WHEN I HIT YOU
Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
By Meena Kandasamy

In Meena Kandasamy’s “When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife,” the evidence of a crumbling marriage can be found on the bodies of the husband and wife: “thin, red welts” on her arms where her laptop cord has lashed her; scorched skin above his ankle after he holds a ladle over the stove and then presses it to his leg until she agrees to see a gynecologist about starting a family; a dull ache where a broomstick has pummeled her back. A smattering of burns like freckles on his elbow where he holds one glowing match after the other, singeing himself until she gives in and deactivates her Facebook account. (He objects to “its narcissism,” he says. “If you love me, this is the quickest way you will make up your mind.”) The slackening of her legs, how she learns to “go limp” when he drags her to their bed to punish, to “tame” her.

When the unnamed narrator returns to her childhood home, her parents decipher this marriage story through her ailments. “Her heels were cracked and her soles were 25 shades darker than the rest of her,” her mother tells gaggles of curious relatives. “You could tell that she did nothing but housework.” And then there’s the story of the lice, repeated again and again: “That criminal had cut my daughter’s hair short, and it was in-fes-ted.” Little can be more evocative of the rot of this partnership than the image of swarms of little creatures scuttling about on her daughter’s head. But lest four harrowing months of her life be whittled down to an anecdote, the narrator realizes she can be the only one to tell us what happened.

It would be easy to ask, “What kind of woman would allow that?” Or even, “Why did she stay?” In 2012, when Kandasamy, a poet, translator and activist, wrote about her brief, violent marriage for the Indian magazine Outlook, these are the kinds of questions she was asked. “When I Hit You” is her urgent, searing answer. She does not give her readers the sense of certainty a memoir might offer; she is very clear that this is a work of fiction — of imagination, not of memory. Unlike a factual testimony, a novel begs no response from her former partner, no corrections from a lawyer, nor queries from a police officer about the finer details of an argument here, a beating there.

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In India, where Kandasamy lived with her ex-husband (she now splits her time between Chennai and London), the National Family Health Survey last year found that over 30 percent of women have been physically, sexually or emotionally abused by their partners at some point. This book is Kandasamy’s rebuke to those who think privilege, financial or educational, protects against harm. Her characters are never named, their anonymity allowing the reader to slip easily into their skins.

The protagonist is a young woman — a poet, a romantic — heartbroken at the end of a love affair. If you have ever felt the sting of rejection, Kandasamy tells her reader, you will know the antidote that a new relationship can offer, the embrace that marriage promises: “There was no dull ache of desire in this manhunt,” she says. “I was only looking for safety.” If, like the protagonist, you have read enough love stories to see only the rosy hues of possibility in committing to a union with a virtual stranger, you might cling to that fantasy right up until you find yourself against a wall with an open palm pinned to your throat. And Kandasamy is too skilled a writer to give us a caricature of an abusive man. “He made the best rasam I’ve ever tasted,” the wife remembers. “He sang out of tune always, but with no hint of shyness.” It does not come off as an apology for his cruelty when she explains that “his father, a major in the Indian Army, had beaten him often as a child. He made a note of it every time it happened in a small pocketbook.”

In Mangalore, where the couple move after the husband, a Marxist lecturer, lands a teaching job, the wife finds that her world has shrunk. Far from friends and family and unable to speak the language, she struggles to find work. She picks up a few words in Kannada: “eshtu: how much; haalu: milk; anda: eggs; … hendathi: wife.” Here, she sees, “in this language, I am nothing except a housewife.” There are other lessons she must learn, as well: Her husband tells her a good wife would be content keeping his home, she would not need to work (or, without a job or friends in their new city, to have a phone), she would stop wearing lipstick that only served to make her more beautiful for other men, she would not do a hundred small things (oversalting his food, disagreeing, writing poetry) that irk him, that call for punishment. “When I hit you,” he notes mournfully, “Comrade Lenin weeps.” He is forced to betray his ideals to forge the perfect wife from the scraps he’s been given.

The story opens five years after the wife has fled; we already know that she lives to tell the tale. This is not just a story of survival, but, more important, one of self-preservation. For what is turned into record is not the husband’s confession of why he hits her, but the wife’s impression of how it hurts. “I am already transferring what I see and experience in the privacy of our home into art,” she thinks. “He is becoming the first semblance of a plot.”

As he wipes her computer’s hard disk, erasing and belittling her work because it takes away from her chores, her husband asks, “Should I remind Writer Madam that she is also a wife?” The book’s subtitle makes an ambitious nod to James Joyce, to the coming-of-age genre. Each chapter contains an epigraph by the likes of Kamala Das, Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Zora Neale Hurston. These writers’ words have survived, and provided comfort, across time and cultures. And within the book, an answer — no, a warning — to the husband: Should I remind you that your wife is also a writer? And what is a writer, if not the one who gets to shape the narrative, to have the last word?