He was done. Her father rolled off her thin gaunt body and without a word went to the lavatory outside. She got up as she always did mechanically, putting on her shalwar. She would have to wait for him to finish with his ablutions before she could wash herself. That interminable period before she gained access to the washroom used to be spent in a sweat of fear: what if her mother walked in, or her brother… The thought used to agonize her so that she couldn’t breathe. At that time, her shame and her guilt were all her own. There was no one else to blame for the sinful act that she committed so often. Her father, her rapist, too was a vague figure that stood on the periphery of her sinfulness. To her, he was also a censoring, vilifying entity that had only a hazy, unclear role in what she did again and again. She hated herself.
That was then, when she was twelve years old. She was sixteen now and while her abuse had continued, her sphere of loathing had expanded now to include everyone else in the household too. But she still hated herself most of all …. best of all…
She had tried to end it of course in the only way she knew how: swallowing rat poison once, pills another time and finally cutting her wrists with her father’s razor. But even Allah hated her because she was still here. She had survived every attempt at self-annihilation. She wondered secretly if in fact, her mother was not equally disappointed with her daughter’s clumsy efforts at ending the perversion that she had brought upon their home since … since forever. She had forgotten when it all started. She had forgotten any time that existed, that may have existed before she became a whore. There was no time before that. She had lacerated that memory, erased it beyond any recall. Because to remember would be to ask why and to ask why would release demons that would drive her mad. They wouldn’t kill her, no, they would just torture her endlessly, relentlessly. With the insulating, numbing cloak of self-loathing that had her in its choke-hold, there was no space for anything beyond just getting through each day.
For the last week, she had been sick every morning. She had woken up with her gut wrenching on the inside while an ethereal calm had overtaken her on the outside. Over the years, she had found an odd comfort surrounding her when her body functioned imperfectly; whether it was a viral fever that gripped her or an injury that festered in her flesh, inflicted sometimes by nature and sometimes by herself. Shrouded in her physical affliction, her punishing self-awareness and self-hate lost some of their sharp edges and she found that she could actually smile. Her mother had told her in those times, that her eyes had a mad glitter when her body was burning up. And so, she had felt especially buoyant as her insides had churned and lurched over the last few days.
A week into her tranquillising unwellness, her mother had looked at her quietly and then told her that she was pregnant. She had gazed back at her mother impassively. This was something new, stoking an entirely new sensation and she was not yet aware of how to react to it. That it was her father’s child was not a fact that crossed her mind at all. It was in the realm of reason and memory that she had cut out of her awareness a long time ago. That it was her child, and she was not yet bound to a husband, was the thought that clipped up to her even while she calmly vomited in the drain outside the kitchen.
She was to be wed. To her cousin, her mother’s sister’s son. Her father didn’t want to have anything to do with her after he had heard that she was carrying a child. He had looked at her as if he didn’t recognise her and had not come near her since. A child, she had mused in fleeting, ephemeral moments … her child… an immaculate child. The morning sickness had dissipated but her return to healthfulness neither awakened her customary self-loathing, nor did it bring with it any newfound relief. Her days were strangely vacuous, stuporous where she felt mostly a deadening apathy.
The wedding took place a month later. Her cousin despised her; he had told her so the very first night that they were alone. He had called her a randi*, a whore. She didn’t disagree with him. She felt nothing, no pain no humiliation, not even the hate for herself and the world around her that she had stewed in earlier; that simmering abhorrence that had made her heart hammer in her chest reminding her that she was still breathing, that she was still agonisingly alive. Now there was empty space where her feelings of despair and detestation had been; a limbo which somehow removed her from the stormy realm of the living. The rare, almost hypnotic sensations she ever experienced now, were either wild euphoria, savage rage or keening despair taking for that time, possession of her entire being. And so the atoms in her empty space now waited only for the spotless, the guiltless, the immaculate sensations to churn them into a frenzied, all-consuming dance.
In the early days of her marriage, she felt nothing. Things were alright even in the slew of verbal abuse her husband flung at her nightly. He didn’t touch her. He said he didn’t want anything to do with her bastard child. So, things were alright. The beatings had started four months into the marriage. She observed disconnectedly, the frustration rise as her husband’s nights of abstinence turned to months of self-imposed celibacy. Things were still alright. Until he had kicked her in her stomach. Again and again. She had passed out. They had not taken her to the hospital. Such incidences stayed within the sanctified confines of the family home. She was relieved. Her lingering, stupefying apathy however left her and two new sensations began growing strong, stalwart roots somewhere inside her: she loved her unborn child and she hated her husband. She refused to go back to him. She would kill him if she did. She knew that. She was trying to save him from herself. To her mother she simply said that she would not go back to her husband; that she feared for her child’s life. Her mother understood that logic, thought it was prudent in fact: If he killed her or her child, there could be a police case and the whole family edifice would come crumbling down. Yes, she had said, it was better that her daughter didn't go back to provoke her nephew’s anger. The divorce was finalised in three months.
The baby was born five months later. She had looked at the feeble little bundle in her hands for a while and had waited for the little spark of love that she had felt for her unborn child, to inflame for the living one. She felt nothing. It was a girl. Her heart rose for a fleeting moment and then collapsed. Another sensation slowly crept into the empty space: Revulsion. She didn’t want it she said. They removed it from her.
Her mother found work for her at a bungalow. She was to help in the kitchen: washing dishes, sweeping the floor, chopping the vegetables. The lady of the house liked her; she’d said so herself. The blessed nothingness had overspread its grey blanket about her again. Everything was alright. And then one day, her baji* had asked her to tend to her two year old child. A girl. She looked at the little bundle in the carriage she was wheeling around the courtyard. Her stomach lurched. A new sensation clutched at her lungs. Claustrophobia dug its ravening tentacles into her chest so that she gasped for air. She didn’t want to be wheeling it around or holding it. She didn’t want it.
She stood there for a while looking into the distance, willing away the storm of dire thoughts that were gathering in her head. She heard something then above the pounding in her ears and the rasping in her throat. A low thrumming that she could almost taste – frigid, comforting, numbing. That was the first time that the far end of the garden whispered to her. Come it said, come into my soothing darkness. She pushed the carriage towards the rockery where a weeping willow spread sepulchral shadows on the wet earth where the grass never grew. The child slept. She sat there and closed her eyes. For now, the storm had passed.
Glossary:
*Randi: whore/ fallen woman in Urdu.
*Baji: term of respect used for lady employers in the Indian subcontinent.
DoubleSpeak 