Am I Her Abuser?

I only found out he had gotten married when she first contacted me. I sat in my living-room, staring at the message on my phone and holding my breath like an animal hiding from a hunter, too scared to exhale lest it be discovered.

‘Hi, my name is Isha. I am the wife of Mannat. I really want to talk to you. I know you won’t talk to me, but please, please I need to talk to you. Please message me back. Don’t call.’

I read her words over and over, as if I expected them to change meaning. I started to feel like a grave-robber, digging where no life remains, to find the remains of something that could be useful to me. I didn’t want to talk to her, that was clear to me the moment I first read the message, but it was because of the fear. Even though it had been years since I had last seen Mannat, I was still carrying around the fear of him and every once in a while, when I was alone at home and heard a sound in the dark, I would turn on the lights expecting to see him standing there. Even today, he is the descriptive embodiment of my boogeyman, of the monster under my bed, my boggart. Despite my fear of him, I was also sure I was going to talk to her. That was because of my mother.

My mother is an impossibly polite woman with too much pluck for her own good. In her perfectly curated social behaviour and the penchant for throwing back shots of tequila at a moment’s notice, she presents an eternal conundrum to the world, or at least, to me. She would have wanted me to write back to Isha immediately, because it would have been rude to leave someone’s attempt at correspondence unanswered, but most importantly, because she could have needed my help. It must be a universal law to resist the social norms taught to you by your parents, but as much as I resisted the behavioural lessons of my mother, her morality had been passed to me in-utero. I knew exactly what she would have said, because it was exactly what I had been thinking.

‘She wouldn’t write to you if she didn’t need your help. She wouldn’t tell you not to call if she wasn’t scared of something. It’s your duty to help her.’

While raising the next generation of martyrs, I wonder if my mother ever pondered her own complex — one that is equal parts self-aggrandising and self-destructive — it has her convinced that it is our job to save everyone. Even if she had pondered it, I wonder if it would have made a difference. I try so hard not to be like my mother, I won’t brush my hair, iron my shirts or buy the kind of cutlery that comes in a velvet-lined box, but I act exactly as she would have in most situations.

I told Isha I would talk to her.

……….

Mannat and I had met when I was fifteen-years old. At the time he was a college student studying to become an engineer and I was a wayward schoolgirl hoping to find the meaning of life in the backseats of the cars of strange men. It has been suggested to me that my sexual behaviour was the result of neglectful parents, abuse and self-loathing, which a lot of therapists diagnose as Borderline Personality Disorder in women. Only for women is trauma treated like a trait of personality. I think my sexual behaviour was the result of hitting puberty at the age of nine. By fifteen, I felt like a woman so accustomed to her own sexuality, I deigned to use it to the end of my own pleasure. Usually, (heterosexual) women get to this place closer to thirty, you’re supposed to spend your teenage years having sex because of peer-pressure, your twenties having bad sex for male pleasure, and in your thirties you discover yourself as a sexual being dedicated to your own pleasure. If you do that alarmingly early, it irritates people. They’d much rather you offer a more tragic explanation.

Mannat did.

The first conversation we ever had was in his house, I was sleeping with his roommate. There were a dozen men in the house, mixing drinks in the kitchen and rolling joints in the living room, when I found myself standing on the balcony. Mannat came outside. He was not very tall, but very well built. He had long hair, tattoos and a ring in his eyebrow. I was instantly attracted to him. I tried to make small-talk, he responded in nods and shrugs.

“You know everyone thinks you are a slut, right?” He asked me, a burst of misplaced anger detectable in his tone.

It made sense. I had anticipated my reputation. I had slept with at least half of the men in that room, you don’t do that in a conservative country like India without being labelled a slut.

“That doesn’t bother me,” I told him.

He grabbed my arm, tighter than a stranger ever should, and looked at me as if the right to chastise me had been given to him by a higher power.

“You hate yourself,” he explained, “You had a difficult childhood, I am sure, and now you act out by giving yourself to just any guy. No girl who respects herself has sex with just any guy.”

“I really just like sex,” I told him, trying to ignore the impact of his tightening grip on my body.

“You won’t like it with me,” he said, pushing me away before walking back inside.

Two hours later, I slept with him. He pushed me against the wall in his bedroom and hit me with his belt until I cried. It wasn’t sex, it was punishment. Three hours later, I was in love with him.

It lasted nine years.

………

Love in the modern world isn’t supposed to happen like that. You cannot just meet a person and immediately fall in love with them. You’re supposed to find them on every corner of the internet first, study every public communication they have ever had for red-flags and then go through six stages of slightly escalating seriousness in commitment until you’re allowed to be in love. I have never been able to do it this way. I demand madness from myself in matters of love, there is no rationality to the human desire to fall in love, then why must there be rationality to its practise? For the most part I live a careful and measured life — I run in the morning, I have degrees, I eat a balanced diet — I live like a sane person, but I love like the insane. It took an insane person to know Mannat and love him.

It’s not that he was an angry violent man, I’ve known angry, violent men my whole life. My father was one. He was a slave to his temper, he couldn’t control it and in his outbursts, even as I watched him beat my mother, I felt sorry for him. As awful as it sounds, I knew my mother could take it, but I knew my father wouldn’t be able to pay the piper when the bill came due. A woman’s soul is taught, so young, to expect trauma, and so we have plans to deal with it before it ever comes to pass, a man is never taught the possibility that their own actions may cause them remorse one day. They aren’t taught that there are consequences for what they do and while those consequences may not always involve a jail cell, sometimes the hearts of your children turn cold to you, and for the rest of your life, you look into their eyes and know they cannot quite forgive you for who you were. Angry, violent men aren’t necessarily lacking a conscience, they’re often sorry after the fact for what they have done, and in moments of calm they wish they hadn’t done it, but they’re helpless in the face of their rage. It controls them.

That’s not who Mannat was. He was angry. He was violent too. He relished those things about himself. He was a predator with intent and awareness. He lived to see the fear of him in the eyes of other people. He enjoyed the suffering he caused. He was never sorry about it either, in his head, if he hurt you, you deserved it. It sexually gratified him to destroy you.

That’s what I loved about him. I could never explain it to anyone.

…….

Isha called me a few minutes after I responded to her message. I let the phone ring for a bit before I took the call, I was not sure what tone I was going to employ. I went with confused. I was confused about why she would be calling me, or maybe I knew, but hoped it was about something else. Maybe she hated his tattoo of my name across his chest and wanted to chew me out for it. Maybe he had said my name in bed and she wanted to confront me. I was hoping for an expression of internalised misogyny, because solidarity would have been heartbreaking.

She had the sweetest voice. Like the gaze of a doe her syllables landed like pleas. We exchanged pleasantries. She told me about her life. She was from a small town in the mountains. She had met Mannat through a newspaper advertisement her parents had placed to find her a husband because society had deemed that she was the right age for that. His parents responded to the advertisement and after a few exchanges they made the trip down to her hamlet so the couple could meet in person. Her parents were wary of marrying her off to a man from the big city, a man from a different religion but she was smitten. She explained that she had fought her family to be with him, and how big of a deal that was for her. She was raised in a very conservative household, it had horrified her when Mannat had tried to hold her hand before they were married, she insisted that intimacy like that was to be reserved only for one’s husband. We could not have been any more different. For a while I listened to her fill me in with context and background, she seemed to forget the circumstances of our conversation.

“Isha,” I finally interjected, “What is it that you wanted to talk to me about?”

For a moment, there was silence.

“I know it’s weird for you that I am calling you like this,” she said, “I just need to know… You were with him for nine years, you guys were engaged, then why..why did you leave him? What could have happened to make you break off an engagement?”

……..

Why did I leave him?

I had never before been asked that question. The question I had been asked was a little different. After I did leave him, and I confessed to those closest to me about the nature of our relationship, each one of them asked: Why didn’t you leave him sooner?

Women like me aren’t allowed to be abused, I don’t cut a sorry enough figure, people aren’t inclined to believe that the same woman can loudly march for her rights and quietly crawl for safety. I’m not even inclined to believe that, even today I feel that in the abuse, I was complicit. I was drawn to his sadism, can I really be allowed surprise when it hurt me? Mannat was an underachieving member of society, but he was brilliant at manipulation, so much so that even when I could see it, write it down exactly as it happened and use it to demonstrate how predators look like men, I couldn’t help but be awed by the brilliance with which he kept me. Such is my sickness, I couldn’t help but love him for it.

He never told me the game of pain could have boundaries. At fifteen, I was so amazed to discover that there were men in the world who would hurt me on purpose because I liked it, a thing that I was sure I could never find, that I didn’t even think to question how far they should be allowed to go. It didn’t even occur to me that it could be my decision. He told me that to love him, I had to agree to never say no to him for anything, and I was so blinded by the electric pains of arousal in my extremities, I said yes to that condition. I didn’t think it through, I wasn’t sure what consequence could come from that. I thought the worst that would happen is that he would tie me down and rough me up. Games. Just outlandish sexual games played between the similarly-inclined. I didn’t know that the danger of the game depends not on its rules, but on the people playing. With him, playing dirty sex was like playing Russian Roulette, I just didn’t know the bullets were real.

I found out when I said no for the first time. He asked me to take back his burger and get him another without any cheese in it. He had told me that when I had gone to pick it up, but I’d forgotten. We were eating on the porch, the gates were wide open, and the moment he realised there was cheese in his burger, his eyes turned red. He told me to take it back, I found his request so inane, I laughed.

“No! I’m not taking that back,” I exclaimed, “Just scrape off the cheese, what’s the big deal?”

Before I had finished speaking, his hands were around my throat. He was screaming about the fact that I had said no to him and dragging me out through the gates, into the street. He threw me on the road and began kicking me. I tried to crawl away but he kept dragging me back to hit me in the head. I finally managed to get up on my knees, I looked up to see a few people standing in front of their houses, they made eye-contact with me as if to tell me they were sorry, before they turned away and let a twenty-two year old guy beat a 16-year old schoolgirl still in her uniform in the streets. I ran and he ran behind me. He pushed me into a rickshaw and told me to get lost. As the rickshaw started to move, he kicked me in the ribs. The driver avoided my gaze through the journey, when I got home, I offered to pay him and he shook his head, hurrying away as if the contact with me was bringing him shame. My knees were scratched up and lip was cut, I told my mother I had fallen on the street getting out of the rickshaw, I hope she actually believed me, because the alternative is that the woman who tasked me with saving the world, had no concern with saving her daughter. I washed up and went to my bedroom to change, I couldn’t think, the rush from the adrenaline was coursing through my veins. My body was covered in bruises, I stood crying before the mirror, as I admired how pretty I looked in purple. I lay down and tried to go to sleep, but my fingers kept making their way between my legs.

A couple of hours later Mannat called me as if nothing had happened, as if our afternoon together had been rough sex as usual, I thought for sure I had ended that relationship somehow, yet I found myself apologising for saying no to him. I knew I had nailed my coffin shut with my own hands at that moment, I didn’t know what grooming meant but I lived it, and as much as it horrified me, I was enamoured by it. By the disturbia of seeing myself enslaved. Whatever disease he had, I had the mirror image of it inside me somewhere. That should have made me believe in the cruel intentions of God, instead it made me believe in romance. I couldn’t tell people that’s why I didn’t leave him. Perhaps I didn’t even believe it.

Many years later I revisited that question: Why? Why didn’t I leave him when I could see exactly what he was doing to me? I realised the answer to that question may have been Isha. I am a dirtbag. I cheat with relish, I enjoy the violent intersection of pain and sex, I spent half my life doing drugs, I’ve slept with more people than I can count, I’ve used my body for financial and professional advantage. I deserved a man like Mannat, at least half of me wanted a man exactly like that, and by subjecting myself to him, I had successfully kept him from the unwilling for almost a decade. I had successfully kept him from Isha.

Then she called me, and asked me a question I hadn’t anticipated having to answer.

……….

I sat silently on the other end of that call for long enough that she wondered if the call had dropped. I didn’t know what to say, I couldn’t tell her the truth about why I had left, it’s not what she had come to me for.

“I can’t really explain that to you,” I said, at last, “But maybe, I could ask you a question?”

She said yes.

“Did he hit you?” I asked.

I had taken a risk. Even though, from the moment she had reached out to me I had known exactly what it was about, there was still the nagging paranoia that it could be a trap. Or that I could say something to complicate their marriage, something she didn’t already know.

“So this has been going on for a long time then,” she said, almost with a sigh of relief.

I know that relief. It is something all survivors of abuse know. The relief of knowing it’s not just you they would abuse. The lore about victims of domestic violence suggests that we try to explain their behaviour by finding flaws and mistakes in ourselves, but that’s what they do, and sometimes they succeed in making us believe that there is something wrong with us, but eventually, we do all come to realise that they would do it to anyone. We’re not all the same, they’re the same with everyone. Victims exist along a vast spectrum, predators are often a type.

“I’m so sorry, Isha,” I told her, “If I had any inkling he was going to get married, I would have warned you.”

Would I have warned her? I really don’t know. After I got away, I ran so far I lost track of my entire life. I never went back to our apartment, I just got all new stuff over the course of the years. I have no idea what became of all my notebooks, the bed, the lamp or any of the other things in left in that apartment. I changed jobs. I changed cities. I even changed friends. It’s funny, I would never have known how scared I was, if I hadn’t left.

“No don’t apologise,” she said to me with the kind of grace I can never muster, “Thank god that you got away from this horrible man, I understand now why you left.”

She didn’t. I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t leave because of the abuse. I had grown so accustomed to that and it had become so deeply interspersed with the nature of our sexual relationship that I couldn’t extricate it from the romance of being his property. I was an addict to the pain, I begged for it, and he injected it into me like morsels of Fentanyl at a clinic. I worried that if I told her the real reason she wouldn’t be able to relate to me anymore.

I left because he wanted to marry me.

He proposed without any warning, I had just turned twenty-three, he was pushing thirty. We had moved together to several cities across the country as I finished my education, and he became less and less inclined to making a living. I was working three jobs, he had been working on getting a new job for months.

The proposal was elaborate. He took me back to the hotel where we used to regularly spend the night when I was a teenager, he got us the same room, he tied me up and popped the question. I had no intention of saying yes, but I was worried about what happened when I said no. After we had sex, we lay on the dirty sheets in the shady hotel.

“You’ll be very happy as my wife,” he said, “I promise I won’t hit you anymore, you can stop working all these jobs and become a teacher, I will get a good job, we can have a family, buy a nice couch, maybe move closer to my parents.”

I was horrified. In the months to come I realised that he meant some of it. He couldn’t help but hit me, but he did get a job. He began to resent my work as a journalist and each time my phone rang, we fought. He insisted I spend more time with his mother. He started to hate all my clothes and wanted me to dress like a good Indian girl. He wanted to take the piercings out of my tongue and nipples, hide my tattoos. He wanted me to plan the wedding, to engage in religious practice, to prepare to be adorned by symbols of marital enslavement. Somehow this felt like the ultimate betrayal. I had accepted him, through the years, as the sadistic monster that he was, but he couldn’t accept me as who I was. I was happy, if somewhat numb, to the eventuality of a lifetime of brutal violence, but I never signed on for normalcy.

………

I had no intention of every being married or having children. Indian culture starts to prepare a girl to be a wife the moment she is born. We are trained in the ways of compromise and sacrifice. We are taught modesty and silence. A rigorous curriculum of household management and cultural oppression is taught through our teenaged years, and a punitive hammer comes down on any dissent, and for most of us, by the time we are old enough to be independent, we’ve already succumbed to the eventuality of the shackles of matrimony. You don’t just marry a man, you marry his family, and that family gets to dictate how you behave, it gets to decide when you wake up in the morning and how often you see your parents. The lie of freedom is sold at the cost of marriage. The freedom never comes. They tell you to put your dreams on hold until you are married, because they know, you’re only being shifted from one gilded cage to another. You have to snatch the liberty from the grips of society, label yourself a polluted woman and desecrate your own reputation so no one would ever think to marry you. No one would ever think to accept you within the ranks of good Indian women.

I was never going to be a good woman.

I will enslave myself to a man, but never to a culture. I will let the violent pathology of an ego-maniac leash me for life, but I will not let the patriarchy of culture and tradition be the noose on which I am punished. I will suffer for being who I am, but never for being a woman. Perhaps, in effect, it makes no difference whatsoever, but the moment the prospect of replacing the choke-chains around my neck with culturally-symbolic gold was presented to me, I couldn’t bear the abuse for one more second.

I couldn’t tell Isha that’s why I left.

……..

Within a few minutes of my revelation, Isha began to cry. She told me he beat her for the first time the day after they had gotten married. Even before they had made love for the first time. They had just returned from her town after completing the wedding ceremonies, she had just been welcomed into her new home, and after several hours spent with his family, she had taken him aside and asked when they could be alone so she could change and settle in. He screamed at her for disrespecting his family, and banged her head against the wall, she reached out to her new family for help, but they all slowly left the room without making any eye-contact with her. He didn’t beat her for very long, choosing to assert his rights as a husband over her body instead.

“How can you be intimate with someone like that?” She asked me, sobbing, “If you love someone, why would you want to hurt them when you get in bed with them? Where do you even learn something like that?”

That made me want to cry.

It felt like she was saying I had taught it to him. I do wonder, sometimes, whether the encouragement from me is what made him believe that he could treat any woman that way. I wonder if being with me made him realise he couldn’t operate an independent, liberal woman as easily as he could someone who was as shackled by society as she was sure to be by him. I know for sure that he knew all along what he would do to her, the charming ritual to win her over was a deliberate act, he was nothing like my father. He wasn’t helpless against his rage, he was indulgent with it. I wonder if he had let any of it slip before he married her.

There was nothing I could say to her.

“I’m so scared,” she said to me, “Every time he comes close to me, I wish I could run away. My family won’t ever accept me back home, I have no place to go and I just wish, I wish someone had told me what a big mistake I was about to make.”

It should have been me. I should have been the one to warn her about him. I should have spent every waking moment tracking him so as to ensure he didn’t get close enough to another woman and if I couldn’t do that, I shouldn’t have left. It should have been me. I should have been the one crying over the phone. He used to tell me that I would never get through him alive. He’d punch me in the mouth and hold me in his arms, promising me that we would be together forever, the only way I would get away from him would be in a body bag, and instead of running away screaming, I wrote poetry about it and with my broken mouth, read it to him. I put the romance into his violence, maybe I am the reason he isn’t the culturally oppressive and helpless type of abuser my father was, maybe I had rewarded him so much for his deliberate cruelty, I had cemented it. For all my gusto to smash the patriarchy, I had helped build one of its most sinister monsters.

“I am really sorry,” I told her, my words sounded empty even to me, “I wish I had known he was planning to marry.”

“Did you really not know?” She asked, I am unsure if the accusation in her tone was really there or I was hearing it, like a connotation hallucinated, “Did you really believe he would be alone forever?”

I am not sure. I think I did believe it. At least for a moment, I may have fostered a misguided notion that I had broken enough of his heart to make him mend his ways. He was inconsolable when I broke up with him. I was out of town, things had been shaky between us ever since the proposal and I was travelling for work more than ever. I left him a long letter explaining why we couldn’t be together anymore, he got on a bus and came down to where I was working. He begged me to see him and stood outside my hotel room until I let him in. He brought me flowers and chocolate, things that had never before been exchanged between us. He tried to convince me that we would be happy, but he was like a businessman who hadn’t correctly identified his market, he didn’t know what about his brand was appealing to me. He pushed me into the wall and kissed me, I stopped him. For once, I knew I was allowed to say no. He did not care. He didn’t quite force himself on me, it doesn’t quite look like force if the recipient does not fight you, but me fucked me through my refusal. I can still taste the mixture of bile and hazelnut chocolate in my throat when I think about that moment. In hindsight, it was in that moment I should have realised he would definitely do it again, he didn’t care about the willingness of his victims.

I should have known.

…….

Isha and I stayed on the phone for almost an hour, she told me about their marriage and how each day for the past year it had gotten worse. He had refused to let her work, he checked her phone regularly to ensure she wasn’t making friends and she wasn’t allowed to go out without him or a member of his family. She had to dress in accordance with the Indian traditions followed by his mother and sister. These details were less palatable to me than the details of the violence; the violent monster in him was my friend, but the system of oppression in which he seemed to have tangled her felt alien. Even though we had both been through the trappings of the same man, it felt like her struggle was so incomprehensible to me. I wanted to help her, I needed to help her. I offered every system of assistance I could access. I told her I could take her to the cops, I could help her get into a good shelter, I could find her a lawyer who would work her case pro bono, I could help her find a job. After all, I had spent years studying and practising the system of rescuing women. I could help her, I knew how. I assumed that is why she had called, for the solidarity that in all feel-good movies helps women escape the terrible situations that threaten to destroy us.

I had assumed that the poor naïve village girl needed my help.

“I cannot leave him,” she said, as if I had been a fool to consider that was what she wanted, “It’s too late, I am six months pregnant with his child. My child cannot grow up without a father.”

“Then why did you call me?” I asked her.

“To tell you that,” she said.

“You wanted to tell me you’re having a baby with my ex?” I asked, “Why?”

“So that you can see, what has been done,” she said.

It turns out we were cut from the same cloth after all. When left to take stock of our destruction, we would blame the first women we could find. I spent years blaming myself and she seemed to agree. Perhaps I never should have been allowed to leave. I made that bed, maybe it was on me that she was lying in it. I know it’s not my fault, every post on social media in the month of October reminds me that it’s not my fault, but I know how talking to her made me feel. I thought I would offer her my solidarity and save her, but underneath the layers of nuance and bluster lies a shameful morsel of who I really am, not her sister, but her abuser.

………