13 Lessons From A Morally-Wounded Woman: Chapter 5.

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Chapter 5
“If you wish to see the real truth of your marriage, end it.”


“Madam,” a khaki-clad man with a stick in one hand and a gun in his belt says to me as I sit typing on the computer on a concrete bench at the far end of the station, “Can I see your ticket?”

I don’t have a ticket because I am not going anywhere, I just like coming here to work. I have had a lifelong fascination with trains and I live just across from the railway station, so I often come here. I realised many years ago that railway stations are one of those unlikely places of safety for women because there are always people around and cops on duty. There’s always cloakrooms and station-masters. And Indian trains are like a mother who refuses to let you emancipate, she will give you her daily schedule but she will still show up whenever she wants and knows you will be waiting. You never know when a train is coming in this country and I love that. Of course, I also hate it because I am one of those people who cannot stand any deviation from schedule and everything about trains here is a deviation from schedule.

“I’m just waiting for someone, sir,” I tell him, “The train is late.”

“This train is twelve hours late madam,” he explains to me, “Are you going to wait here till morning?”

I don’t know which train he is talking about or why he assumes I am waiting for that specific one, it hardly seems possible that there will only be one train arriving at this platform over the next twelve hours.

“I could wait here till morning,” I tell him smiling, “As long as we have people like you that are working to keep women safe.”

He beams at me. No one ever tells cops they are doing a good job or any job at all, and while it is often for good reason, I don’t mind lying to be a bright spot in his day and to get out of paying a fine for not having a platform pass. Years ago, I had a regular client who was a cop, he liked me to stick his baton up his ass and jerk him off with my feet while I cursed at him in a language I didn’t understand. It immediately makes me picture this guy gagged on the floor with his baton up his ass while I yell at him in a language I do understand. Language is a strange phenomenon in our country especially for people who move from place-to-place frequently. Anyone with decent upper body strength could throw a stone far enough to hit another dialect and anyone with some measure of disposable income can fly to another language within an hour. Not only are our states divided on a linguistic basis, but so are our people. It’s extremely unlikely that you’d meet a person here who doesn’t speak at least two languages and it’s just as unlikely that you could move from city-to-city without having to pick up the basics of the language spoken there.

“Please madam,” he reasons with me, “You can’t stay here all night even if it is safe.”

“Of course not, sir,” I tell him, gathering my affairs, “I’m just leaving now.”

I walk outside and take a taxi to My Only Friend’s house which is only a few kilometres away. I text her to tell her I am coming and even though she doesn’t respond, I know she is making coffee. We have spent the past couple of days orienting our new inmates and adjusting to having a child in the shelter. Number 1 is an older woman and she has naturally taken to The Seamstress who has been a great help at getting her adjusted to no longer being with her family. She was disowned by her village for having an affair with one of the village leaders which is essentially just code for allowing herself to be raped. She was paraded naked in her village with dirt smeared all over her face before one of our associates convinced the police to intervene and have her removed from the area. She spends most of her time in wistful contemplation of all the things she will do differently when she returns to her family. The Seamstress, with an unnecessary dose of schadenfreude, reminds her regularly that there is no family to return to, and while Number 1 knows that she pretends it isn’t the truth. I met a woman like that once in a shelter for widows. She was nineteen when her husband died and forty-one when I met her and the entire time that we were together she only spoke with me about all the things she would do when she went back to her husband. I understand why sometimes when grief is so powerful that you decide to treat it like a temporary thing even when it plunders the entire terrain of your life and leaves nothing of its old self behind.

Number 2 acts like nothing has happened even though she was picked up off the street, almost dead, with a needle still sticking out from between her toes. She has just spent three months at a rehabilitation facility and seems accustomed to life amongst strangers that aren’t impressed by your suffering. Number 3 spends all of her time with The Child inside their room, emerging only at meal times, and for scheduled sessions. The Chef tells me that she is often sullen and The Seamstress is especially suspicious of what she does in there all day. Most of the women who stay with us have some sort of employment, it’s part of our process to help them be gainfully employed once they have been with us for over four weeks and then to help them settle into their own new lives once the six-month period of residency is expired. Aside from The Seamstress, the only people who live permanently on the residence are The Chef who was never one of our residents but a stout, proud Bengali woman, and The Teacher who takes lessons daily for the women, runs the household and manages the ongoings of the house.

The Teacher is a young woman we hired straight out of college because the moment we met her, we were convinced she understood exactly what it was we were going for, which is odd since we don’t even know that. She has a knack for identifying the special skills of anyone she teaches, sometimes even in a day. She’s a pot-smoking musician with vitiligo and she feels deeply self-conscious about how her skin looks even though she is amongst the most beautiful women I have ever met. She’s tall and looks rather frail at first sight; she speaks very little and in a low, even voice that is neither especially confident nor hard to hear. She’s the only person I know who can successfully lose herself to another world for hours at a time without the slightest change in posture or any movement whatsoever. On seeing her one might assume that she is wispy, fragile creature with no strength inside her drab frame, but when she sings, she is a giant. Often when I go there late in the evening, I can hear her wailing her heart out from the back of the house in gut-wrenching elongated syllables that speak of love lost and found. Someday everyone will know her name.

Number 4 is a former sex worker who upon attempting to leave the trade was forcibly married to her pimp, when she ran away, she was beaten and sent back to work but she managed to run away again and this time had the presence of mind to declare herself to a women’s helpline who had her house with a volunteer until they found a place for her with us. As part of our services, we are attempting to deduce the legitimacy of her marriage to have it annulled or file for divorce but it’s difficult because all the lawyers that consult with us donate their time and as a result it is hard to have enough legal support to sort their things out. We often discuss permanently hiring a lawyer to our staff but the only way to do that would be to fire our assistant who does all the clerical work. I would fire the assistant because to me she has always seemed less interested in being there and more interested in where she could go after but My Only Friend insists that she is good at her job despite her general lack of presence of mind. I feel a general lack of presence of mind too as I attempt to read the evaluations the counsellor has submitted to me after her individual sessions with the new women. Actual details of the sessions are never divulged but we keep records of the general evaluations, history of criminal activity and triggers. Sometimes, this feels like we are children trying to play at justice.

I try to read through the evaluations of Number 1 and 2 and find myself naturally skipping forward to Number 3. I am fascinated by her in a way that doesn’t seem entirely professional. I spend a lot of my idle time wondering about what she is doing and where she came from, we have the least amount of information about her and aside from a birth certificate we have no record of her existence at all. I wonder what that’s like, to be a person in flesh and blood, and no person on paper. I wonder if she ever thinks about that, if she ever wonders whether she has any place in the world.

“The subject is extremely resistant to communication,” The report reads, “Twice during the hour-long session she asked if she could return to her room. She does not like being asked questions and her body language is extremely closed off to communication. No participation on her behalf at the group session.....”

I stop reading at that point because it reads more like a complaint a school-teacher writes to a parent than a useful evaluation of the mental state of a person. I’ve told My Only Friend many times that I am not convinced any of these sessions do anyone any good and it is perhaps the only subject on which The Seamstress and I agree. She’s the only person we have ever had who refused to go to her session or participate in the group sessions, we insisted that she must attend at least one and then if she decided not to she didn’t have to go anymore. I received one of these reports about her too back in the day after her first scheduled session.

“The subject did not show up, appeared to be bathing for an hour at the time of the scheduled session,” it read, “Seems resistant to therapy.”

No shit.

None of us pushed on it, partly because since she was our first, we were concerned we had done something wrong, and partly because we were, and are, all still scared of her. The Seamstress does no shit she doesn’t want to do and telling her to feels a bit like telling your grandfather how to live his life. I turn my computer off as the driver pulls over in front of my friend’s building. I get out and take the eight flights of stairs up to her place because I am deathly afraid of elevators. Nothing has ever happened to justify this fear but I believe it is only a matter of time before it does. I see no reason why elevators actually work and I cannot be convinced otherwise. I ring her doorbell and her boyfriend comes to the door. He’s a big, bald guy who the eyes of a ghost and the hands of a giant. I like him for her very much especially since before him she was with a guy who made the pimp-husband of Number 4 look like a saint. They got together almost two years ago now and I have never seen my friend so happy in a relationship in all of the time that I have known her. The only thing I know about his personality is that he is a nice, slightly goofy, extremely principled man but other than that it’s hard to say whether still waters run deep or are just an illusion with nothing underneath.

There is an air of tension abounding in the house as I enter even though he greets me warmly. They are used to my unannounced presence in this house. My Only Friend appears from the kitchen holding two cups of coffee as I sit down on my spot on the floor beside the radiator.

“It’s decaf,” she says handing me one of the cups.

“Are you fucking insane?” I ask her taking the cup and peering into it as if I expect it to be green in colour, “Is everything okay?”

She laughs even though from her face I can tell quite clearly that she has been crying. I know something is wrong with my friend when she gives me decaf, with her it’s a little bit like walking in on a diabetic eating a table full of fondant. The Boyfriend excuses himself and walks into their bedroom while my friend offers me a joint she has already rolled. She doesn’t really smoke pot except to keep me company while we have the kinds of discussions that cannot be replicated but cannot be forgotten either.

“Are you guys fighting?” I ask taking the joint from her and rummaging through my pockets for a matchbox.

“No, it’s not us,” she says and I know what this is about, “It’s his wife.”

The Boyfriend has been going through a divorce for the past six years now. He married a woman chosen by his family when he was twenty-eight after he had a crisis of mortality after a near-death incident when his car crashed into a speeding truck on a highway. He came out of the experience having decided that he had squandered too much of his life and needed to settle down with a family. He met the woman twice before deciding to marry her and in retrospect he realises that the fact that she was more interested in how much spending money he would give her every month than him was a warning sigh, but he was desperate and perhaps at a low moment he decided that it was okay to be only worth your wallet to a woman. She told him that her family was at an extremely low-point financially and so he had to pay for the entire wedding, and being the creature that he is, he agreed. After they were married, she got pregnant almost immediately and the man is a born-father so he was nothing but delirious about this child. She is a devout woman so despite her lack of desire to have a child she called it a blessing from God and pushed it out into the world. The marriage ended when the child was five-years old but it was a long time coming. Between the lack of sex and the daily screaming-matches, it was only a matter of time. She left one night as soon as he got home from work while he desperately tried to get her to stop. She told him that she was taking the child but he could eventually have him back because he would be an impediment to her future.

He went to her parents’ home a few days later to convince her to come back but as soon as he left her house and got to his, he was met by a policeman who read him a detailed account of the alleged abuse that he had put her through during his marriage as well as the Information Report alleging that he had harassed her for dowry, and beaten her while he had been at her place earlier that day. Now, ask any lawyer and they will tell you; this is the standard operating procedure when it comes to divorce. In fact, better yet, go to a lawyer as a woman and tell them you want to divorce a man and they will advise you about a tool which exists to protect women who are being abused within marriages or harassed for dowry but is used by any woman, abused or not, to create a solid case. The cop placed him under non-bailable arrest as was allowed in the purview of that law at the time and the only thing that kept him from actually being held in custody for months, or maybe even years, was a well-placed call to a lawyer friend at the right time.

Regardless the hearings of that case have continued for six years without the so much as any evidence being produced or any charges being presented. Now, I am a feminist and I have seen both abuse and the mindless subjection of women my entire life, but because I am a feminist, I cannot support the exploitation of a law that exists to protect women to the point that it has to be repealed because it never serves the one it intends to and is a weapon for the one who doesn’t need it. The reality of divorce in this country is grim and mired in the protection of an imagined sanctity that marriage possesses. Marriage, that thing that forced my mother to remain loyal to a man who was never there. The thing that is being used to hold Number 4 in slavery. That thing which is performed by priests who sometimes condone the bombing of places of worship and rape children. That thing which is governed by the market value of fair skin, family businesses and slim waists.

Divorce is not a right in our country. It is a privilege you can avail by requesting the court, either if both parties have an agreement between them or one can prove that one of five situations that allow for divorce have occurred. This is because marriage, after all, is a sanctimonious institution that must be protected at the cost of the happiness of the people trapped inside it. The facade must be maintained and whether that takes the silence of a woman when her husband forces himself on her or the entrapment of a man to enable extortion, the price must be paid.


……



I used to have a much more romantic, albeit tragic, idea of ending a marriage. When I was sixteen, I had an intense and rather fulfilling relationship with the man who opened the first tattoo-parlour in the city where I grew up. He was married, and I know that I was supposed to care about that but I never could figure out why I, the person who wasn’t in the marriage, needed to be the one who took accountability. I loved him very deeply because he saw me for who I was and allowed me to be that person around him. The Tattooist was much older than me and had only moved to my city after his daughter died of rare genetic disorder at the age of seven, I suppose an incident like that makes you want to no longer be around the places that force you to re-experience your grief in memories all the time. His wife had chosen not to move with him but they were still together. They spoke every day and she visited him often. I didn’t want to be his wife, I just enjoyed his company and being the person he talked to about his art and music. I enjoyed it when he fucked me too because he had those ink-stained fingers and the rough tongue of a man well-suffered. Unfortunately, that relationship ended when his wife caught us together in their home. That’s the story of how I ended a marriage.

It turns out what they actually meant was that the relationship had ended because that is the only thing we have the power to end ourselves, once we’ve allowed a rubber seal that represents a system, legitimise our relationships. A marriage doesn’t just end, in fact, it doesn’t even begin to show its true colours until you view it on the way out. We think of marriage in romantic or religious terms because they begin with beautiful clothes and places but all marriages end in the same place, all marriages end inside courtrooms. That is where you are able to truly see what they were made of and how they were designed to make it impossible for you to get out even if you want to.

The peculiarity of marriage in our country is that you can move on from the relationship but to extricate yourself from the contract of it is a process so long, and sometimes endless, that even when you are moving forward in time a part of you remains tethered in the past. It feels like you are being stretched forward until the limit of the elasticity of your soul, and eventually it just snaps. It rips off a part of you and leaves it there in the past forever, like the dismembered tail of a lizard, it keeps moving even though the creature has died. The death of love seems to bring such animosity from within the souls of people who once lay together, ate together, dreamed together that it makes marriage seem like a misguided endeavor altogether. It may well be that but as a people we are invested in upholding morals that have no meaning and institutions that have no soul.


…….



The result of this system for My Only Friend and her partner is that they spend a lot of their time, and money, making appearances in cases that were going nowhere. Almost every month it seems like they are in a round of fresh negotiations that end in screaming matches inside the halls of whatever mediation mechanism they were trying that month. It also means that he is still married, and as a result my friend cannot legally exist in his life. Now I know that we all do whatever it is that we want to do, and just because the law does not offer us the option of a legal separation doesn’t mean that we will not move on with our lives. He has moved on to the best of his abilities. He tried his hardest to remain in contact with his son but when his wife began to use him as a tool to extract money and trap him in situations that could incriminate him, his lawyers suggested he wait until there was an actual court case to demand custody or visitation. Fathers seem to have no rights. A child needs a mother, we all accept that, but a father is legally the most powerless role to have in a child’s life, and while I cannot pretend that the male attitude towards parenting hasn’t contributed to that, it still does not seem fair. Or maybe it’s the second most powerless after step-parent. The romantic equivalent of that relationship is to be the mistress of a married man who is single for all morally-effective reasons.

The Boyfriend loves my friend deeply, and I don’t say this lightly, he dotes on her and even though they are so different from one another there is an effortlessness to their communication that shouldn’t be possible between two people who aren’t related. Yet he has to hide her inside his life. Even though they live together, they have to be careful about who knows that. She couldn’t put her name on the lease and if they had been honest about their situation, they probably wouldn’t have even been able to even rent the apartment. He couldn’t have his colleagues over because he wasn’t sure who might leak information to his wife. On a day-to-day basis all of this matters very little to them in light of the fact that they love each other and want to be together. It doesn’t come up unless there is a court date to keep or a lawyer to pay. Still at the heart of their relationship is a tiny little blockage that necessitates the kind of caution that always has you questioning whether it is wise to eat something. A life of looking over your shoulder is not easy, especially when you must justify the sanctity of your love to a system that requires you to suffer simply because you dare exercise the option of resigning from a sacred prison. My Only Friend doesn’t talk about this often, for the most part her motto is summed in something she said to me a year into being with him.

“This divorce thing, this is the worst thing I can imagine going through,” she said, “We’re broke, we’re under attack, and every day brings more dreaded news about the laws we once celebrated as women fucking us in the ass, but every single day when I go to bed with him, it’s the happiest I’ve ever been, and the happiest he is ever been. I think, maybe, that’s what’s more important.

My caffeine addicted friend is some kind of fucking oracle on most days but today she seems worried. She seems scared.

“She wants so much money, I don’t think we can ever arrange that,” she tells me as she takes the joint from my hand.

“Why don’t you guys just go the non-consensual route?” I ask her.

“We’re considering it,” she says thoughtfully, “But I think he would agree to anything just for his child.”

“I can understand that,” I tell her, and I think I really can even though I have personally never felt any desire to procreate, “I’m sorry this is so difficult but I will be there for you through all of it.”

I really will because one of the things I want most is my life is for her to be happy. I will do anything to see her smile and if that means I have to hold her hand through legalese while we try to get as stoned as the people who drafted it just to understand it then so be it.

“How long must he do penance before he is allowed to move on?” She asks me in resignation.

Allowed. When will we be allowed to take decisions for our own lives? I’d answer in a heartbeat if I had a fucking a clue.

“Twice the length of the relationship,” I tell her to make her laugh, “Give or take a few months for the delays in paperwork.”

She laughs, and for a moment, everything is okay.

…….