I am unlike any of the notable women in politics: daughter-in-law of a former chief minister, younger sister of a home minister, wife of a political bigwig convicted in the teachers recruitment scam, wife of a party ex-president, the widow of the students’ wing secretary who was brutally murdered, the daughter of a caste leader who had recently defected from one party to another. What they have is what I lack – the family steeped in politics. Fathers to build me, brothers to prop me up, uncles to launch me into their media empires. It is clear as day that the only way in which I will be a legitimate part of the political circus will be through marriage.
And so, for this reason alone, I detest the idea of marriage, the idea that it would be perceived as a means to an end, the idea that becoming a wife would be read as ambition rather than love. But politics is primitive, and I know that this is the settled practice through which an outsider may join the tribe.
I have not yet been anointed as wife. And although the gossip abounds, no one has a clue what our relationship is and what my intentions are. To his cadre who make jokes about my ambition, I counter with sharp retorts: ‘So is that the post you want for yourself, chetta? I will put in a word for you.’ And to those who suggest a love affair, I get away by saying: ‘Oh no. I love him the way one loves a leader. My love for him is no different than your love for him, chetta.’ Such repartee does not change anyone’s opinion. It only makes it easier for me to put on a brave, indifferent face. To these purpose-hunters of love, no answer will ever be good enough.
* *
Marriage is not the first thing on my to-do list. It is not the end of the road, the culmination of love. I make this clear, I do not mince my words.
‘I do not ask you to marry me because I love you and you love me. I do not ask for you to marry me because this is the thing that people in love do. I do not ask you to marry me because I believe in marriage or because I believe in this society. I do not ask you to marry me because we can live together night and day or because I would die if I do not get to wash your underwear with my own delicate hands. I do not ask you to marry me because I want to be your dazzling trophy wife, or because I can be the gold-digger who married up, up, up above her status.
‘I want you to marry me because I want to confront the reasons why you refuse to marry me. When you fail to take even a step towards marriage, I want to know why this idea does not exist on your horizon. I want to know why I am rejected even if you never say these words yourself. I want to know what it is about me that makes me unworthy of being your wife.
‘I want to know if I was another woman – richer, fairer, less educated or more buxom, an industrialist’s daughter, an MP’s sister – if I would be given the stamp of approval.’
‘This is the kind of feminism that ruins love,’ he replies. ‘This manner in which you frame it, the way in which you demand marriage as a right, instead of looking at it as the next logical location where our love would take us. This is the feminism that calculates,’ he says, ‘the feminism that negotiates, the feminism with a balance sheet. This is not love that waits. This is not a love that has wrapped itself in trust and therefore cannot, ever, feel doubt.
‘The problem is your feminism, your feminism that makes you an individual, the feminism that refuses to recognize that we are a couple, the feminism that makes you build a barricade all around yourself, the feminism that sows the seeds of distrust in your mind about me because it cannot see me as anything other than a man and men as anything other than selfish scoundrels.
‘If you are a woman in love, and I am the man you love, aren’t we a unit of ourselves, one together, the one living in two? Would I not have your interests in my heart? Would I not see you as I see myself? How do you treat me as another? How do you even think that I could betray you? Why do you situate yourself outside the couple and alienate me? Why do you hound me with these questions? Your feminism is killing our love. And, just so you know, I am not the problem. I am not the problem and you know that. You are not the problem either. Your feminism is.’
I listen in silence.
‘Your feminism will drive away all the men who come your way. No man stands a chance.’
* *
I watch love transform. Alone in his office, his hands find my breasts, he crushes me in his hasty embrace, he kisses my cheeks, my eyelids, he settles upon my lips and, in a minute of stolen intimacy, ends this in a hug where his hardness declares itself to me against my thigh. Then, the rhythm of the approaching footsteps in the corridor makes us retreat into our old, familiar positions – him on his throne behind the desk, me in front like a supplicant. There, he sharpens up, his eyes narrow, his lips pucker into contemplativeness, he runs his fingers over his moustache. He makes a wry observation. In the presence of a third person his love is programmed to self-destruct.
I cannot match my politician. I sit there, my heart pounding, my fingers fidgeting, a light in my eyes that refuse to dim, in a state of excitement that does not subside.
* *
Let me tell you something that goes against popular wisdom.
Love is not blind; it just looks in the wrong places.
* *
First love forges a different woman out of me. It tires me with responsibility. Fighting for my love to sustain itself, for it to be given a name, a suitable face and necessary public history, I am jolted awake from the reverie-landscape of lovers. If love is a place marked by the absence of questions, I’m no longer there. I have left with questions. I am left with questions.
As it is their nature, questions between lovers can deteriorate into accusations.
It is no longer: What will become of me?
Or: What does the future hold for us?
Or: What shall we do with our lives?
This is the end of open-ended questions. An interrogative becomes a declarative. A sentiment becomes a charge-sheet. A statement becomes a sentence.
‘You used me.’
Another man in his place would have declared his love all over again, made peace and a promise of marriage. He merely turns feminist.
‘Why do you think I “used” you? Is this how you reduce our love: into a one-way street? Did you not have any role, any control in what happened? This is downright dirty. Your thinking is cheap and problematic. I did not “use” you. Not anymore than you “used” me. If you think you “lost” something by sleeping with me, then remember that I lost the same thing by sleeping with you. I think you are saying this in anger. You do not mean it, my love. You cannot have such a low opinion of me, or such a low opinion of sex. Do not look at it that way: me “using” you; no, we, the two of us, we “shared” something.’
I do not know what to say. I’m just about half his age, but even I can see that he only adopts this convenient Feminist Dialectic because he will never commit to me. With these dispassionate arguments, I see us lose the poetry that holds us together.
* *
It seemed as if the people of our nation had decided – or, as if it had been decided on behalf of the people of our nation – that the only way to counter the political narrative of ‘dynasty’ was to spin the opposite narrative of ‘bachelorhood’. A man free of a visible woman would be free of visible progeny who would lay claim to his legacy. Maybe it was meant to signal that, having no heirs, these men would have no impulse to be corrupt, to amass wealth, to build dynasties. Maybe it meant that not having any domestic responsibilities, these men would devote all their time to the service of society. These bachelor politicians emerged in every tiny village and every tiny ward-councillor election – flaunting the absence of a family.
The original and most popular bachelor politician was of course Gandhi, the goat-milk-drinking-groundnut-eating Gandhi, the father-of-the-nation Gandhi. Gandhi was a married man who managed the miracle of becoming a bachelor politician. He made his celibacy public. This gave him a sainthood, whereas anywhere else in the world he would have been berated or mocked for denying pleasure to his wife and for not t
aking his conjugal responsibilities seriously. He also floated the rumour that the loss of semen equalled the loss of energy, which sent the nation into orgiastic repression. To ejaculate was to emasculate. No man wanted to lose his power and his potency having sex. A woman by your side meant that you were not masculine enough, not man enough to lead the people. So, when they had the chance, the men who could not stick with celibacy (unlike Gandhi) decided to hide the women they were with, so that they could continue to remain bachelor politicians.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee – with an adopted daughter, and a live-in partner, Mrs Kaul – was a bachelor politician. Narendra Modi – with a wife he managed to abandon and purge from our collective memory, even as he had his hands full with launching an anti-Muslim pogrom – was another.
So is the man I am with: Bachelor. Politician.
This label makes him stand out. This label conveys the pledge that his life is dedicated to serving the people. This label conveys that he takes his semen seriously. How can I stake a claim without making him lose this label? How can I press for marriage if he keeps declaring that it would prove costly to his political life? How can I step out of the shadows, and bring our love to light, knowing in advance that it would be catastrophic to his career?
To keep this love, I have to keep it secret, I have to whip myself into becoming secret. When I cease being the secret, perhaps I will cease being his lover.
* *
In a sense, he is my secret too.
He is the reason why I stay back in Kerala even after my master’s degree, why I settle for a measly salary in a charitable Christian college in a contract-based teaching job, and why I vehemently shut down any marriage proposals to the sons of neighbours and the brothers of friends that my eager family puts forward.
They do not know of the existence of a lover in my life. My mother thinks that I am one of those women who get so deep into English literature that my only love will ever be for Shakespeare and my only passion and pleasure will ever be from the thrust of iambic pentameter. My father, with his evergreen ambitious outlook on life, imagines that I have remained in Kerala because it will open the door for me to find teaching opportunities in the Middle East and I will soon be making hefty remittances home in dirhams and dinars and riyals.
I cannot tell them about the politician yet. His unwillingness to marry me makes it impossible for me even to broach the topic. I have lived with my parents long enough to know that they will dismiss the whole love affair as fooling around and frivolous sex.
Tired of living in denial, one day I try the ancient method of testing the waters. I take tried-and-tested refuge in speaking of a friend who has started seeing a politician who’s much older than her. My mother has a panic attack on the phone: cut all contact with this girl and keep away from trouble and what is wrong with young women of your age do you not know that politicians are hoodlums and rapists who will carry you away and one day you are going to find your friend dead in an abandoned outhouse or this man is going to prostitute her to other politicians and oh good lord stay away from all this and do not ever meet this monster because today he is after your friend but tomorrow he will want you in bed as well and if you end up dead the news will not even reach us because we live so far away. Relax, Mom, relax relax relax. I have a hard time changing the topic. I assure her that I will make sure that I never cross paths with a politician in my life. After that phone call, I never mention this friend again.
* *
Secrecy is cancerous – it begins to eat us from the inside. The necessity to keep our love under wraps feeds our fear of losing each other, the fear of losing a life together. Intimacy is replaced by our fear of fear, a fear of evenings, a fear of lonely nights, his fear of gossip taking to the streets, my fear of being misunderstood. One day, we are waiting for someone to rearrange the stars so that our fates change, and another day, we are waiting for the axe to fall and cleave us apart. I watch him chase his privacy like a little animal scurrying away to hide from a storm. I watch him, within our safe zone, love with a flamboyance beyond my imagination. One day, the wind may change direction – we may be left together, or we may be uprooted, torn asunder, thrown across different worlds. Not knowing breaks us. Knowing would break us too.
* *
The end comes at an unexpected moment.
The hospital ward resembles a village fair: his friends, his cadres, his relatives, media persons and his retinue of lady admirers – thoroughly sanitized by respectable marriages – are all present. Everyone is streaming in and out. I encounter them in the little tea-stall outside the hospital, in the reception area, in the corridor, in the queue waiting for the lifts, en route to his room. Everyone seems to have known of his emergency admission to the hospital, everyone seems to have known where to go to meet him. Everyone, with the exception of me.
I had tried in vain to reach him over the phone the previous evening and night. I had frantically called his secretary and driver – and they had given me evasive answers, reluctant to say anything. This morning, his media liaison, taking pity on me, had called me to the hospital.
I’m hysterical, in tears, not knowing what happened to him. I’m the last of his extended circle to get there. I find every eye pinned on me. There are hushed whispers that I choose to ignore. In their presence, my politician-lover treats me like a perfect stranger. He makes polite enquiries, not for a moment showing any sign that he had spent the last afternoon in bed with me. I’m dying to hold his hand, to go and kiss his feverish forehead, to stay by his bedside till he recovers. I cannot do any of that because it would be deemed inappropriate. When I try to take a step forward, so that I’m allowed to get a little closer to him, he turns me away with a quick sweeping glance.
A few minutes later, the doctor enters and all of us leave the room.
That is the last I see of him.
I decide against a love that decides against acknowledging me. I want a man for whom I will have the right to mourn in public, by whose dead body I can sit for the last few hours before it is consigned to ashes, on whom I can throw myself and weep my heart to a stop. This is not feminism.
I am just a woman in love.
VIII
He was a perfect husband: he never picked up anything from the floor, or turned out a light, or closed a door.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MARQUÉZ,
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
My husband is in the kitchen.
He is channelling his anger, practising his outrage. I am the wooden cutting board banged against the countertop. I am the clattering plates flung into the cupboards. I am the unwashed glass being thrown to the floor. Shatter and shards and diamond sparkle of tiny pieces. My hips and thighs and breasts and buttocks. Irreversible crashing sounds, a fragile sight of brokenness as a petty tyrant indulges in a power-trip. Not for the first time, and not for the last.
I hold back tears. I will not become a traitor to my cause. Tomorrow, the clean-up is going to be all mine. He continues smashing things. Try harder, husband. Try harder. I am not going to be tamed by these tantrums.
* *
one two tame
the shrew
one two
just push through
one two
yes thank you
* *
We are supposed to go to a protest meeting.
I’m getting dressed. It’s the first time I’m leaving home in two weeks, so I wear kohl and a touch of lipstick.
‘Don’t expect that you will one day earn the trust of the working-class women if you strut around with your lipstick and handbag. They will mistake you for a prostitute.’
‘Is the prostitute not a working woman?’
I knew it was coming; I knew I had tempted fate, but I just couldn’t resist. He flies into a rage, tearing my bag from my shoulder and hurling it against the wall.
‘Not a prostitute like you, not a petit-bourgeois prostitute like you. Under Communism there will be no prostitution. Under Communism, a peti
t-bourgeois woman like you will have to give up her petit-bourgeois privileges. The lipstick will not survive the New Democratic Revolution. The lipstick that costs three hundred rupees is not something that society needs. The lipstick that is more than the weekly wage of a tribal woman in Chhattisgarh exists only because it allows petit-bourgeois bitches to send the signal that they are on heat and ready to barter their sexual availability in exchange for favours. The lipstick is a symbol of this transaction and this availability, there is nothing beautiful about it.’
I am on the verge of tears; he sees this and, fearing that we’ll be late for the meeting, he changes his tone. He begins to pacify me, begins to pull out other reasons to support his anti-lipstick crusade. He tells me I am the victim of a cosmetics industry trying to sell me back the confidence it has stolen from me. He tells me that I am a very beautiful woman and that I do not need anything to be added to my face, least of all anything that capitalism has decreed as good. Knowing that this berating and patronizing will never cease, I throw my lipstick in the bin. I rub off the purple of my lips on my dupatta. This temporarily shuts him up. He appears smug and triumphant. We leave for the protest: two perfect comrades. The revolution is just around the corner.
* *
That night, he prepares the bed, plumps the pillows, and calls me to join him. I’m doing the last of the dinner dishes, watching the clear moon from the window. He calls me again, a note of irritation in his voice. I wash the last dish and wave goodbye to the moon, who watches me leave before turning her gaze to the graveyard next door, where the newly buried dead sleep away their deferred dreams, the finicky dead rejoice in a rainless night, the friendly dead squat in a circle and tell each other stories, the silent dead soak in the faint white light, and the melancholic dead think of loved ones they have left behind. The moon has a difficult job cut out for her night after night.
When I Hit You Page 8
