अनकही #10

The words take up all the space in her head. She thinks of them, tries saying them out loud—rolls them around on her tongue. She tries to figure out their correct pronunciations. After all, she doesn’t really know what they mean. Only that they are not nice. 

Ritu was given a choice to continue studying after the fifth grade; she did not take it. Before the ‘why?’ rolled off my tongue, she had already started to tell me the answer. Ritu’s family was devastatingly destitute, and her parents lived their lives under a constantly present cloud of sadness, both things visible to 10-year-old Ritu’s still small, still wonderous eyes. Her education would have become another burden on them, and she did not want that, did not want to become part of the cloud of sadness that hung above them. And so, she dropped out of school when she completed the fifth standard, and eight years later, she got married. 

Ritu, like most women she has known, has a husband that immerses himself in substance abuse. Riding on an intoxicated high, he comes home every night and unleashes verbal abuse on his wife. “He shouts so loud sometimes that I fear he might hurt his throat. He calls me everything, every bad thing you can think of. He calls me those things so many times that I have to remind myself to not believe them, not think they are true,” Ritu shared with me, her voice barely audible, just another octave away from a whisper. When asked about why she thinks her husband drinks and abuses, she has the same answer that has haunted her life before, and her parents before that—sadness. “He becomes sad, upset. Then he drinks.”

But the worst part of what Ritu confessed was when she told me that when this had started to happen with her, she immediately informed her mother, in the hopes of some help. “She told me at once to not go to the police or tell anyone. She told me to let three days pass by, to wait it out. She told me, one day it would stop. I just had to keep hope. And I believed her. I believed that he would get better and stop, so I didn’t go to the police.”

Four years have passed since and Ritu has now realised that such violence is so common, that so many women get shouted at. She has also realised that it is so hard to stop. And, so, so hard to understand.