When I Hit you - Meena Kandasamy

Tender, lyrical, raw, brutal, fears and honest is 'When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife' by Meena Kandasamy. This was my 17th book in 2020 and the fourth in February.

Chapters epigraphs from Anne Sexton, Kamala Das and Elfriede Jelinek (“art creates the / suffering in the first place”), beyond caste, race or culture, even beyond language difference. Each one before the 14 chapters are just amazing.

First chapter begins with how her mother retells her escape story, crediting it to her feet, and the great battle of her versus the Head Lice. She thought of writing her own story to stop this and take responsibility over her own life.

The unnamed narrator falls in love with a university lecturer because of his Marxist ideologies and revolutionary thoughts and marries him. Soon after the marriage, they move to Mangalore, their house in Primrose Villa, so very well described and she realizes that she is all alone there. Her husband decides to show her “right path” and soon her marriage becomes a training camp for her. He dictates her what to do, how to behave in public, whom to talk and even he limits her online presence time. He demands all her passwords and took the control of everything from her. After two weeks of marriage, the husband burns himself with matches until she deactivates her Facebook account. He deletes every email she has ever received to “set [her] free”. She is constantly under his radar and finds herself totally cut-out from the outside world. He forbids her from writing poetry about his abuse because it will create a “material basis” which their relationship cannot transcend, then writes his own dreadful poems about abusing her as his own therapy. The title of the book comes from one his poems called When I hit you, Comrade Lenin weeps. And when the narrator finally begins standing up for herself, he rapes her every night. She writes letters to imaginary lovers.

Indian form of toxic masculinity is dissected by Kandasamy. A few brief, funny pages sketch a lineage of sexual repression from Gandhi to the current prime minister, Regardless of ideology, the Indian politician must appear to be a bachelor, and women must be subjugated. Her mothers view - 'Politicians are hoodlums'.

She admitted that no one forced her to into this relationship, yet she went into it because no one knows what future holds. Thousands of women across the world share the story, voice, tears. " Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape. The shaming is in being asked to stand to judgment."