Parallel Lives
It has been a week since me and my son moved into our apartment in suburban Philadelphia. The pre-war building oozes a musty but comforting smell. I can smell it coming from the carpets, the elevator; it is everywhere in the basement when I go down to dump my boxes in the storage room. It is an old smell, but it feels like the good old and I welcome it. The bad old we have left behind in another country, I tell myself. The building superintendent comes to check in on us. He is a big Liberian man who talks a lot about his country and his family back home. He offers to help where he can: he helps me lug my mattress up to my apartment. I thank him. It has been a while since I encountered kindness.
Across the hallway from my apartment, he tells me, lives another woman who he thinks I might like to know. He offers to introduce me to her. We knock on her door and wait. We are turning to leave when the door is unlatched and a sleepy head – and then two more – peek out through the crack. It is dark inside, but the long hair on each of the three heads is darker still. The shortest head is rubbing puffy eyes with slow hands. ‘Oh no, it’s fine. It’s just that we drove back late last night from New York,’ the tallest head says when I apologize. It apologizes in return and promises to come say hello later and get properly introduced. I thank the superintendent and he leaves.
It is a few days before there is a knock on our door. My six-year-old son runs to open it. By the time I am at the door, he has already introduced himself to the three heads attached to three people standing outside. They are no longer sleepy and are bathed now in the yellow hallway light. ‘Hi, I’m your neighbor, and these are my daughters. Sorry about the other day!’ says the tallest head. ‘Youse from India? Come over for some tea, and we can get to know each other better.’ I close my door behind me and we cross the hallway into her apartment.
Meeting a tea lover in a land where every street corner smells of coffee! I think it is a lucky coincidence. But coincidence does not even begin to describe it, I realize, as I do indeed get to know my neighbor better. My son is already playing with the two girls, 12 and 10 years old. ‘Kids can make friends so easily’, we two mothers say to each other. But before long, we two mothers are also good friends. And over countless more cups of tea, we swap our life stories.
She came to the US to get married. Her multinational finance company in Melbourne helped her set up in New York when she said she was moving. She enjoyed working on Wall Street and earned enough to put her husband through medical school. Then, when he was earning enough for the two of them, she gave up her own job to become a mother. Not long after her younger daughter was born, though, she realized he was sleeping around. Too many weekend conferences, too many late nights. And finally, a text that was meant for somebody else landed up on her phone. ‘I should have known something was wrong when he started bringing home pastries from my favorite store.’ There is a wistful look in her eyes, and she adds: ‘Oh, I miss those red velvet cakes!’
She had to leave him, of course, but there were lots of decisions to be taken, too many logistics involved, and two kids besides. Overwhelmed, she decided to move back to Australia. Her parents had a big home in the Melbourne suburbs, and were thrilled to have the empty nest filled again. Her husband cut her off from their money then: she found one day she could not access their joint account. But she had been in finance and she was smart; so she was not destitute. The girls were also beginning to feel settled again. The eldest daughter still missed her father because she had had a relationship with him, and would sometimes write about him in her journal. The youngest was happy running around with the chicken their grandfather raised.
Meanwhile, their father was filing endless complaints alleging child abduction and using international lawsuits to force them and their mother to return to America. My neighbor fought back with the help of her parents, but her girls were American citizens. In the end, two years after she left the US, she was forced to come back. And because she had extended family living nearby, she moved into this apartment. The husband married another woman who also had two daughters. To prevent my neighbor from moving back to Australia, he moved his new family across the street from her: a statute in Pennsylvania custody law prevents relocation if the father is involved in the children’s everyday lives. But his new wife was unhappy with the arrangement and a few months before I moved in next door, they moved to Nevada: they had lived across the road for less than three years. He rarely comes to visit his own girls now. He comes only when he knows it will inconvenience their mother, and then takes them and dumps them with his parents.
She says she used to cry on the phone every day, talking to her parents in Australia and siblings in London. She had nobody here who didn’t judge her. She had grown up in a big family and hated being alone. She had a good father who was also a good husband and could not understand why the man she married turned out to be so different. It was tough raising two kids alone while making frequent trips to the attorney’s office and the court houses. Her girls wanted desperately to go live with Grampy in Australia and chase after the chicken again. She had difficulty explaining to them why that could not happen.
We run out of tea, and she goes into the kitchen to fill the kettle again. I see an open book lying face down on the side table. I pick it up gingerly, trying not to disturb the page it was open at. I find that the book is actually face down on the first blank page under the cover. I see written there the name of the eldest daughter. A proclamation of ownership is accompanied by the strict admonition that if lost, the book should be returned to her at her address C/O her grandfather in Melbourne, Australia. They have been back in America for nearly four years now.
My neighbor does not have a job anymore. She gets by with the child support and alimony the courts awarded her. ‘The Australian judge made sure my husband would pay a generous sum before I moved back,’ she tells me. But now, her alimony’s running out and she is trying to figure out a way to get back into the workforce. She does not know though how she can handle a full-time job and two girls on her own. It is tough being single moms, we both know. ‘But at least we do not have to be with our husbands,’ we always agree.
Across the street, a few houses down, she tells me, lives a woman whom she met outside our building one evening some months ago. She had just gotten back from dinner with a friend who had insisted she get a life while her kids were with her husband for the weekend. As she waved goodbye to her friend and walked down the driveway, she noticed that the woman was standing there, unmoving. Looking closely, she realized the woman had a bruise across her face and was crying. She asked if she might help. The woman had blurted out that her husband had gotten angry with her, chased her down the road, and when he caught up with her, hit her and hurled her purse in the air. It had landed on the second-floor balcony of our building and she was now trying to figure out a way to get it back. My neighbor helped her retrieve it, and offered to call the police for her, but she refused. She only said thanks and left. She had never met the woman again.
Maybe they moved, we speculate.
‘I hope she didn’t die,’ I shudder.
‘I hope she left him and took his house and car,’ my neighbor says.
As we sip our tea and look back at our lives and the lives of other women like us whom we have encountered along the way, I tell her my story. I tell her how I left my house and my car to my husband, or surely, I would have died.
Across the ocean, beyond a continent and a half, I had had to walk out of my house and my marriage one day when my son was six months old. On that day, my husband tried to strangle me. This was in Delhi, India. Four and a half years of living with an abusive man traps you in a marriage, but familiarizes you with the signs and gives you a keen sense of impending danger. I had felt another episode in the offing since the morning. Then, when he threw a bottle full of water on the bed where our six-month old lay sleeping – thankfully, it missed – I sent the baby to a neighbor’s house with his nanny. I thought, ‘A few blows like always and this too will blow over’. But it did not. His hands were round my neck and I saw black. When I recovered, he locked me, and himself, in the bathroom. I screamed for help out of the window. That forced him to open the door. I ran.
I ran out the front door, down the stairs, and across the lawn to the neighbor’s house, in my slippers, and shorts, and a torn T-shirt. The sun was shining down warmly on the lawn across which I ran that day seven years ago. I do not know why I noticed the sun at that moment: certainly, I had other, more pressing, concerns. But I did, and that was the last time, in a long, long time, that I noticed the sun. For what followed felt like the heaviest cloud descending inexorably around me. The only light came from my son, and from my immediate family who took me in and stood by me. But often, they too became engulfed in the same cloying darkness, for my cloud followed me everywhere I went. It still does; it is, perhaps, the price I have to pay for getting away with my life and my son’s.
Ever since that day – the day that I lived – it has been a long saga of abuse and harassment for me and my family. I have been fighting off litigation after litigation, civil and criminal, relating to divorce and defamation, custody and contempt, even sexual assault. I still wake up to regular emails threatening more litigation and making baseless allegations. And I say to myself, ‘Well, at least there aren’t goons standing outside the house and following me around in this city!’ I was afraid to live in Delhi and had moved to Guwahati where my parents lived. I thought I had gotten away. But what is a distance of 1100 miles in the face of a dogged determination to destroy? Money can buy air tickets and a lot of money can buy a lot of air tickets, frequently, initially every week and gradually every month or so. It can also help hire people – the kind that stood outside my parents’ house and looked menacingly on. And then, there was the clout, a network of contacts that bore down upon me and my family giving systemic oppression a new meaning, a different nuance. Phone calls from police stations, summons from courts, legal notices, telephonic threats, and email hacks, the list goes on and on. So, changing cities did not help. Neither did changing jobs, because harassment followed me to every workplace. Professional contacts would get emails detailing why I am unemployable, or should be. Allegations of sexual misconducts with multiple men would be raised in open court and in private parties. In short, I got a complete image makeover.
Through all this, I tried to keep my head down and concentrated on raising my son and getting on with my life. The people who mattered to me were with me: my sibling and their families, my parents, a few from the extended family and a handful of family friends too. But if they were with me, they were not above persecution. My brother bore the brunt of it, with a complaint of sexual assault against him, and multiple attempts at destabilizing his business ventures. So that my darkness did not extend to others, I withdrew into myself. I cut myself off from old friends and acquaintances. I did not talk about my problems outside of the close circle of friends and family. I was silent for two years. Then one day, my husband entered my parent’s house with some friends and assaulted me. Then they went and filed a police complaint against me and my brother.
Sitting across the desk from policemen saying how sorry they were for me and asking what it was I did to make my husband this angry, I knew I had no help. I had hit the very bottom. And it was while sitting at the bottom of the pit one day that I realized I had no way out but up. I had to overcome my fear of him: it was this that was feeding him. So, I decided to speak out, to use my only strength: my writing. I wrote about what he did. I wrote about what so many men did to so many other women. And how they all got away. People started reaching out: an editor I had worked with on one of my books, a fellow journalist I had started my career with, a writer I had published in my journal, activist friends, and more. I realized I was not alone. I reconnected with old friends I had stopped connecting with, first because of my abusive marriage and then because of its abusive aftermath. They reminded me of who I used to be, who I could still be. One friend cautioned me, ‘He was just five years of your life, don’t let him be your whole life.’ And just like that, he wasn’t.
One day, filling my shopping cart with milk and cereal, I found myself tapping my feet to the music playing at the departmental store. I realized I had not done that in years. The litigation, intimidation, character assassination continued, but I learnt to live with them. I accepted them as part of my life, as challenges that would give a new direction to my life. Sure enough, my scholarship took a different turn: I started thinking more about women’s issues. My earlier research on ethnic conflicts now took on a gendered perspective. Then in 2016, I applied for a Fulbright fellowship and left India with my son. And ended up living next door to my neighbor.
Different lives, wrote Anita Desai in one of her novels, are parallel lives. This novel that I had taught to my students in India, came to life for me when I found my own parallel in my neighbor. True, she was not physically abused like me, but we both knew what it was like to fight legal battles across continents. We were both struggling to pack in the legal consultations, professional networking, and grocery shopping during the day while the kids were at school; additionally, I also had to make steady progress on my book in order to justify my fellowship. And we had to do all of this without getting too tired by the time the kids came back from school so we could take them to the playground after. We had to hold ourselves together for them despite the frequent disruptions caused by the hurt egos of the men we both married. We would both periodically receive insolent emails making unreasonable demands: in her case, it would be about meeting the girls on the shortest notice or sending them all the way to Nevada on their own; in my case, there would be veiled threats and a few legal documents attached.
But we were both surviving: heck, we were even managing to have some very good times with our children, with our families (what if they are continents away), and with our friends, even strangers sometimes. On a day when I received upsetting news about something or the other my husband had done to force me back to India – like starting another legal proceeding against me – and I would be walking down the street frowning, a stranger would smile at me and say, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ I would suddenly realize that it was indeed a nice day; if it felt like it was not, I should turn that around: nobody else should have the power to destroy its niceness for me but me. And I would notice the sun again, mellow and mildly filtering through the yellow and green and red and orange leaves: colors I had never in my life seen wafting in the wind before. It helped that my neighbor often joined me in my mission. We went out, ate out, shopped for fun, did the things people without our particular set of problems also do. And we buried our demons in the storerooms in the basement, with the piles and piles of legal files and documents we had accumulated over the years. We only brought them up when we had to had to, and then we locked them away again. I do not know if I could have found this strength on my own, but it really helped to have a fellow victim who also chose not to be victimized anymore.
School geometry taught us that parallel lines never meet. But here we were, two women whose husbands’ every act of aggression, every indiscretion, every insult, every slur, every blow and every bruise, began bending our lives/lines till they met in the hallway of an apartment building in suburban Philadelphia. It was not fate or destiny (or the building superintendent who first introduced us) that led me to meet my neighbor. It was the violence that characterized my life and hers for so many years now: the violence that forced us to redefine our lives, our careers, our outlook to life, everything. Without this violence, the dehumanization we faced day in and day out in our marriages, ours would have been lives lived – happily or otherwise – in different homes, across different continents. When my neighbor’s husband got down on his knees and the entire family cheered, did she think the only person who really did understand her pain fully one day would be me?
We were the lucky ones: we could break free. But we also knew that many women cannot, like that woman my neighbor met outside our building, who refused to call the police. Or me for nearly five years of marriage. ‘Why do we stay?’ my neighbor asks. She says that if her husband had not filed all those lawsuits and cut her off from the money, she would perhaps have considered going back eventually: the girls were missing their father. But by doing that, he ruined all chances of reconciliation. In the initial days after I left him, I had also offered to maintain a long-distance relationship with my husband so that our son could be with both parents alternately. But he refused.
I realize then that in an abusive relationship, the abuser is as trapped as the person abused. Abuse involves two people, and it seems to me now that the abuser is the more dependent of the two. The abused sometimes finds the strength and/or opportunity to walk away, physically and emotionally, like I and my neighbor did. We had the unflinching support of our families who suffered alongside us. We also found solidarity and sisterhood eventually. But the abusers can never let go, can never admit to being abusive and seek help, can never connect to people meaningfully: they isolate themselves. Their effort, their energy, all resources, are expended on plotting and scheming against the one who got away. Like my husband, who never lets up. Seven years and he is still filing lawsuits, still sending letters to my workplace making wild allegations and demanding action against me.
When I heard about the latest litany of accusations, for a while, I felt drawn back into the cesspool again. I sulked around my apartment all morning and then, went and knocked on my neighbor’s door. She made me a super-strong cup of tea, handed me cookies to dunk in it, and let me rant and vent. Then we both sighed, and shrugged. And then we put on our coats and headed out in search of the best red velvet cake in town.
