13 Lessons From A Morally-Wounded Woman: Chapter 6.

Read all the chapters at this tag. 

......

Chapter 6

“You Cannot Help People Against Their Will.”

As I walk in through the gate to the office, already drenched from the unexpected showers, the guard stops me. He is a middle-aged fellow with an untreated cataract in one eye and often the only man on the premises.

“Such chaos last night,” he says to me in a tone of concern that is mired in nosiness, “There was so much screaming and shouting for so many hours.”

I nod at him and walk to the office. I don’t want to discuss whatever has happened with him and he doesn’t either, I believe. He wants to know the extent of my information. Just because one didn’t go to school doesn’t mean they are unable to apply Socratic irony. It’s just going to be me here today so I have come in a little later than usual. The Assistant is out sick and My Only Friend is meeting with the principal of a charitable school to see if we could have The Child sent there to study. It has not been easy to work that out. Essentially, The Child does not exist. There is no paperwork to legitimise his existence, he has had no prior education and we have no money to donate our way past that. We cannot declare him as one of our residents so we cannot claim extra funding for him or even openly raise it through our own channels. I certainly don’t intend for either her or the child to stay here forever but for them to get to that stage of being self-reliant, he needs to be sent to school. I am worried that it won’t work out the way it should. It never does, like fools we keep attempting our idealistic solutions, believing we know what we are doing. In most things I am able to accept that everything sucks all the time but it’s harder with children. Not because they are innocent but because they are helpless. They don’t have the awareness, the skills or the means to be able to do things for themselves.

As I approach the door of the office, I see The Seamstress already standing there, she is accompanied by The Sisters. The Sisters are two young girls who came to us a few months ago when their father was killed and their house burnt down in an outbreak of communal violence. Having no other living relatives, they were moved to a temporary camp for a while until we had the space for them. They both work together at a shop in the neighbourhood that sells earrings and other such things meant to accentuate the beauty of a woman. They are both enrolled in an institute that provides training for beauticians and I often see them with their faces covered in various mud-masks they make themselves. Earlier this year when the mulberry crop came in they attempted to make their own version of a mulberry-papaya mask which resulted in everyone turning purple for about a week. A bunch of purple-faced women in a place of safety is not a good look but The Sisters had a good laugh about it and so did the rest of us. We have since decided that perhaps mulberries aren’t the best fruit to use to become more beautiful. I approach the group knowing I will be soon filled in on the events of last night.

“Good morning,” I say to them with a cheeriness that seemed only to annoy them.

“Good morning,” The Seamstress says to me, “I need to talk to you.”

I unlock the door to the office and the group follows me inside. They wait as I set my things down and open a window. It smells rank in here. Before I can even sit down or offer anyone else a seat The Seamstress starts explaining to me that The Teacher had her regular visitor over last night. The Teacher has been seeing the same woman for a while now and because I refuse to enforce any rules that prohibit romantic relationships with anyone. the more conservative women among the lot continue to insist that there are problems because of my freeness. It amazes me how much women will resist being free even when they are given the option to do it. There is no system of subjugation more pervasive than the patriarchy, it teaches you even to apply it to yourself. The Seamstress is a woman but her ideals have always been more focused on controlling the behaviour of women so they don’t get themselves into trouble. I would love to say that that is problem we only face with the older women but it is perhaps our greatest struggle to convince victims that walking down a street or wearing jeans wasn’t the reason they were targeted.

They tell us that things are different for us, and I want to be able to tell them that they are not but that would be a lie. I do genuinely believe things could be different for them too but ultimately it always boils down to money. I have more and so I can live in a place where most people don’t care what I do, even when they graduate from our program they are able to make much less and have to live in places where people care a lot what single women do. To be honest it’s not as if I have no frame of reference. In my very early years of living alone as a woman, almost every home-owner that rented me apartments insisted that I have no men over and the ones that didn’t often asked me to move out when the neighbours complained about the frequent visitors that ventured into my flat at all hours. They do it with love and concern but the path to hell is paved with good intentions. 

On her part, I know The Seamstress genuinely believes that she means well for the women she complains to me about and that is why the patriarchy wins, it makes you believe the wrong thing is the right thing to do because it convinces you that the right thing is actually immoral. All women must be crucified at this altar of morality. We must say no to men who want to fuck us and we must say nothing if they fuck us without our permission. We must not discuss these things lest we disrupt a casual dinner party or a comfortable living situation. I realise there is a distinction between the traps I live in and the traps they so, but they all come from the same place and sometimes when they make me feel like I couldn’t possibly understand their struggles because I am so different, I feel like they are calling me an alien.

“You have to do something,” The Seamstress says to me, “That girl-guy keeps coming and....”

“She’s a woman with short hair and a fondness for shirts, that’s not a girl-guy...” I cut her off to correct her because this idea that any woman who dresses like a man is confused about her gender is preposterous. If she were a man, she would be one, she is hardly limited by what is inside her pants to embrace her identity. 

“Fine, that woman was here last night,” she says, snarling at me, “They were fighting and screaming for hours, they were throwing things and breaking things and hurling curses at each other and no one in the house knew what to do. I went there to tell the woman to stop because it was making us all scared but she told me that it was good that we were scared. Then she pushed me out of the room and they continued to fight for another couple of hours.”

This is a problem and I don’t know what to say to her now. I don’t know The Womanfriend at all, only having been briefly introduced to her once, so I know nothing about her that could indicate this. The Teacher doesn’t really talk to anyone about herself or her life, and her general manner is so withdrawn and calm that I couldn’t have deduced any signs of abuse even if they had been there. I know I have to act but I don’t know what to do.

“I’m sorry,” I apologise to The Seamstress and The Sisters even though I have not thrown anything, “Is The Teacher okay? Has anyone spoken to her?”

They look at me like I am speaking Greek, which I would love to be able to speak but have never managed to find a teacher. They don’t think it matters that The Teacher might be distraught or worse, injured, and they are surprised I care about that more than the disruption that her whorish ways have caused to the household. It’s completely lost on them that they treat each other in exactly the manner they were treated by social norms. 

“I don’t know,” The Seamstress responds, I know she hopes she had been able to take this matter to My Only Friend instead of me, “I have been waiting here for you ever since I woke up.”

That seems insane given that everyone knows exactly when I get in and everyone has my phone number. Sometimes she does things simply to amplify the drama so everything seems more dire but she doesn’t do it for things that really are dire. She doesn’t care whether The Teacher is okay, in her mind the abuse, if there is any, is only a well-deserved consequence for her ways.

“I’ll take care of it,” I tell them, “You guys should probably have breakfast and get about your day.”

The Seamstress walks out behind The Sisters and I am glad to see her go. She gives me a headache. I stare at my phone and wonder if I should call my friend to discuss what has happened before I decide what to do about it but I don’t want to interrupt her while she is in an important meeting. This situation is exactly why I do what I do. The helplessness of this situation is exactly why I decided I had to create a haven to run to but the truth is it’s much easier to retain your idealism as a whore than it is as a social worker. You’re always fighting a losing battle and the enemy changes faces and genital shapes so often you start to lose sight of what side you are fighting on. A helplessness overcomes me as I start to feel the taste of bile and acid at the back of my throat.

…….

Five years ago, I opened this place up because of a woman who once approached me for help when I had none to offer. The Battered Wife had married the first man I ever loved, My Actual Abusive Boyfriend. He was also the first man who abused me so thoroughly that all my ideas about My Imaginary Abusive Boyfriend seemed like soft velvet pillows compared to the bed of thorns I lay in with him. I spent five years with him until I finally recovered from the romance of anger and bloodshed, and graduated to the romance of intensity and pain. Two years after I left him, I received an e-mail from a woman claiming to be his wife, begging to speak with me. I thought about it before I gave her my phone number, I believed from the language that it wasn’t him typing that message and I believed from the fact that she insisted that I give her my number as opposed to the other way round that she was communicating with me without his knowledge. I had a sneaking suspicion what it was about but I think I hoped I would be proven wrong once I spoke with her.

She called the next day while I was sitting on my balcony enjoying the rain. I am a cold, calculating and cynical person in many ways but I have exactly one completely irrational belief: I believe it rains for me. To say I love the rain is somehow insulting both to the concept of love and of rain. I don’t love the rain; I live for it. I wake up each morning hoping to see dark clouds and smell the mud. Many years ago, when I lived with My Actual Abusive Boyfriend, he came back from work one evening amidst a downpour that had already baffled the meteorological department and broken every record for rain in the city. When he couldn’t find me inside our house, he knew immediately to come looking for me on the roof. I was sitting behind the water tank, sopping wet, and completely lost.

“There’s a flood warning,” he said as soon as he saw me, “You fucking moron.”

“The rain won’t hurt me,” I told him with a confidence that I had acquired over years of being irrational with precipitation.

It has never mattered whether it was warm or cold, whether it would flood or not, if the rain called, I had to go, because if I didn’t the rain would stop coming for me. If it required that I suffer a little for the infinite joy that it brought me then I would suffer a little.

“Why are you only attracted to destructive things?” He asked me sitting down next to me on the concrete floor.

“Isn’t it a bit dangerous for you to get me to start questioning along those lines?” I asked him.

I knew it would make him angry and that would eventually lead to his fist against my mouth but everything is better in the rain, even mindless violence, and the mindless violence was inevitable anyway. I used to believe he was the rain in my life but I’ve since learnt that it’s not rain when you have to suffer a lot for a little joy. No, that’s snow. The snow is beautiful and pristine but it attacks your very survival in ways that the rain cannot. The destruction of the rain is incidental, the destruction of the snow is central. He was the blanket of ice that stunned me into numbness but in the rain, I melted. In the rain, I became the embodiment of his monster and played with myself.

“I don’t destroy you,” he said gripping my throat in one hand, “I fucking own you.”

I believe he did genuinely want to own me and the fact that he was never really convinced that he did drove his desire to break me down until I was small enough to be confined in his bondage. I cannot be confined, not by a man and not within a system. Both things can tie me up, beat me down, break me, fuck me up but they cannot control me. Even the man who haunted me for years with his morphine of love couldn’t control me, and I believe that was never more evident to him than in the rain. The rain breeds insanity in me and I think insanity is often just an unfriendly moniker for freedom.

“Then fall from the sky and compel me to come to you,” I told him.

His response to that was as old as heterosexuality. He punched me in the face. There’s an electricity to being punched that cannot be replicated in any other form of violence. It’s not like a roller coaster where you go in with dread and come out having realised the adrenaline was an adventure that dissipated the fear, no, being punched is always worse than the anticipation of it. I think the thing that has always freaked me out the most about it is that I can always hear the impact against the bone inside my head. It’s like hearing nails against a chalkboard but the chalkboard is part of your body. Somehow, I have always found being punched an equaliser of sorts, because in all the fragility and weakness that women are accused of being genetically made of, the men forget to mention that we’re the ones really taking their punches. When a man punches me, I believe he is attacking me as a woman equal in strength if not stronger, because as much strength as it may take to throw a devastating punch, it always takes more to not only bear it but stand back up for the second one.

……..

I figured that’s what The Battered Wife was calling about too. I don’t think she wanted to discuss the social dynamics of punches but I was fairly certain she had taken a few. He wasn’t exactly the kind of man who could stop. There are men who are helpless against their angry behaviours that can be stopped because they acknowledge that there’s a problem. He wasn’t those men; according to him it was always your fault and if you didn’t want to be punched you shouldn’t have done anything to deserve it. In that My Actual Abusive Boyfriend was a perfect microcosm for all of society; what you wore was what got you raped as far as he was concerned. What you said was what got you punched. In wondered what she said. When I answered the phone, I didn’t immediately know who it was even though she introduced herself by the name she had given me the previous day. I think I expected her to sound more like me but she didn’t. She sounded timid, inarticulate and she spoke to me in my second language while it was clearly her first. She told me that she really appreciated me speaking with her and she promised that no matter what happened she would never tell him that she had spoken to me. She assumed my fear of him and she was not wrong, there’s only one way she could have known there was something to fear. She told me she had met him a year ago while she was working the reception of a hotel in an old-part of the city. He had doted on her, and respected her wishes about not being physically intimate until they were married. The more she told me about them and herself, the more stunned I was by the differences between us. As much as I wanted to believe that he had changed, I knew he had only changed his manner of operation.

“I just wanted to ask you...,” she said hesitant to move on to the real reason why she had called, “Why did you leave him?”

She had way more tact than I have ever possessed and I immediately teared up when I realised she was looking for a polite way to ask me if he had been beating me. I took a chance and moved the conversation to a more direct space.

“Did he hit you?” I asked her.

There was a long-stunned silence, perhaps, she thought I wouldn’t tell her the truth or at least I would sugarcoat it.

“Two days after we got married....” she said, “Who does that? Who marries a girl they love and then bangs her head against a wall while they are still on their honeymoon? He completely changed overnight.”

I wanted to tell her that he had not changed, he was just comfortable being himself once he had trapped her. As horrible as it sounds, I was actually impressed. The problem with me and him was that he was a thorough-bred misogynist who beat women to take their power away and I am a thorough-bred degenerate who lives to get beat in the name of sexual liberation to get my power back. He recognised that my general sense of empowerment was the reason he couldn’t enslave me into being his punching bag forever, because I wanted to be punched. I did not want to told who to be. So, when he went looking for his next woman, he found someone gentle and conservative. Someone who was completely lacking comfort within developing their own sexual identity. He didn’t touch her before he married her, again, a lesson he presumably learnt because of us. I was never going to marry him despite the fact that we pledged forevers to each other routinely, I wasn’t going to marry him because I knew exactly who he was. I knew pledging myself to him legally would mean being trapped inside a room with a dangerous man who wants me to be a better woman, or die trying. So instead of being as offensively himself as he was with me, he was gentle with her as a boyfriend. Respectful, even, by the sounds of it.

“I’m sorry,” I apologised to her because I felt responsible somehow.

I felt like if I had stuck with him then the abuse would have continued with me, and even if I didn’t deserve it, at least I enjoyed the raping and the punches. Unlike her. It only took her a few minutes to break down and cry. She told me more horrid details of the nature of the abuse and I realised that within his hands a woman who didn’t resist control or insist on financial independence could be entirely destroyed. He had made her quit her job, move in next door to his parents and forbidden her from visiting any people without him. His parents were a special breed of scum that not only turn a blind eye to the activities of their son but simply expect anyone who loves him to bear his anger with the pride of honour.

“Women are like the sky,” his mother once told me when I informed her that my black eye had come from her son, “They bear everything and they remain as vast and beautiful as ever.”

If there is one notion in the world that I would like to fuck to death it is the idea that women are meant to display strength only in endurance. Which is not to say you couldn’t strap me down next to a guy and whip us both only to find that he has died before I have broken my silence, but that’s not strength, that is just the ability to break pain down into a welcome sensation or to numb your receptors to it. The naivety that accompanies the same deluded ideas as believing in the innocence of a child. No one has ever convinced me of their innocence but The Battered Wife said something’s to me that I have never been able to explain as anything else.

“I just don’t understand,” she said, “When you are in the bed with someone you love, how can you want to hurt them?”

That statement shattered me in a way that leaving him had not. In that moment I realised I had been the keeper of a monster and I had released him into the world without fixing him. Of course, I knew I never stood a chance but I operate with a sense of martyrdom that I believe will be my downfall someday. I believe I should fall on the cross instead of anyone else, and maybe that’s just because I am greedy for suffering. There is nothing more exquisite to me than pain.

“How can I help you?” I asked her, “Do you want me to help you?”

Again, her silence indicated that she hadn’t thought it through and perhaps she hadn’t imagined that I wouldn’t have the desire to help her. I did though, one refugee to another, because I knew what happens when you live in the war-zone of love for too long. You start to believe that it is normal. You start to live between air raids as if the world isn’t collapsing around you. You start to believe you deserve it, because you asked for it. Because you have less value than the woman who doesn’t deserve to be abused. Because the kicks and punches you take are the best you have to offer. I knew what happens.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t know what to do. My family won’t support me if I decide to leave him and I have no money of my own to be able to do that. Everything my family gave me at the wedding, they took away from me. I haven’t even seen my wedding jewellery.”

That, that right there is why the laws we have are complete garbage. There we had a woman who was clearly being abused, living in a hostile situation and being harassed for her dowry but she had as much of a chance of having him arrested as I did of ever sucking his dick again. On the other hand, we have women like the wife of The Boyfriend who was blackmailing him into giving her money in exchange for phone conversations with his child who was not even being sent to school and her case against him continues to this day without a shred of evidence. No matter how biased the law towards the protection of a woman, it will ultimately fuck one over because the law can’t erase the intention of the patriarchal agenda. The law doesn’t crawl into your bedroom at night and rescue you from the man slapping you senseless.

“I could talk to some friends and try to find space for you at a women’s shelter,” I offered.

At the time I wouldn’t have a shelter to run for another nine years, I was working as a prostitute still and had through the entire course of my relationship with my ex. I never told him, of course, and in a way, we deserved each other. A good deception deserves a good thrashing every now and then.

“I can’t,” she said in a lower volume than the rest of our conversation, “I’m...with child.”

It makes people in India uncomfortable to say the word pregnant. We always say bogus crap like with child or “in the family way” as if saying the word pregnant draws more attention to the fact that you got fucked to accomplish it than the alternative. I once said the word uterus while my mother and I were in the back of a cab together and she had a cow. She said it was inappropriate to say that word, as if it were a four-letter word which is even weirder because my mother is one of the most foul-mouthed creatures I know. She doesn’t mind swear words. She only minds any mention of the female anatomy, much like The Battered Wife minded any allusion to the experience of being female.

“Oh,” I said resisting my desire to congratulate her and schedule an abortion for her at the same time, “Does he know?”

“He knows,” she said, “But he is worse than ever since I conceived, and now I am really scared for the child.”

That is when I realised why the call hadn’t come six months earlier, because she was a woman like all of us and she didn’t see the reason in protecting herself until there was another life dependent on her. Women’s lives matter to a point where they are practically sacrosanct because females bring life, bereft of that women’s lives matter as much as the dirt under a shoe.

“Do you think,” I asked her gently, “that you would actually call the police the next time he does this?”

She was silent for a while, and in that moment, I wanted to laugh at the bizarre nature of our alliance. If war makes men brothers-in-arms then being abused at the hands of the same man makes women sister suffragettes.

“No,” she said, “I can’t, my child will grow up without a father.”

Some of us manage fine.

I told her I would give her as many resources as I had that could help and I would put in a word with all the people I knew who worked emergency relief for beat-up women in case she decided to call. You meet weird unlikely people in the business of selling your body. She thanked me profusely but I knew she wasn’t going to call anyone. Whatever form of help it was that she wanted from me I felt I had failed at providing it. Two days later, she sent me a message saying she would delete my number from her phone and I should do the same. I never heard from her again. Two years later, I learnt they had moved to another country and I was relieved because it was one of those countries where the neighbours call the cops for you. Regardless I never could recover from the guilt of not being able to help her and I don’t ever want that to happen again so I know I have to go speak to The Teacher immediately.

…….

I walk to the back of the house and up the metal staircase that leads up to her room and kitchenette. As I stand knocking outside the door, I can hear her familiar murmur and the unrecognisable murmur of another. The door opens almost instantly and to my surprise it isn’t The Teacher but Number 3 that is at the door. The moment she sees me she moves away from the frame and I see The Teacher sitting on her bed in a while nightgown with her hair loose all around her, her face looks like the week we all had mulberry face packs, and I am suddenly much more concerned that I was a moment before.

“Can you please leave us?” I ask Number 3 and she gives me a look that has way too much sparkle for the moment.

It unsettles me.

“Can I come in?” I ask The Teacher as Number 3 walks down the stairs.

I can feel her gaze on my neck as she leaves. The Teachers nods her assent and I occupy the chair I imagine Number 3 was occupying just a few moments before. It’s warm and I am distracted by that.

“Please don’t ask me to leave her,” she says even before I have a chance to open my mouth, “I love her. She knows she made a mistake.”

I never thought I would live to see the day I was having this conversation with a woman about another woman. I know it is probably ultimately discriminatory of me to believe a woman cannot be abusive, but something about it seemed fatidic, and more wrong than the abuse I was accustomed to dealing with.

“I wasn’t going to say that,” I tell her, “I want to know how you are and what happened if you would like to tell me. I want to offer my support and any help that you need.”

“I really just want to sleep,” she says and I understand why she doesn’t want to talk to me right now, “I know you can help but I don’t need help.”

“Can I at least get you some ibuprofen for the swelling?” I ask her, “Vitamin C for the bruising? Anything?”

“I don’t need anything,” she says and I know I won’t be able to avoid having to talk to everyone else in the house about what has happened.

I can already picture The Seamstress and her brand of cold, loud dispassion as she tells me that I have to get rid of The Teacher. I don’t know the right thing to do so I vow to ask My Only Friend. In times like these she often acts as a measured conscience for me. I wait for The Teacher to tell me something else, say anything else but she only lays back in her bed and closes her eyes. I get up to leave and I see her looking at me when I turn to close the door behind me. Her eyes stare blankly into mine, unblinking, for what seems like a very long time.

“Can you close the door?” She says finally breaking the moment of helplessness with an awkwardness which is much harder to bear.

I walk down the stairs slowly reminding myself in my loudest inside voice: The essence of agency is that you cannot help people against their will.

…….