I can still remember my sister-in-law, steadfast in her love for her brother, telling the policeman, “She must have provoked him. It’s her fault.” I was silent, I let my bleeding forehead, my injured arm, my bruises tell my story. The habit of silence I’d inherited from childhood was too deeply ingrained; my police complaint of one A4 sheet was brief in its description of 14 months of unrelenting physical and mental abuse.
Also, in cases of sexual assault when its the boyfriend or husband, the case becomes even more complicated. The person time and again isn’t believed. Or if believed, asked why did they let it go on for so long? Why did they stay? Why did they not complain earlier? Why did they not leave? Assault from a stranger is easier to process than assault from someone trusted — easier for the victim and the family to condemn an unknown stranger, a faceless, voiceless evil entity. But a friend? Then we’ve opened a Pandora’s box. It would be dragging everyone’s name through mud, rupture of family ties and forcing people to take sides – yours or his.
I faced that dilemma, when my childhood friend of nearly 16 years visited my house that summer vacation, I was recovering. If you’ve read the first part of what I wrote, at 18 I’d had surgery to get a tumour removed from my left breast. The left side of my chest was swathed in bandages – glued onto the skin — to prevent possible rupture of the stitches. Wearing a bra felt like a torture exercise. I was wearing a brown pyjama with red stripes and had overslept when the bell rang.
He had come over as his dad promised my parents a good price for our Bajaj Kawasaki. Now, my friend was one of those tall, good-looking chaps, who frequented the gym; and just had the right amount of muscle beneath his t-shirt and half-buttoned formal shirt. I hadn’t seen him in months, but I felt butterflies in my stomach as he impishly grinned at me; his dimples making one want to reach out and pat his cheeks. But the code was too strong within me – so we continued talking as usual. The code was I was a Christian and he was a Hindu; and we knew it was out of question for us to date; we lived in the shadow of our family’s value systems.
But, once he got the vehicle details, he still hovered around. Obviously reluctant to go, he asked for a glass of water to prolong the visit. He said it was seeing me without my school uniform. I went to the kitchen only to find he had followed me. And as he drew closer, it struck me that I was 18 and never had my first kiss. All my friends had experienced that by age 16. And he moved closer and it felt sweet, tender and magical. It was like what the books and Disney movies had promised.
But then it seemed to go on and he was touching my waist – and now I started getting uncomfortable. As I tried to break free, he got more forceful. Then he encircled and pinned my hands down and I started getting annoyed. I asked him what the hell he was playing it. He said “Please, I only want to see you. I won’t hurt you I promise.” I was hissing back furiously, “You take your hands off. I’ll tell your dad and you’ll get beaten black and blue.” And somehow — just like the first code, another code was not to make noise — me screaming and all the neighbours landing up when we were in a compromising position given our parents’ standing in the locality– was something instinctively we knew we had to avoid. So I kept hissing furiously back at him, while he kept pleading with me.
And then panic and terror truly hit. As he swiftly unbuttoned my pyjama top and started unhooking my bra, for the first time I realised how strong he was. I couldn’t move an inch; my hands were held fast beneath me with just his right hand; while both my legs were pinioned down on the sofa with just his left knee. Now the tears started, I was alternatively pleading and muttering threats and dire repercussions. The minutes kept ticking by. But he wasn’t touching me, true to his promise he was just looking at me topless, one half of my chest bandaged. When he made a move towards unknotting my pyjama bottom, I noticed the scar on his forehead, it was when he had hit his head on the monkey bars as a 5-year-old. And then anger coursed through my body — that this snotty-nosed kid, whom I had seen from kindergarten, who couldn’t say his A,B,Cs right, who cribbed from me and copied my answer sheets during exams — should be terrorising me. Anger gave clarity, and with one twist, I’d jerked my knee into his groin, and my left hand snaked out caught the table lamp next to the sofa and brought it crashing down on his head. He crumpled.
I swiftly dressed up. Drank a glass of water and turned around to see he was bleeding profusely and unconscious. “Oh, holy mother of God. I had killed the boy.” I jerked out the ice tray from the fridge and tried to staunch the bleeding. It just wouldn’t stop. There was blood everywhere, on the sofa, on the floor, on his clothes, on the ice tray. I dumped all the ice on a tea towel and held it up against his head. It didn’t stop the bleeding and his face was acquiring a death-like pallor. I put my ear to his chest and my fingers to his nose – his heart was still beating and his breath was warming my fingers.
The minutes crawled by, a quarter of an hour passed before he groggily woke up. I instructed him to keep the motley ice pack against his head and went upstairs to change into a salwar kameez to take him to the hospital. When I went down, I realised he couldn’t walk without help, his head was swimming and he found my help inadequate. We barely made it past a few steps; he was too heavy for me and I lowered him back onto the sofa. He whispered for me to call for another classmate. I called from the landline. It seemed till eternity, before he arrived on a bike. I hissed at the fool to get an auto. We got him into one and I hoped none of my neighbours were watching behind their lace-curtained windows. I swiftly, cleaned, scrubbed and wiped out every trace of blood.
He did survive, but had to miss two weeks of college. For months after that, I had nightmares of blood, blood everywhere, blood soaking my clothes; and in the nightmares he was dead, dead beyond revival — the sickly-sweet odour of his imagined blood – making me wake up in a sweat.
Likewise, the domestic violence I faced with Indra’s father is something I find very difficult to talk about. I should have walked out the first time he hit me. I didn’t. I was supposed to be a feminist. What was wrong with me?
I was crippled with inaction.
For starters, are you stupid? If the guy was hitting you and hitting you when you were pregnant, are you a moron not to have left? Well, I can only say it is gradual. The process of alienating you from your friends and family; the process of constantly humiliating you, belittling you, making you doubt your own senses; the process of engaging in outrageous behaviour to ensure your instant and immediate obedience to their bizarre wishes; the process of trying to cut off your financial ties so that you are entirely at their mercy; at their whimsical fancies and caprices.
It would be so gradual and steady their cutting off all your emotional anchors and support systems – that you might not even notice it till you are left high and dry and all alone. And as emotional vampires — your violent and abusive partner — would be able to sense out your deepest and darkest fears and use them to club you on the head; club you back into obedience. In my case, my deepest fear was the thought of a second divorce; how it would affect my family; how much it would hurt them. And he used that as the whip to hold me fast to my place.
Some of their simplest tricks to alienate you – are when they start huge fights, land up drunk or in someway embarass and humiliate visitors — so that you never make the mistake again of inviting friends and family to your home. Their way of getting access to your financials would be to demand your bank account details; when you don’t, then accuse you of not trusting them; berate you and pile abuse till you finally give in.
So then why did I stay? I did not entirely hate him. There were parts of me that empathised with him; that wished I could wipe out all his years of abuse. He’d been anally raped as a 7-year-old by three of his father’s friends at their pigeon loft. Forced to perform oral sex as startled pigeons fluttered around him. His parents — whom he also acccused of neglect, physical and mental abuse– noticed nothing wrong, when he came back tear-stained, with torn shorts and a lifelong dislike for curd rice (given its mental associations for him).
It would take the birth of Indra – before the realisation dawned on me that he was beyond any help I would render him. He needed professional help and I started viewing him as a rabid dog — one can see its suffering and empathise, but also realise the prudence of staying away for one’s own safety.
Months of nastiness followed, pure and mean nastiness. I filed for custody and divorce. Won both. And miraculously won custody with no visitation rights. But some trace of the human being he had the possibility of becoming, surfaced on the last day of court. To my surprise, he told the judge, “I know Rachel will take care of my daughter. I think it is better the child remains with her.”
And that’s when I realised there are greys to every relationship; nothing is in black and white. No one is wholly bad. But that shouldn’t make anyone stay on in an abusive relationship – in the perennial hope that their finer instincts will surface. That they will magically morph back into the person they fell in love with. Neat endings happen only in movies. In real life, I’d urge at the first instance of violence, just pack up and leave. As it will only get harder as the days, weeks, months lapse and you turn into a weaker version of yourself. As they suck out more of your life blood. Just leave, while you can! #domesticviolence #assault #WhenIwas11