an interior decorator told me.

I was baffled and a little hurt.

“What did I do?” I asked holding myself responsible for something I wasn’t even aware of yet.

The thing is, I had a bit of a reputation at school. I grew up in a small town and being aware of the fact that I was going to grow up to be a prostitute, I never made the effort the hide the type of things that girls from good families were only supposed to do in secret. I met men openly. I knew I had the reputation of being a loose woman but I couldn’t articulate or even understand that at the time. I just believed that I was being hated on for being a girl who was outspoken and honest about things.

“We spoke to some of your classmates and they told us you are not a nice girl,” they said, “You’re just a slut.”

I was even more confused by that because not only did I not really understand what a slut was but I didn’t know why it made me not a nice girl. It was like the cellphone that was supposed to keep me safe all over again.

“What’s that?” I asked them.

They exchanged looks amongst themselves that seemed to suggest that they were exasperated and amused at the same time.

“You have sex with lots of guys,” she said.

It made me laugh when she said that. It was like she was saying to me that she thought I wasn’t nice because I liked the colour red. It made absolutely no sense.

“So, a slut is someone who has sex with lots of guys?” I asked, by then I was more interested in the meaning of the word than having friends.

To me it was like someone had unwittingly handed me a title for my identity while attempting to insult me.

“We don’t want to be your friend!” She said still focused on the thesis of the conversation as opposed to what was clearly the more important topic of discussion.


“That’s fine,” I told her, “It’s your right to only be friends with people who don’t have sex, but can you tell me what the male-word for slut is?”

I really wanted to know. I really believed it was like tiger-tigress. I gathered from the look that she gave me that she had completely failed to understand my interest in the matter and thought I was trying to fight back with her. I didn’t even know that was a fight, I would learn that it was when I started hearing that rumour do the rounds in school. I unwittingly began a rivalry that would lead to me being called a slut by almost every person who ever had a conversation with me for the next four years. I was even called in by one of the teachers who was concerned about the direction I was taking in life. That conversation ended quickly because I used the word sex and I believe it set her ears on fire so she had to seek immediate medical attention.

The only real consequence of that entire affair was that I started to call myself a slut.

…….


I often even introduced myself to men as a slut, and until My Actual Abusive Boyfriend no one seemed to have a problem with it.

“No one had a problem because everyone likes to fuck a slut,” he explained to me often, “No one wants to love a slut.”

That was the nature of our relationship right from the beginning. He made it extremely clear to me that he was doing me a favour by actually being interested in me as a partner because no one else would. I wasn’t naive by a long shot but it was the first time I had been with a man that I was actually interested in even after we had had sex. I started to fall for it. He would often threaten to leave me and make me beg him to stay. He would say that I was not worth his love and that made me want it so much more. I started to feel guilt about sleeping with other men even though I didn’t stop doing that, it was my job, but I started to believe I deserved the things he said to me because my job was so immoral. I was so immoral. He would explain to me that I was ugly and of no real value to a respectable man which is why he had to treat me this way. Every night he would scream at me for being a slut after he fucked me bloody, and I would apologise repeatedly for my entire identity. He only hit me during sex and in ways that we both enjoyed until that day six months into our relationship.

That day I brought him a burger and he didn’t like that I had forgotten to tell them not to put cheese in it. He asked me about the cheese as soon as I handed it over to him and when I told him that I had forgotten about it, he completely lost it. We were standing in the courtyard of his house; he flung the burger on the ground and grabbed me by my throat. With the other hand he slapped me twice across my face and then started to punch me all over the body. He then pushed me out of the gate and kicked me onto the road. He kicked me until I was far enough to stand up and try to run away but he caught up to me with ease and started to rain blows on me again. On the other end of the street, there was a vegetable vendor pushing a cart around, I screamed out to him and instead of rushing towards us, he pushed his cart faster and faster until he had disappeared from the scene. I began to scream as blood poured out of my nose and onto the road. If you’ve ever wondered how people get away with heinous acts of violence in broad daylight, the answer is that people don’t care. Not one person in that respectable, upper middle-class neighbourhood stepped out past their gate while he pummeled me as I begged him to stop.

When he did finally stop, I was sure I was going to die. He left me there on the street, being watched by at least five people standing in their courtyards, I looked each one of them in the eye before I picked myself up and walked out onto the main road to hail an auto rickshaw and go home. All I could think about was how this wasn’t supposed to happen to girls like me. Girls like me from homes where paying for college was no big thing. Girls like me who are sexually liberated and understood how the patriarchy controls women. Girls like me who would never stand for a man who treated them like property. Girls like me who were educated and understood their legal rights. Girls like me who knew better. Girls like me who had the privilege to not be trapped within in a system. Instead of feeling a rage that should have sent me to the police station, I felt ashamed of what I had allowed to happen to me. I realised I had to leave him.

“....but you love him,” the voice inside my head said.

I believed that voice was my authenticity but it wasn’t. That voice was the culmination of the success of the societal agenda to keep women in place reminding me that I had to accept this treatment because I must have caused it myself. He felt the same way. I decided I would wait for him to call and apologise; the call never came so a day later, still bruised and hunched over, I called him myself. After spending a few minutes pretending nothing had happened he began chastising me for what I had made him do. Instead of promising to never do it again he warned me never to make him angry like that again.

I still wonder why I would put up with that, the more I thought about the violence and how it had felt, the more conflicted I was about whether I had actually enjoyed it and was only complaining because a different faction of society dictated that I do. Or maybe I was just scared. I had never known terror like that moment. Even with Mr. Boiled Chicken the violence was not outright, I never worried that I would die at his hands, but with My Actual Abusive Boyfriend that became one of my primary concerns in that relationship. I asked him to promise that he would never beat me like that again but somehow before I knew it, I was promising him that I would never give him a reason again. I was apologising to him for making him do that to do. That is the actual definition of powerlessness, I think, when you apologise for the violence done unto you.

Our relationship changed radically that day, instead of focusing all of his energy on making me feel terrible about myself he started losing his temper around me with extreme ease and beating me in violent rages each time. He convinced me that because we had a sex life that involved pain anyway, this wasn’t that far a departure from our norm. I began making excuses for him to anyone who tried to tell me they were concerned for me, I started to tell people that they just didn’t understand our love. I taught myself to always be on guard for assault and over the years my reflexes to violence underwent such radical shifts that even today I can take a punch and just laugh it off without so much as an increased heartbeat. I stuck by him through broken ribs and a cracked femur, because I loved him. I really loved him and so I understood why The Teacher wanted to move in with The Womanfriend. Trauma bonds are a curious thing but they have a longevity that often even healthy relationships lack. When violence and abuse are all you have ever known it is not unusual to believe they are the side-effects of love. It was only after I left him that I realised that I had replaced the abuse of my mother with him. He told me I was worthless, much like she did. He beat me for any attempt at being extraordinary, like she did. I started living with visible bruises and a natural defense against anyone questioning them. That was my normal.


…….



I wondered if that would soon become The Teacher’s defense too, I could have told her all of this but I didn’t because I have been in her place and everything I said in support of her would sound to her like a rebuke to the woman she loved. There is no value to our experiences, ultimately, because having had them we still cannot use them to do better for anyone except ourselves.

“Thank you for everything,” she told us, “I will stay for four weeks so you have time to find someone to replace me.”

Right then, I considered giving the job to Number 3. Number 3 didn’t fit in with the rest of the women in the shelter for some obvious and some deeply class-based reasons. She was a runaway but she had clearly had excellent elementary education, she still read profusely and her sexuality had the quality of being practiced by choice. The sexual fingerprint of a person is often a blueprint to their soul and her sexual blueprint is like an MC Escher painting. She put on an excellent act of being from the forgotten factions of society but her knowledge about her own legal situation was a departure from the norm. Most women who come to us know nothing about their rights and they rarely express views that reflect any agreement with a society founded on equal rights. She knows her rights, and not only does she choose not to exercise them in any way, she pretends like she doesn’t know them. She refuses to explain or talk any further about the child who has by now become a natural part of our household. She loves him, that much is clear, but I can’t always tell that he loves her. There is an unknowable quality to her, and even though I can draw a picture of her cunt with the tip of my tongue, I don’t know who she is at all. I think perhaps that is where my attraction to her stems from; for once it feels like I am the thing being studied as opposed to being the person watching the organism through the lens of a sexual microscope. I don’t feel as strong a need to know who she is, but I want her to know who I am. I feel like I put on a voyeuristic display of my personality for her.

…….



I still haven’t spoken to My Only Friend about the prospect of hiring Number 3 but I believe I can convince her because everyone else I have interviewed so far has just refused to work for so little money, we have already had to lower the level of qualification we are looking for in a person. I will speak to her about it after she returns from her trip and in the meanwhile, I can convince The Teacher to stay an extra two weeks. She goes out a lot nowadays and a lot of her responsibilities have fallen to The Seamstress which means I have to deal with her a lot more than usual. I go through the applications we have left for The Teacher’s job on the way back home from the airport. As the cab pulls into my lane, my phone rings, it is an unknown number and I let it ring for a bit before I answer. The unknowable is often so terrifying that even a bunch of numbers on a phone can sometimes feel like death calling.

I answer the phone and the familiar voice of Number 3 rings inside my ears. She sounds like a strange kind of music, the kind that sounds like screeching records but is appealing in the extent of its noise. She drowns out the city, the thousands of people in the street rushing from here to there, the sirens of the trains, the bellowing baritone of fruit-vendors and pimps. Everything goes silent when she talks to me.

“I bought a phone with the money you gave me,” she tells me.

I don’t know why she phrased it like that since that is what I gave her the money for when she asked. I enjoyed her asking me for it more than I could have anticipated. There’s something about being the one who brings the money to the table that makes me feel powerful. I feel like it justifies what I am doing here with her because I am taking care of her. I feel like a man when I do it, like I need a shower to wash off the dirt of the manipulation.

“That’s good,” I tell her.

“Will you come see me now?” She asks.

My friend and I left early today so I could help her pack and take her to the airport and so I haven’t seen her at all today.

“Why don’t you come see me?” I ask her, “You’ve got to have enough money left over to take an auto.”

She is silent for a moment.

“Can I slap you because you made me come instead of coming to get me?” She asks in her usual teasing manner.

“I’ll tell you what, you can slap me twice,” I say to her, “And then a dozen more times.”

She laughs and hangs up on me. Like I’m going to say no to a woman who wants to slap me when it’s exactly what I pay her for.

…….