अनकही #02

Sapna spends her free time caring for her husband like she has been taught to do her entire life. She baths him, feeds him, and helps him walk on the days his cardiac conditions make it hard for him to carry out his tasks. Before sleeping every night, she dutifully massages his hands and cares for them so that they don’t become stiff. The same hands that once abused her. 

Sapna has never picked up a book in her life. She does not know how to read, she does not know how to write, and she does not even know which side of a magazine is the right one to start from. Sapna is one of six other siblings, all born to destitute parents in a village with grounds cracked from the midsummer heat, and metal rusted from negligence. She told me, when I first spoke to her, giggling with nonchalance, that the place she was born in and where she was raised could not be found on any map in the world—such small and worthless was its existence. In fact, Sapna does not know the exact day she was born. The only proof of her age is in words passed down through her family of that one thunderous day when she had emerged into the world, and in the tired wrinkles that dawn her face every now and then. When I had suggested to Sapna the idea of ever having received an education, she looked at me with her eyes squinted, wondering if I was trying to make a joke. Because for her, education is a privilege so out of reach, inexplicably bizarre, and hopelessly unthinkable that she couldn’t help but laugh at my questions. And so, quickly, we both moved on to what she did know, what she had experienced in this life, Domestic Violence. 

Sapna had never heard of or seen substances like alcohol or drugs when she was growing up. Three days into her new marriage, a marriage she was forced into at the tender age of 15, she was well-versed with them. She could smell the reek of vodka on her husband’s breath, she could see the coursing nicotine in his dilated pupils, she knew. She knew because when her husband performed substance abuse, he would come and leave the marks of his actions on her. Once intoxicated, her husband would blatantly bash her around the house: slap her, kick her, push her down when she was sitting up, twist her hands, and once, even attempted to burn her right cheek off. Unaware of his state, he would scream, yell, howl at her, call her names and discard curses. For her husband, Sapna became nothing more than an object, a careless, easy-to-overpower ‘thing’ that he could control ominously. 

When I frustratedly asked her if she told anyone this was happening, a soft smile settled on Sapna’s lips. She looked away as if replaying those days that she had once experienced. Then, she fluttered the answer out as a whisper, “No.” She continued to explain how her parents had always known what was happening when they would see her covered in poorly hidden bruises and fresh cuts, but they never supported her. Never did they ever tell her that she could go to them and that she would be protected. She was raised to be a dutiful wife, and they would not let her run away from that. And so, she never sought legal or police support either. Her fear? “What would people say? I was always ashamed of that,” she confessed to me, still looking out the window, as the sun was setting, leaving behind in its place an orange hue.

Sapna’s husband rarely showed up to work, instead always choosing to bury himself in recreational activities. He didn’t allow her to work either. As a result of this, she had to learn to run the house with the few scrapes of pennies that the house earned monthly, remnants of the money that her husband has already spent on buying boxes of liquor bottles and cigarettes. The scariest part of a night when he was drinking, Sapna told me, was not even the violence. For her, it was when he would ask for food, and she would not know how to tell him that there is no money for food and if he would have noticed, she herself hadn’t eaten for the past three meals. Because she could not bear to let him down, could not bear to tell him that she had been unsuccessful in performing the only duty she had. 

But the worst part, the most gut-wrenching thing about Sapna’s whole experience was that never once did she realise that what was happening to her was abnormal and wrong. So much on so frequently she had seen it around her, in neighbourhoods, in relatives’ homes, in her own home, that she thought that this was part of a marriage. That, this had to take place in order for a marriage to survive. “I know now,” she had laughed, releasing a breath she had been holding since I started speaking to her, slowly stopping the fiddling she had been doing with the pallu of her green chiffon sari. 

Sapna’s husband does not hit her anymore. A decade into their marriage, he suffered from a severe cardiac arrest, which is when they found out about the complications of his heart. He was ordered to lay off the substances if at all he wished to live, and so, afer months of withdrawal pain and relapsing terrors, he did. Now, he visits the medical store monthly to procure his medicines and diligently goes to work. All of their earnings are now handled by her, with her paying all the bills and returning debts, in control of the household finances. With two grown-up kids, neither Sapna nor her husband wishes for a violent environment around the house. She, in her strength and determination, has found a way to communicate with him so that he understands, and now they restrict the shouting in the house to absolutely necessary. But, she told me, that I should not consider this a happy ending. Because of some miracle, if she has been allowed to live a changed life, it does not mean that the others in the neighbourhood have. Their husbands still drink, now hitting and abusing both their wives and their children. They still live penniless, surviving on the scraps of the day.  

When asked about her wishes for the future of women, Sapna, now working at an NGO as a caretaker for children, has one simple answer, “Stop the alcohol access, it will save a million lives.” She reminisces that, if she had been allowed to marry once older, or provided access to education, things would not have been the way they were. Sapna also strongly believes that a woman needs to be able to earn for herself. Now well-versed in the crucial art of handling finances responsibly, she believes it’s imperative that a woman has her own stream of income and a collection of savings. No longer is Sapna a 15-year-old girl dwindling in the shadows of her abusive husband, but rather a 32-year-old financially-independent woman—majority breadwinner wife, headstrong, with her own opinions. And, such is her empathy, that she still cares for the hands that once abused her.