13 Lessons From A Morally-Wounded Woman: Chapter 11

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Chapter 11 

“There is a world of happiness to be found within a transaction, you just have to make the right one.”



“Do you think I am a whore?” Number 3 asks me as she lounges in my bed.
 
I found her an apartment not far from mine which is reasonably priced, safely located and has enough space for her and The Child. I met with the broker earlier to get a final copy of the lease so I can have her sign it. I was telling her that I could move her out of the shelter and into the new apartment, I would take care of her rent and most general expenses while I find her a job, and try to get the kid into an alternative learning program.

“Would it seem insulting to you if I did?” I ask her, “Or are you just saying that because I would be giving you money and I also have sex with you?”

“What do you think?” she asks, clearly miffed at something.

“I really don’t know,” I explain, “You don’t seem to mind taking my money now.”

“It’s not the money,” she says softly, “You want me to move out of there, but you don’t want me to move in with you?”

I don’t know why she ever thought that would be possible. She has a child she insists on keeping with her even though she is entirely ill-equipped to handle him, I have tried on several occasions now to convince her to let me have him placed at one of the best orphanages in the city. I even explained to her that as one of their residents he would be guaranteed an education and she could visit him as frequently as she likes but she refuses to agree. She refuses to part with that boy even though she never talks to me about him, she never tells me stories, she never even asks if she can bring him here with her. It’s not even just about a child, though, while I certainly love her in the way that I have an insatiable need for her and I genuinely enjoy her company and I feel a deep desire to take care of her, I cannot say that I am actually capable of normal love anymore. My longest and perhaps happiest relationship was with a man who paid me to be at his beck-and-call while simultaneously making me rich, and perhaps it is no wonder that I would try to replicate that relationship with her.


…….


At first when I moved to Delhi for The Germaphobe, I wasn’t sure how any of it was going to work out. He bought tickets for me and I exchanged the business-class fare for two economy tickets for My Only Friend and I. We landed one rainy evening in the dirtiest city in the world, he sent someone to pick me up at the airport and he drove me to this apartment. It looked very different then. It looked like a place out of a catalogue in which no one would ever really live. The couches were beige and the sheets were beige and the curtains were beige and it even smelled beige. My Only Friend loved it because I believe she is the only person in the world who can be dressed in beige from head to toe and not look like a giant penis. She becomes the colour in a way that elevates it. Later that evening, we went to visit her apartment, she was not set to move in for another week when all of our stuff was due to arrive. The place was a complete nightmare and somehow, she really took to it. Unlike my place which was a beautiful sanctuary situated, by my request, as close to a railway station as possible, her place was in the middle of one of the fanciest parts of town and looked like it was designed by the same people who design toilets at the railway station. It had nothing in it by way of furniture except one barren, blue couch and a wooden table that was covered in blue-chart paper for whatever reason.

“Why don’t you just live with me?” I asked her, “I am sure I can work it out.”

“Bitch, you’re some guy’s mistress,” she said in her matter-of-fact manner, “I am not your mistress. Don’t suck my life into your adventure.”

If it were anyone else, I might have questioned them further but my friend is the only woman I know that I know I can always trust to take care of herself.

“Besides,” she said, “You’re paying for me to go to college already because you are insane.”

“What am I even going to do with all this money?” I asked her, “I can only buy so many black dresses.”

Of course, this was before we discovered what would become our favourite market so I didn’t know I could actually buy an endless supply of black dresses and it would barely even cost any money. We went back to my place, ordered some falafel sandwiches and browsed through furniture online. It’s extremely unsettling to realise you can afford anything when you are looking through stuff, it’s even more unsettling to realise that you earned all the money to do that by convincing a bunch of men to pay for what was between your legs in a world where most of them just believe they are entitled to take it by force. It felt like we were putting together a doll-house of scraps with diamonds and pearls while we ate out of cardboard containers that sat precariously on our knees.

“Can you believe this is our life?” I asked my friend.

“Aren’t you grateful?” She asked, “Would you rather have us be tellers married to boring men who think they deserve an award for bringing home apples?”

Say whatever you will about that girl she always manages to retain perspective. However, I have come to expect her level of moral and social ambivalence from everyone so when someone doesn’t just understand why I can’t live with them, it strikes me as odd.

…….


The ordinary, mundane nature of Number 3’s requests tires me.

“Well, you have a child and I can’t live with a child,” I tell Number 3, “And I also really can’t live with anyone. Maybe that’s my shortcoming but that is what it is.”

“So, you just expect me to live off you and you come and go as you please?” she asks, “Don’t you love me?’

I don’t know what love has to do with any of it and I don’t know how to tell her that without the trimmings, that is exactly what I expect. It’s not that I don’t love her but I think I see love in a way that seems inauthentic to a lot of people.

“I love you,” I tell her, “But don’t you think it unreasonable that you expect some kind of fairy tale from me?”

She does. She expects that she can move in here with me along with her child and we will be some kind of PC greeting card family. I think there is nothing more dangerous for a woman than to believe in happily ever after. If fairy tales were written in reverse, they would make more sense and be more relatable. Happily ever after ends the story when the man gets the woman but what happens to the woman after is the real story. I believed in the concept of forever once, for five minutes, when I was with My Actual Abusive Boyfriend I believed that we could leave it all behind and spend eternity in loving bliss but there is nothing like a man who pushes you down the stairs to bring you back to reality.

“You are so cold,” Number 3 says to me, “Is this all just transactional to you?”


…….



Just transactional.

I loathe the insinuation that there isn’t a world of happiness to be found within a transaction, there is, you just have to make the right transaction. My transaction with The Germaphobe turned out to be the best decision I ever made, a fairy tale would have ended with me renouncing my vile ways and marrying my first love. No one would have written the part where I ended up on a ditch with his name branded on my face. Instead, I rolled the dice with a man who was exact in his demands from me and explicit in my renumeration for fulfilling them. Two weeks after I had moved to Delhi and a week after My Only Friend had started her new job, The Germaphobe moved into his new place in Delhi. He came to see me that night, I cleaned for him and put on my trashiest finery to welcome him.

“Do you like this place?” He asked.

“It’s a little bit beige,” I told him handing him a tumbler of scotch, “But yeah it’s great.”

“Why in the world did you want a place near the railway station?” He asked, “If you were going to run away, surely you would take a flight?”

In many ways he was a perfect specimen for a man, he only “treated me like a woman” when he fucked me. The woman who eventually married him is one of the few in the world that might have gotten a great deal.

“Who would I be running away from?” I asked him.

It was a genuine question because while in the past I had been with men who gave me good reason to run away, I was never a runner in that way. I run for my calves, not for my safety. Fuck safety, if they are coming for me, I am ready for them and no amount of abuse they can rain on me will break my back before their fists start to crack. I don’t need to run because I know that every man who breaks me will walk away covered in the shards of me with which I fuck myself. What good is breaking my body when I shove my own fingers inside myself and toy with the broken bits until my hand is drenched in blood. You can dispense suffering to women as if it is your right, but what will you do when she rubs it all on her skin and has an orgasm all over your weapons?

“Does the mode of transport change depending on who you are running from?” He asked me putting his glass down on the beige coaster I had set before him.

“It could,” I told him, “However so far, I cannot fathom a situation that would compel me to run away. Besides, running away implies I have a home.”

“Don’t you?” he asked me.

“Home is overrated,” I told him, “Just ask the people who would do anything for a tiny piece of shelter.”

“Isn’t shelter home?” He asked me.

“Shelter is shelter,” I told him, “Shelter is safety, home is a bogus fairy tale. I have shelter, but you don’t run away from shelter, you leave it when it’s no longer safe.”

He seemed satisfied with my answers and so he moved on to examining my body. He was satisfied with that too. Over the years, I had realised that the aspect of sex that I enjoyed most with men was the performance. It was a stage and I could let out every bit of yearning I had inside me to be seen when I was performing on top of a man. I could control ever flinch, every muscle that contorted; they were like metaphors on my skin as I wrote my heart out all over silk sheets. There was no one I loved performing for more than The Germaphobe, I think I enjoyed his impossible standards and genuine praise when they were met. After we finished, he lay in bed with me for a while.

“You’re not going to fall in love with me, are you?” He asked, clearly the question had been coming all evening, but it was so uncharacteristic of him that it made me sit up and regard him for a full minute before I could even recover from it.

“Have you been...talking to people?” I asked him, since those words were clearly not his own or based on anything he actually knew about me.

“How did you know?” He asked.

“I’m not going to fall in love with you,” I told him to reassure him of whatever seed of doubt had been planted inside him, “Unless you pay me to do that but we’d be ruining a good thing here.”

He sniggered into my shoulder and pretended to strangle me, I liked it and would have even encouraged it but that relationship wasn’t about fulfilling my sexual fantasies. It was one where the entirety of me was a sexual fantasy, and I preferred that much more to anything else.

“How are you real?” He asked me.

He rarely complimented me or people, you had to extricate his compliments from his actions and between the lines. That was perhaps the greatest compliment he gave me.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked him.

‘I mean...” he began, “I’ve never met a, person who was this comfortable with something so long term being entirely transactional.”

“I think that’s because you have been looking at transactional wrong,” I explained, “We all pretend that our relationships aren’t but we’ve managed to do something rare here, we’ve managed to be honest about our transaction without deluding ourselves with ideas of romance and love. Does that mean I enjoy your company? Sure. I even enjoy sex with you but if we were to pull the basis for our transaction, would we still be together? Of course not. That’s not cold, that’s honest.”


…….


I want to be able to explain that to Number 3 and maybe someday she will even understand it, but today is not that day. I want to be able to explain to her that there is a transaction built into all relationships and just because money is routed through various layers of constructs in marriages and parenting doesn’t mean the transaction is missing. Nor does it mean that a more direct relationship is cold.

“I’m not cold,” I tell Number 3, “I am just trying to work out the best possible living situation for all of us, if you want to continue living at the shelter, that is fine for now too.”

“Yep,” she says getting on her feet and scanning the floor for her clothes, “Everything is fine with you as long as I don’t want to live here.”

“It’s fine to want it,” I explain to her, “As long as you understand and accept that this is my limitation and is not on the table for discussion, it’s okay.”

“You are fucking impossible,” she screams.

I am surprised because I thought we were just discussing things like two people trying to work things out do. I don’t enjoy it when people scream around me, it disturbs something deep inside me. It’s one of those exceptionally human things that make me want to don my alien-garb and return to my home planet, like the groans of relief when a hungry person eats.

“Don’t scream,” I tell her, “I really don’t like it.”

“Fine, I won’t scream,” she says still screaming, “I’ll just leave.”

I know she wants me to stop her but I cannot encourage this. I sit up and watch her as she makes a demonstration of gathering her things and gearing up to leave.

“I’m leaving,” she says watching me with a gaze that is daring me to just try and not stop her.

I am not going to stop her. This idea that relationships come with a dose of fights and altercations has never seemed agreeable to be.

My Actual Abusive Boyfriend and I fought a lot but I never screamed, he did. I instigated him with snide comments and he beat me with all of his extremities. I feel if two people are unable to reason things out between themselves without one of them losing their temper then that conversation is perhaps not even worth having. There is a quality to an angry person that makes them lose control of themselves in a way that they lose sight of what they even want and I find it impossible to engage with such a person. I have an extremely high threshold for anger because I grew up with an angry mother and i ran into the arms of angry lover as soon as I could but my patience with a temper is extremely low. I am no longer that young woman who can be intimidated or confused with anger, or baited into turning it into a sexual game. Make-up sex, for instance, is the most toxic ideology that I have ever come across. One moment you are raging at each other as if you could kill and the next you want the carnal comfort of one another’s body. It doesn’t seem right; it seems hateful and maybe that is the heart of my problem with anger too. Anger seems to come from a hateful place of entitlement and I strongly prefer people who don’t allow themselves that kind of entitlement.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” I tell her, “Do you want me to call you a cab?”

She gives me a hard look as she fumbles for her phone in her bag.

“You think you own me,” she says as she walks out of my bedroom, “You crazy fucking bitch.”

I don’t think I will see her tomorrow. I hear the main-door slam into the frame in the living room. It feels like a slap in the face. I resent the notion that if I pay someone, I believe I own them. I don’t know why sometimes when you tell someone what isn’t an option, they take that to mean you are expressing ownership of them. I don’t want ownership of any person nor have I ever. I get up and lock the door, I still cannot stand the thought of being inside an unlocked house.


…….


Eight years ago, The Germaphobe and I were once drinking some horrible homemade wine that one of his colleagues had given him. Homemade wine is a special kind of evil that the friends of the rich inflict upon one another. Maybe someone in the world has managed to make a decent batch of homemade wine but I have never met them, all the homemade wines I have had to force down my throat have tasted like spiced bleach.

“Hmmmm,” he said taking a second-sip of the wine out of glasses that looked like crystal but I bought for next to nothing in a dingy little alley where I used to buy pot.

It was an interesting alley. The same shop had these glasses, a few medallions and an extensive display of antique jewellery. The jewellery wasn’t antique by design, it had just been lying in that display for so long that the layers of dust and age had given it a rustic quality that made it appear more rundown and more majestic all at once. I went inside the shop because I wanted to look at more jewellery but there was none to be found. Instead, a father and son say behind a glass display case with a typewriter and a dozen files. On the other end of the store files were piled almost as high as the ceiling. The two wore matching glasses and had the exact same noses, too big for their faces but well camouflaged but their moustaches.

“I wanted...those glasses in the display,” I asked them, confused, but also too curious to leave, “Do you actually sell that stuff?”

They looked at each other as if the question had never come up before. That’s part of the charm of this city, nothing is as it seems but you can probably buy something unnecessary anywhere.

“We can sell them” the father told me while gesturing to his son to remove them from the display.

The son walked over and removed the glasses from the display, one by one, the sixth one fell to the floor in a terrific smash that shattered it into so many little bits that only the stem remained intact and rolled over towards my feet.

“I’m so sorry!” The son cried out but I am not sure who he is apologising to since i haven’t even bought anything yet, “We don’t have another one.”

“That’s fine,” I told him, “I’ll take just five.”

He brought the glasses out and tried to wipe the years of dirt off them. It wasn’t just dust that you could rub off with a piece of muslin. The dirt had made those glasses their home and the more he rubbed with that dry yellow cloth that is better suited to wiping down a car, the dirtier the glasses seemed.

“How much is it?” I asked them while attempting to catch a glimpse at what it was they were actually working on.

Once again, they exchanged looks like the idea of a shopkeeper knowing the price of their wares is preposterous. They looked for a price on the box they were packing it in and soon realised the box belonged to a vase that was nowhere in the shop. They discussed it with each other and finally decided to charge me the price that it said on the box. The box they didn’t even belong in. I took my glasses and left but I returned to that shop several times until I has essentially emptied out their entire display for a fraction of the price any of those things were worth. I bought amulets, an old China platter, a dozen tongue studs, a glass stained window pane that I gave to My Only Friend to put in her home, two pairs of cuff links for The Germaphobe, a dozen necklaces and a silver plate that was sold to me at the price of aluminum.

I had just finished telling The Germaphobe about the shop and why I had only five glasses when he started sipping the wine. He said nothing after the first sip, I followed his lead and waited for his comment but when his comment came only in the form of a sound, I wasn’t sure what to say. He took a third sip and I could say even his poker-face was shook by the sheer amount of flavour in that one tiny glass. It was sweet and sour, bitter and honeyed, spiced and fruity with a healthy dash of something that tasted as complex as arugula.

“Do you want whiskey?” I asked him when he looked away after he took the tiniest fourth sip.

“Of course not,” he said feigning surprise, “This is...great.”

“Really?” I asked him extremely amused as to why a man as direct as him would lie about that, “Let me top that off for you then.”

“No!” He said in his loudest register which is about as high as my lowest, “I admit it, it’s horrid, I’d rather boil my mouth in cough syrup.

I picked up our glasses and poured them down the sink. I brought him a proper drink in a glass that I hadn’t bought in a back-alley and I brought myself coffee in a plastic mug that I have owned since I was 18. It’s recyclable, not that I will ever get to test that claim because it will most likely be buried with me. Not because I attach any sentimentality with me but because it fucking refuses to get lost. I leave it in offices, in taxis and once even in a hotel room in a foreign country but it always finds its way back to me.

“I want you to do something for me,” he asked as I set our drinks down on the table outside.

He was an extremely polite man and I can only imagine an excellent boss to all of his employees. An unlikely prodigy, he resigned from pot-smoking and video-gaming when both his parents died in a car-crash when he was 20, and he took over his dad’s company instead. He finished college despite working full-time and afterwards expanded the already massive company all over the country. He fell in love once for exactly one-year but when she refused to marry him citing the difference in religions, he decided to step away from dating altogether. Being Muslim is a curious condition in India that cannot be cured even when you are a millionaire. Most people will look past most religions, castes and maybe even gender when it comes to debilitating wealth but the same rules do not apply when the wealthy are Muslim. He was not a religious man but he was born with a religious identity the way most of us are, some of us don’t even know who is counting us as members of their faith while we proudly proclaim our atheism to our cool, hipster friends. He was festival-religious, like a lot of us used to be before pure polarization became our politics, he didn’t have a religious identity as much as he liked Eid and made note of Ramzan. It’s the same way I am Hindu, I guess, I like Diwali and Holi, sometimes. It’s the same way My Only Friend is Christian. She likes Santa Claus. It shouldn’t be edgy or pushing boundaries to say that, or observe any of that. Sometimes religion is just not as serious to someone of us. It’s the little things that keep any of us in, really. The festivity, the garb, the thoughtless traditions that have continued for generations that we teach our kids about because it is all fun and games and culture. I don’t know that I am sold on culture. Paintings are great, I like a folk song every now and then but when culture becomes so strong that it dictates your life opposed to us designing its course, I find it dangerous.

“What would you like me to do?” I asked him setting my glass down and standing up again.

“Sit down! Must you be going at warp speed all the time,” he said, “I want you to leave the house unlocked tomorrow night and go to bed at ten, I’ll come in quietly and surprise you in the bedroom. Can you struggle and pretend you were not expecting me?”

“You mean you want me to pretend that you are raping me?” I asked.

The colour must have drained from my face because suddenly I felt like the tip of my nose and my cheeks were so cold that they felt like ice. I explained to myself that I lived in a secure building, there was a guard at the door and any visitors had to make an entry at the reception.

“It’s not rape,” he said clearly as uncomfortable with his own fantasy as I was with the reality of my life, “You’ll know it is me, I am telling you now and I think you will recognise me quite easily even in the dark.”

“It’s pretend-rape enabled by an unlocked door,” I said, “That’s what I said.”

“So, you’ll do it then?” He said to me.

“Of course,” I said even though it was the most unfathomable thing I could have imagined ever willingly doing, “You own me, don’t you?”

I knew the moment I said it that I should not have. What I said wasn’t even about him, it was a leftover fragment of a 13-year-old girl who didn’t have the permission to secure herself. I had no reason to make an accusation like that against him when he had never given me any reason to treat him as such.

“I do not own you,” he said firmly without a trace of anger in his voice, “I pay you for a job that you do for me and you are excellent at it, it’s not slavery. I wouldn’t demand that my employees do everything I say even when they are clearly uncomfortable with it. I own things. I own land, cars, clothes, houses but you are not a thing. I do not own you.”

Listening to him say those words in his usual calm voice made tears fall out of my eyes before I could have any control over them,

“I’m sorry,” I said attempting not to say so many words that I couldn’t keep the eye-water inside, “I didn’t mean that.”

“I get it,” he said thoughtfully, “I can see I touched a nerve.”

“I don’t have nerves,” I said getting up to go to the bathroom for a moment so I could compose myself.

He pulled me back and sat me right back down on the chair.

“Be a human being for one fucking second,” he said to me holding my wrist, “It wont kill you.”

“Isn’t that exactly what it will do, though?” I asked him.

He laughed and that made it easier for me to return to my usual state of being. The next day I sent him a message explaining that I would be waiting for him but pretending not to after ten that night. He asked if I was really sure that I wanted to do that and I was. I really was sure. The fear of leaving my door unlocked wasn’t as potent when the thing on the other side was knowable and even controllable. I think The Germaphobe may have been the only man I ever trusted. Besides I have a strange relationship with fear that abates in the wake of the need to perform. I am scared of violence, yet i step into it with ease. I am scared of elevators, yet I take them when someone is paying me. I am scared of unlocked doors, but I will even be behind one when I’m there to put on a show.

That night my bedroom felt like a green room while I put on makeup to wear to bed, I dressed myself for hours which is not just unlike me but also unlike a person going to bed. Obviously, I couldn’t actually fall asleep but I lay in bed with my eyes closed to give myself the appearance of having been asleep. He came thirty-five minutes later and I heard him close the door. I was sure he was doing it for my benefit because as man he was capable of being as quiet as a cat. I felt fear even though I was sure exactly who it was, it was a quiet fear. A fear of a time gone by. The fear of a part of me that was dead. So dead that it had already decomposed into the soil and become it. He entered my bedroom quietly and walked over to my side of the bed, I could pick up his footsteps anywhere but the reassurance that it was really him did nothing to abate the fear. It did nothing to exacerbate it either. When he pulled the covers off me and put his hand against my mouth, I screamed. That might have been the only time in my life that I have ever screamed. I screamed through the flesh and bones of his hand, as if that scream had been lying inside me gaining more and more power for years. I screamed so loud I think I surpassed the decibel capacity of a human throat. I screamed so loud that I could swear the entire building went quiet for a moment.

He stared at me absolutely stunned for a moment and then he slapped me. He was the most gentle man I have ever been slapped by but he had humongous hands that made up for the lack of intent behind his violence. I put on my best rendition of being forced that night, and until Number 3, that might have been the best sex I had ever had. After we were done, he looked at from me to the bed in disbelief and satisfaction.

“I didn’t know I could actually enjoy that,” he said.

“Me neither,” I told him.

“I’m tempted to just spend the night here,” he said and immediately that filled me with more discomfort than the idea of play-rape.

“Rapists leave after,” I told him, “Trust me.”

He laughed and got up to get dressed, it filled me with the same relief I just experienced as I watched Number 3 walk out of the door. It worries me much more when they stay than when they leave.


…….