Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

“She used to sleep with her property papers under her ass because she thought I wanted to steal them. I don’t like to say such things but secretly I was like, ‘Have you seen the property my family has? I already have houses of my own. This house will be divided between five grandchildren. Do you think I care about stealing one-fifth of your shitty house from you?’ But I thought that since she cared so much about money, I could maybe make her happy with money. So I opened a savings account and every month I used to deposit 5–10,000 rupees [$100–200] depending on what I had. I gave her the ATM card and said, ‘You don’t need to go to Dhruv whenever you need money. This is yours. I’m a part of the family too.’ But I guess I was never part of the family. The entire month she’d be sulking, being completely bitchy — and just when the day came that I had to transfer the money, she was suddenly extremely sweet to me. It was visible you know, that sweet thing, sickening sweet. But I had no issues with it. I thought, ‘If this is what buys peace in the house, you can keep my entire salary.’

“As things got worse, I used to say to my mother-in-law and my husband quite frequently: ‘What exactly do you want me to do, how do you want me to behave? Give me a list, A-Z, and I’ll stick to it? Because whatever I do makes you unhappy, but when I stop doing it, you’re still unhappy.’ I told her after a year, ‘Every week I sat down with you and asked you what you wanted me to do, and every week there was a definite thing. And I actually made a note of each and every thing you wanted me to do. But each week it completely clashed with what you’d said the week before. It was as if you just wanted me to fail.’

“Dhruv had a younger brother who was a loudmouth. He was very rude to his mother, and he would hit her when they had arguments. All that really shook me because after the first time I saw him do that I thought, if he doesn’t respect his own mother, he’ll kill me tomorrow. It totally shook me. He kept on kicking her and boxing her, and I wrapped myself around her so she didn’t get hurt because she had acute arthritis. But in her head her sons were perfect, and the following morning she called up one of her relatives and said, ‘Sukhvinder was trying to hit me.’ So I was like, You bitch! She could never ever see that her sons were doing something wrong, and if they did bad things, she forgot about them straight away.

“I couldn’t understand this, and I always made the mistake of being brutally honest. If my husband and his mother were having an argument about something, Dhruv would bring me in and ask me, ‘Which one of us is right, which one of us is wrong?’ Now, if you ask me that sort of a question, I expect you’re prepared for the answer. So I would say, ‘I think she was wrong here and you were wrong here and—’, and it would make both of them furious. They would both forget about the fact that they were fighting, and they would eat me alive. He would be like, ‘How can you say that about my mother?’ And she would say, ‘How can you say that about my son?’

“Anyway, there came a time when I got home really late from work. There’s one time in the year when we show our products at a trade exhibition, and I have to work all hours. So I came back from the exhibition really late and I really wanted to go to the toilet. So I came back and I completely forgot about the slipper changing thing, I just ran to the toilet. She made a huge fuss and said all sorts of weird things to me. I said, ‘I’m sorry. I genuinely forgot. I only wanted to go to the toilet.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘you are up to something.’ So I said, ‘Forget it. You’re not making any sense.’ And I went to take a shower.

“While I was in the shower I heard all this shouting between the mother and the son. When I came out Dhruv said, ‘You should not argue with Mummy.’ I explained the situation to him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you slapped her.’ I was like, ‘ I slapped your mother ?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ Then he said, ‘Well you didn’t slap her. You were about to slap her.’ And I was like, ‘If you think after a year and a half of marriage that I am capable of that, then God bless you.’ And I went into the kitchen to start cooking.

“So he followed me in, took my hand and pulled me into the dining room. He said, ‘We have to sort this out right now.’ I said, ‘I know I’m younger than you, but I understand one thing: when you’re angry, we should not talk. It’s just going to blow out of proportion, and then you’re going to say things you don’t mean and you’ll feel sorry about it later. And I’ll reciprocate and it will be a who-hurts-who-most game.’ ‘No, we are going to sort this out now.’ So I was like, ‘ Fine ’. And we were talking — we were just talking — and he whacks me right across my face.

“He was really tall, 6’2”, decently built. He whacked me and I fainted. I collapsed.

“Afterwards I was totally numb. I called my two girlfriends and I went to see them. And I howled and I howled and I howled, and I was like, ‘Is this normal, is this normal? Does this normally happen in joint families?’ — because my friends were from joint families while I was brought up in a nuclear family. And they were like, ‘It’s okay, he was just really angry.’ They were just trying to calm me down because I was really out of my senses, but they were furious, you know — I could see the look on their faces. I didn’t tell anyone else, not even my parents, because I couldn’t decipher at that time whether it was a big thing. I was just totally lost.

“I thought I would just try to forget all about it. Start a new chapter. But each time there was a fight, I used to be really scared because I thought he might do it again. Sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn’t. But over time, the frequency of whacking just kept increasing and it was extremely disconcerting, and I was falling into a depression and all of that. Then one day, after about four years of our marriage, I left and I never went back.

“Obviously I hadn’t told my parents about the whacking and all that — so it took me about three months to convince them. No one apart from Dhruv and I and Dhruv’s aunt, in whom I used to confide, knew what had happened. I didn’t feel it was appropriate to tell my parents what went on in their family. So I said, ‘There are things you don’t know about, and I can assure you I’m not making a rash decision.’ But eventually, after months of trying in vain to convince them, I told them about the frequent whacking. They were furious. They went to discuss everything with Dhruv’s family. But I wasn’t ever going to go back.

“For some time I was very angry. I really wanted to put him and his mother behind bars. But eventually I calmed down. For a long time I wished I could slap both of them really hard, just once. But now I don’t even feel like doing that. It’s his life. I believe in God and justice. I know I didn’t do anything so drastically horrible in my marriage that things had to turn out the way they did. It’s okay. I’m fine with it.

“I did give it my best. More than I ever thought I had inside me. But I lost respect for him. I didn’t trust him, and after that it was over. Before the love could develop it turned into bitterness. So there was absolutely nothing.

“You know the moment at which I really lost respect for him? When I knew it was over? It was not when he was hitting me, strangely enough. It was something else.

“I always liked to have all the windows open but his family would keep them completely shut. I used to suffocate in there. And I have asthma, so sometimes it got really bad. One night I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe and I was panicking. I shook Dhruv awake and asked him to pass me my inhaler, which was on his side of the bed. But he refused to get it, and I passed out. After that there was no going back.”