“The people in my husband’s family speak to me with laughter and make me laugh at other times. They buy me everything I need. But when he drinks… oh God… it becomes hell, hell.”
“At the beginning of our marriage, he was good. I don’t know what happened later. After my mother died, I thought he would comfort me, aunty. Perhaps after my mother died, he began to feel that if anything happened to me, there was no one left to question him. Maybe that made him careless.”
“During the day he talks nicely and makes me talk too. Then at night he comes home drunk and takes something I may have said jokingly during the day and keeps questioning me about it, asking why I said such a thing, and does not let me sleep.”
“If I don’t answer after he comes home drunk, he comes to hit me and asks whether I am so arrogant that I won’t answer him. If I answer him, he scolds me for being so insolent as to talk back to him.”
“If I speak, it is wrong. If I don’t speak, it is wrong,” she sobbed.
“At night he holds me tightly in his arms, stares at me and threatens me—‘Didn’t you speak disrespectfully to me? Shall I tear your face apart now? Or should I gouge out both your eyes? If I tear your ears off, you won’t speak again, will you?’ Is this a life?”
“When he threatens me like that, I feel like running away somewhere. I become terribly afraid, aunty.”
“At night he tortures me asking why I spoke, and when morning comes he asks why I don’t speak to him. If I ask why he said such things to me, he says, ‘Did I really gouge out your eyes? Didn’t I only say I would?’ Then he behaves as though nothing happened. Is he trying to make me believe I’m mad? Or is there something wrong with him? Does everyone behave like this after drinking? Is this how people are supposed to behave when they drink? My family gave me to him believing I would be safe with him. If so, is it wrong to expect a husband to treat his wife well?”
“Ever since I came to this house, I have never slept at night. I am afraid that his threats will become real and that he will do something to me.”
“Even when I was a little girl, I could never sleep because I was afraid Appa might do something to Amma. Even now I cannot sleep. I want to sleep peacefully, aunty. I wonder whether I will get that sleep only in the grave where I finally end up.”
“Don’t talk like that, dear…”
“Let me tell you the rest, aunty. I thought that if I told the elders what he was doing, perhaps they would listen. So I went and told my uncle. From that day onwards, they began asking me questions that no one should ever ask…” She began sobbing uncontrollably.
“Even I cannot bear to hear what he says. What will the elders do, aunty? Just like my father, they spoke about me as though I was the one responsible…” Her tears would not stop.
“After that, my father-in-law and brother-in-law found another house and moved away. He had done all these things, but he told everyone in the village that my father-in-law had put us in a separate home only because I didn’t even know how to cook rice properly.”
“Then the baby came into my womb. I believed that, at last, we had found a reason to live.” Sugandhi could do nothing but stare from her side of the wall at the grief of the woman who had lost her child.
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