13 Lessons From A Morally-Wounded Woman: Chapter 1

Chapter 1

“The freedoms they dispense to you are meant to control you.”

.......

We haven't moved in a while. India Gate is still on my right and the bold declaration of love to someone named Ritu that I had closed my eyes to is still looking at me from the rear-screen of the car in front of us.

"What's happening here?" I ask the auto-rickshaw driver, as if his eyes have access to more than mine.

"Protest, madam," he says turning to look at me, "I think it will take some time to clear up."

I rummage through my bag for loose change to pay him. It's only a few kilometres to my office and I can walk. Immediately, he objects, telling me that my destination is too far to reach on foot. I am not surprised, no one walks here. My Only Friend says it's because the weather is always terrible here — too hot, too cold, too dusty, too dirty — but I think there’s just no space to walk. The struggle for space, is at the heart of this city. History lives with you here and it takes up your space. It's not exactly like having Leonardo Da Vinci for a neighbour, it's like having the fourth son of his fifth cousin as a neighbour; one who always parks his car in your spot and steals your newspaper but cannot be asked to move because his ancestors bought him the right to invoke their accomplishments. The monuments of this city were the original askers of the question: Do you know who my father is? The right to behave a certain way here is bought with ownership, but it's never your own possession that you tout, because no one owns this city. Not your father. Not my father. Not the Lodhis. Not the Tuglaqs. Not the Mughals. Not even our democratically-elected government. This city owns itself, and in it we're all the mistreated renters who love our apartments so much we don't mind putting up with the obnoxious landlord and his policies.

I scurry through the traffic and onto the pavement. When I first moved here I was in such awe of this part of town, you can just walk past the parliament and run in front of the President's residence, the proximity to power makes you believe that you have it too. Democracy emanates out of the guttural fountains and Outdoor Broadcasting vans always parked in the street. This is where you come to have your voice heard. On the guarded streets in front of this circular structure where laws are made lies the pedestal of the common man. I walk past the yellow barricades and uniformed officers, into the sea of protestors, it's the fastest way to get to the other side. I push myself through the crowd, inhaling the scent of hundreds of armpits intermingling. As I get to the other side, I bump into her. It takes me a few moments to place her. She's wearing a big red bindi and glasses. Her face is small, or maybe it appears small because the shirt she is wearing is too big for her. She's looks so different from the last time I saw her, but the intensity in her eyes is the same. If l look only at her eyes, I can still see her exactly as I remember her from the last time I saw her. She taught a class I once took, in a different city, on what now feels like a different planet.

"Justice for our daughters," reads the sign.

So different from the last message she delivered to me. I smile at her and quickly move away, walking away from the crowd and towards my destination. As I look back at her, I can picture her, teaching that last class.

……..

“The most dangerous thing a woman can do is live in her imagination,” she said.

She then took a step forward and said it again, punctuating each word with a slow oscillation of her index finger. Her words sounded like a song in a musical and without realising it, I started to sway my head to their rhythm.

“Can you please elaborate?” the girl beside me asked, taking a momentary break from fervently scribbling notes into her leather-bound journal.

It tickled me to observe how she was in class, she was always so serious and focused, and that would have been thoroughly free of humour if we had been sitting in the hallowed halls of a beautiful university studying economics, but we weren’t. We were sitting on the sixth floor of an office complex six-kilometres out of town learning how to be refined women navigating high-society. It was a finishing school and an underpaid former model in decade-old couture was teaching us how to better ourselves by using the right forks to eat and wearing the colours that best complimented our skin-tone. The world is a strange place, but our species perhaps its oddest creation, to take something as necessary to survival as consuming food and turning it into an elaborate dance of china and cutlery positioned at the correct angles is surely the purview of a species that has just a little more intelligence than it really needs. Yet, there I was, learning how to be a perfectly groomed woman with the right attitude. The premise of the class made me angry because almost everything we were taught there was in service of men. Whether it was learning to accentuate our beauty or embracing the effortless grace of elaborately-performed docility, we were there to learn how to decorate the world better for men.

“Imagination takes you out of reality,” our teacher continued, “They are at odds with each other, and you can never accomplish your goals if you don’t confront the reality of your situation.”

For the remainder of the hour, she had us make realistic lists about what we wanted to accomplish and what we needed to confront about ourselves in order to be able to do it. Then she asked us to admit why we really came to that class and what we really hoped to get out of it. She pointed to the woman to my right. She was a quiet woman, despite having taken those classes for a couple of months I still hadn’t learnt her name, nor had a conversation with her in the hallway. Each afternoon when the class was over she would rush out and a car would already be there to pick her up.

“I just, I want to better myself,” she said in a voice so small I could barely hear her.

“That’s not enough,” our teacher exclaimed, “Why do you think you need to be bettered? What’s lacking?”

She took a moment to fidget with the red bangles on her wrist and flip through the pages of her notebook, as if the answer to her life would be found in notes on wine and etiquette.

“I married a man who is rich,” she said, finally, still staring at the pages in front of her, “His family makes me feel small and worthless, especially his sisters. In their gatherings I feel out of place and uncivilized so my husband suggested I take this class to feel better about myself.”

Everyone in the room applauded but I wanted to cry. There is something so sad about a woman who is placed in hostile circumstances and made to find the answer out of them in self-criticism.

“Excellent! You don’t want to live in your imagination anymore,” our teacher said in approval, “And how wonderful to have a partner who allows you the freedom to better yourself.”

I didn’t quite understand her objection to imagination, I would never have made it to that class if it wasn’t for my imagination. Nor could I understand how she didn’t see the oppression of the situation of the married woman. Freedom is such a difficult concept to see clearly sometimes, especially when it is dispensed as a privilege.

I’d been there.

………

My mother bought me a phone when I was eleven and like every parent from that generation she told me that is was for my safety, and I should only use it to that end. While safety in itself is a concept that is hard for most eleven-year olds to take seriously that wasn’t my issue with it as much as I didn’t quite understand how a hunk of wired plastic would keep me safe, and from what. It would take many years for me to understand that when someone tells you they want to keep you safe they usually mean they want to control your life experience in a manner that ensures you will never shine so brightly that someone feels the need to extinguish you. Safety is what we call it because telling little girls that they have power and value may give them ideas and a girl who uses her voice is a target more often than an asset. The inevitable end of the phone-situation was that bereft of knowledge about who was trying to attack me and why, I decided to use it to talk to people. It wasn’t people I knew because at that age I was still wondering why even when people seemed to like me, I couldn’t make friends with kids my age. My parents told people I was an old-soul which is what you call a weird, overweight child who spends more time with books than people. It’s an odd expression but I suppose the implication that some of us seem like we have more life experience than our years is valid until it meets the adage that the only way to gain life experience is trauma. I was not a traumatised child, not then anyway, I was just bored.

Childhood is a cruel affliction and the fact that we have romanticised its innocence as a simpler and purer way of being has always seemed to me like hypocrisy. It seems odd to believe simultaneously that bringing a child into the world is the most complex and profound thing a female can do but the child brought forth is the most simple and innocent creature imaginable. Would that we could convince ourselves every birth was as immaculate as that of Christ. We believe children are innocent because on some level we wish to believe the creature that births them is a statuesque pillar of morality and virtue but even the prepubescent version of me could have told, neither is childhood a state of innocence nor is womanhood. There is no innocence except in the hopeful descriptive narratives of brilliant, albeit misguided, writers. Childhood and womanhood are alike only in that they are states of controlled communication. A child cannot speak and a woman must not: children lack the depth of skill at language to be able to articulate their thoughts or explain their actions, desires and feelings with complete accuracy — were a child to speak as fluently as an adult we’d likely be a lot more disturbed by and concerned about the things they say — and as a result we take their behaviours to be driven by some kind of determining moral force that is touching in its simplicity, and I can’t speak for all children but when I was one all I wanted was to tell them was to fuck their simplicity.

Womanhood is more complex in that the control exerted over the speech of a woman is social yet systematically taught in a way that even before she is capable of articulate speech a woman knows what she must not say. When I, as a ten-year old argued with my dad’s friends about their hateful political views I knew I wasn’t allowed to do that and it wasn’t because it was impolite to disagree, I knew I shouldn’t do it because I was a girl. I don’t know how I knew but eventually when it got to be enough of a problem that my parents started to worry about having people over because of what I would say to whom, they had a talk with me about what a girl should and should not do. With that talk began a vehement argument that would span over two decades and always end in the compromise that we couldn’t agree with one another because we grew up in different times. A valid position, maybe, if it wasn’t for the fundamental principles of independent analysis of information to come to the most fair conclusion because by that reasoning determining a point where we stopped growing would mean that we decided one day that we would no longer admit more information and all our opinions would be based on the information we had up until that day. To me that’s insane but to my parents that meant nothing, they just didn’t like me running my mouth off in polite company and that is not crazy because I certainly don’t enjoy being in the company of a person determined only to argue with me but telling me I shouldn’t do it because I was a girl only ensured that I would continue to do it with even more vehemence.

Children are little shits but telling little girls that their intelligence should reflect only in grades and never in speech or action seemed to me like asking for it. Unable to get me to behave by teaching me the methodology of being a well-behaved woman my parents applied other disciplinary strategies, they started confiscating the phone they gave me for my safety whenever I did something that did not seem in adherence with the behavioral approach birthed from the middle-class version of 90s feminism that dictated that men and women are welcome to be equal but they must acknowledge that they are different and as such must participate in practices more suited to their distinctions. You can take any dictum of horseshit and make it sound reasonable if you put it in words like that but you can never explain the sense in taking away an object you gave to a child for its safety as punishment. In reasonable terms that is like saying that if you, my child, misbehave you no longer deserve to be safe. However I was a child and not a moron, I knew that while I was to use that phone to call the police or my parents, the real reason there were so many rules attached to its use was that it wasn’t as much a tool of safety but of freedom. My parents were afraid I would do with that phone exactly what I did do with that phone, they were afraid I would talk to other people; other people who might have had dire intentions, but therein lies our greatest underestimation of children, we believe they would never have dire intentions themselves. We believe a child would not understand that when you buy them a portal of freedom you intend to use the access to it as a method to regulate their behaviour and we believe a girl cannot possibly understand that being a woman entails being awarded your rights as privileges for good behaviour.

My mother too, I think, believed that I would never be the one to cause trouble but would take my proper place in society and have the courtesy to be a victim of the dishonourable intentions of another. She believed that until during one confiscation she happened to actually go through the phone. She had taken it from me because she had caught me stealing food from the kitchen at night when I was supposed to be in bed. She always called it stealing because being fat I was not supposed to eat, and eating without being granted permission to eat when fat was often referred to as stealing in our household. I liked to eat in secret because whenever I ate in front of people they either called me fat, because children as pure as we wish to believe them to be, are cruel, or they told me I should eat less or healthier things, because adults will always pretend to know better for the audience they deem determinedly beneath them, children. I didn’t like to eat in front of my mother because she was always keeping track of what was on my plate and how much of it really needed to be there. Often at birthday or dinner parties, she would warn me not to eat too much or remove food from my plate until I developed a fear of being watched while I ate. I didn’t want to be told that I was eating too much so I started to pretend I didn’t need to eat at all. I believe that is when I acquired the deep shame I have in being human, because nothing made me feel sicker about myself than my need to eat. I stopped eating breakfast, I stopped carrying a lunchbox to school, I pretended to eat at dinner and eventually when late at night I couldn’t take the hunger anymore I tiptoed into the kitchen and tried to sneak food upstairs to my bedroom. I often ate in the bathroom because that was the one place where I was allowed to lock the door at that age and I couldn’t afford to let anyone find out that I did actually feel hungry.

My mother caught me during one of my helpless trips to the kitchen and accused me of indulging in actions that would only make me fatter, and she decided that she would take my phone for two days. By then I knew arguing with her would not work so I just put the phone in the drawer of the desk in the foyer where I always did, making a mental note to return for it after she was asleep but I must have fallen asleep because the next time I saw the phone it was in my mother’s hand when I returned from school the next day.

“What have you been doing?” She asked me pointing to the phone.

I knew exactly what that was in reference to because what I had been doing was sending messages to random numbers until I hit a man who wanted to actually have a conversation with the character I was pretending to be: A gorgeous 16-year old with an abusive boyfriend.

I can’t imagine being the parent who reads through those messages as written by your preteen daughter but in my mother’s defence she did what she could think of: she beat me up, took my phone away and asked me if I needed to see a therapist. Personally I cannot imagine beating a child or an adult, really, but I can understand why a person might think that taking away the device would take away the intention. What I can completely understand now is considering putting this child in therapy. I get why my mother thought about therapy, what I don’t get is how she phrased it.

“Some people are just sick in the head,” she told me, “You can go to a therapist and get treatment.”

I didn’t feel sick in the head. I didn’t feel sick at all, I just felt sad because my mother took my phone away and I could no longer tell imaginary tales of my abusive lover to my friend, The Faceless Man. I didn’t want his pity nor was I interested in invoking his desire to rescue me, even though that took only a few days because men always immediately think you are more beautiful and want you more if you are presented to them as suffering at the hands of another. Later in life I would learn to use that, but then I was just starting to understand it. I didn’t want him to see my pain and offer me comfort, I’d just wanted an abusive boyfriend for as long as I understood that people pair up in couples and one individual may hit another, and I couldn’t have one in reality at eleven, nor did I know how to get one when I was old enough, so I made one up and to make him real I gave myself an audience. When I told The Faceless Man about the things my Imaginary Abusive Boyfriend did, they became real to me. I told him such detailed tales about being tied up to the swing on his porch while he beat me with his belt, and how the intensity of the moment made me believe I loved him more deeply than I probably did. I told him about conversations that we had and how I enjoyed it so much when he slapped me even though I knew it was wrong. I told him about how it made me love sex with him after because when he beat my body it convinced me that he owned it. I didn’t know my tales were sexually motivated even when I spoke directly of sex, I knew only that telling those stories made me feel giddy in a way that nothing had before. It was like I had a fever in my crotch and rubbing ice on it only made it worse, but it never felt like the symptom of an illness.

My mother thought it was but it took only a little convincing for me to make her believe that I was just kidding around and imitating behaviour I had read in a book, she didn’t ask which book. I don’t believe that was as much an oversight as a desire to believe that I was not lying. There are things we don’t want to believe about our children and so it’s easier to take their phones away, only to return them when they behave more like we want them to. This is what I mean when I say childhood is an affliction. It’s a time of complete powerlessness. A time of stolen freedoms, but for a child it ends, for a girl it’s merely preparation for a lifetime of bartering principles for phones. The day I understood that was the day my education really began. The first lesson of womanhood is delivered the day you understand that the freedoms they dispense to you are meant to control you and that was the knowledge in which I was interested.

………

Somehow my quest for education led me to that flourescent-lit finishing school, and perhaps it was because I was young, only eighteen, that I expected to encounter a more empowered clientele. In my naïve expectations, I thought we were all there for the same reason. I had no personal use for soft-skills or good manners, I just needed to know the things men wanted me to know so I could manipulate them better.

“What about you?” Our teacher asked me after we had finished applauding for the married woman.

“I want to be able to get better clients,” I said, truthfully.

“What do you mean?” She asked, even though I had an inkling that she understood perfectly.

“Men,” I said, “Richer men go for more polished, sophisticated escorts.”

The room fell silent, and our teacher continued to look at me for a very long moment, while the rest of the students began flipping through the pages in their notebooks and pulling out their phones.

“I don’t think this is the right class for that,” she said, finally, and I knew my time there was done.

“Why?” I asked, with genuine curiosity, “You can teach a married woman how to live up to the standards of her new family but I can’t learn how to live up to the standards of the same men if they don’t put bangles on my wrists?”

She asked me to leave, and I did. Once I left I realised I had wanted her to ask me to go. Perhaps the brazenness of youth had led me to that class more to demonstrate my intentions than to learn how to act on them. In any case, I learnt something very important. No one likes a woman who takes charge of her own objectification, that’s only acceptable when society does it to her.

……..

In the crowd, I hurry away from the woman who taught me that. Maybe if I weren’t in such a rush, I would stop and talk to her, but I seek no education at her altar anymore. Elsewhere, a woman who taught me very different lessons is waiting.

………