It was the blow that awakened her. Not that she was asleep, but the lull of the conversation going back and forth with accusations and counter accusations; allegations and countering ones had almost lulled her into a drowsy sadness. All she could think of was that she wanted to be alone somewhere; and let the sadness envelop her like the cold burst of a shower that first shocks you and then pleases. But there was no respite. He just went on and on and on, at first harmless allegations and slowly spewing poisonous barbs first about her life, then parents, then her writing, her nature and finally her past. It was always stupid, senseless comments about her past which used to hurt her the most. She thought it strange and ironic for she was the one who had spilled out the whole story when they met - her intention being not to keep anything back so that a fair decision and judgement were made. She had learnt early on that to see whether anyone thought like her; and was in any way compatible with her; the best way was to shock him/her with the facts of her life.
This would simplify things and she could get on to the next phase of the acquaintance with out wasting time with the nitty-gritty of small talk and copious amounts of thought debating whether to trust him/her or not. But she had not taken into account a new trend in the winds of change. Nowadays it was fashionable to be considered a feminist, it was politically correct to empathise with women and it was diplomacy to portray one as a liberal. She had been fooled into believing he was all that.
So his barbs at having been led on and misunderstood and made to believe really made her see red and she just pursed her lips, folded her arms over her core- as was her habit of cradling the hurt- all the time rubbing her right arm as if to wipe the hurt way and brace for the tears. She always felt crying used to turn her inside out even as a teenager. The emotional upheaval almost felt like surgery and it would take her hours to get over it.
So she was almost thankful for the blow, for as it awakened her, it also numbed her mind and the tears stopped. She stared at those brown eyes she had come to love, which always seemed to her to be the eyes of a boy looking for his lost mother, the lashes sweeping upward and downward depending on the mood and thoughts pouring in torrents through that crazed mind of his. She did not recognise those eyes now, they were blazing and had turned coal-black, the whites particularly, pronounced. And then she looked down and receded more and more into herself, as blow after blow rained on her.
She didn’t feel them at first because she was still reconciling with the idea of being on the floor, getting beaten. She couldn’t believe it! How could she, who used to slap boys for molesting girls on buses and snatch their I-cards and deposit them in the police stations, get beaten? This was the thought which used to cross her unfailingly every time a fresh bout of violence occurred. She was the one to whom girls would turn to when they were in trouble, despite her disillusionment with her gender. How could she have gotten into such a fix?
And the answer would come to her slowly clouding her mind from the mist of her past- a velvety voice talking in the bright afternoon sunlight- “People who are abused in childhood often put themselves inevitably in circumstances where they are bound to be abused because it feels familiar to them…”
It would occur to her hours later that while the violence was going on she was rationalizing the whys and wherefores of it in her mind. But now all those thoughts were being pushed back from her mind by the rising waves of pain, each one more intense than the one before, she willing the present one to be the peak and measuring it with the one before to calculate whether the episode was abating or not.
Suddenly her mind shifted to the fact that today at least she didn’t have to protect her baby. She remembered the terror she used to feel for the baby’s safety when the abuse figured in her pregnancy – her hands groping her distended stomach, skin tautly stretched and she being off-balance, falling over objects clumsily. All that reading, researching and generally making herself aware about childcare had not lessened the instinctual ‘motherly fear’ for her fetus’ survival – a fear that for centuries had enabled the survival of offspring in harsh conditions.
Today it was just her and the pain only. The anger that she felt was channeled into cries, cries of outrage at the unfairness of it all. She wished she were stronger than him so she could give him a mark too. But she knew it was no use and quietly submitted to the outburst. She had tried to hit him back once but it had only angered him further and the blows had been exceedingly painful after that. She waited for the blows to end and the inexorable apologies that would follow plus the declarations of love and commitment.
That part of the whole episode always brought forth a sardonic, crazed laughter from her.