The Wedlock

The grey and wet morning led to a hapless afternoon and a bitter, nonchalant evening. She prepared herself for the night ahead. She knew it was inevitable. He had battered her face a day before and had warned her of dire consequences unless she succumbed and played as per his wishes.

Her fault was that she had drifted off slightly and had opened her heart to a stranger years ago. She was naive enough to not understand what to put into words and what to hold back and poured her agony out in letters and words and sought refuge and comfort in the replies she received, until one day her husband got hold of the conversation. She pleaded and cried, sought forgiveness and tried hard to explain that it wasn’t an affair but only an outburst where she role played to be someone else who could soar as she wished but he certainly couldn’t understand.

Even after years of severing off all the ties, she was tormented and tortured on a daily basis for having made that one mistake. He took sadistic pleasure in badgering her and blackmailing her into staying back. He talked about how her words would make her look. He promised her that he would brand her a harlot before her parents and make them suffer as well. He talked about taking away her daughter and served her with fresh taunts and choicest of abuses on a daily basis. He could bend her any way he wanted, made her do all what he pleased and still cleverly played the victim.

She would go hungry and no one enquired if she’d eaten. She would go sleepless couple of nights in a row scared of her husband who would return at odd hours and forced himself on her and bash her up if she did not ‘respond’. On all such occasions she would double up in pain the next morning and hold her daughter up to her bosom even harder wondering if a similar fate would await her.

She called her parents regularly but never really talked to them about anything. She couldn’t hold them accountable for her misery and also she knew for fact that they would never understand her situation. It was her hell and she braved it for sake of her child perhaps with a view to give her a ‘normal complete’ family. 

Perhaps it was just the fear of a social boycott and the stigma that is still associated with a girl returning to her parent’s home after a broken marriage. Matrimony in this country is perhaps the biggest trap of all – easy to get in, nearly impossible to get out.

We all buy different animals as pets, some are reared for milk, some for meat, others for eggs, wool or pure labor. I guess she belonged to a species that was reared for venting out the outside stress, hurling verbal and physical abuse and being raped at will. She was the child of a lesser God, an adult with no free will, dreams or aspirations. Cast away in a concrete jungle, marooned with her child in an island of a household which met her food, clothing and shelter needs but offered nothing more, she lived as a prisoner of her dreams – a captive held by a wedlock.

I happened to run into her one evening. She was walking with a slight limp and held her child’s arm who was trotting besides her. I paused for a brief moment and she let a feeble smile. I didn’t wait for her to dish out an excuse and turned to her child and took her by surprise by directly asking her if she knew how her mother hurt her leg? The child did not answer my question but hid behind her mother and kept looking suspiciously at me.

The mother let a faint sheepish smile as if she was caught stealing. She hesitated for a moment and said, “Someday, I will ask my father if I stopped being his baby once I got married.” She looked back at me and this time her face seemed to be blazing even as a tear began to build up by the corner of her eye. She walked away looking at the road and turned round the corner.

I never saw her again.

Two weeks later, the domestic help who used to work at her house as well, informed us that she had ‘accidently’ fallen off the stairs leading to her apartment late in the night and cracked her skull. She kept lying in pool of her own blood all night long only to be seen by the neighbors next morning who informed her husband. The hospital pronounced her brought dead on arrival and the police closed the case as accident after a quick investigation. The daughter has since then been packed off to a boarding school in Shimla.

The husband re-married 3 months later.